Daily Archives: December 14, 2008

California

Final Numbers On General Election Released

5 Comments

The Secretary of State has formally released the final numbers on the 2008 General Election.  You can see the Presidential vote by county here.  The Congressional vote is here.  The State Senate races are here.  The State Assembly races are here.  The ballot measures are here.  A couple thoughts.

• We had 79.42% turnout among registered voters, which is pretty fabulous.  Among all eligible voters including those who haven’t registered, turnout was 59.22%, so there’s a lot of room for improvement and to change the elctorate there.  The best turnout was in Sonoma County, with 93.43% of all registered voters.  The worst was Merced County with 66.57%, one of only two under 70% (Imperial County had 68.48%).

• 13,743,177 voted this year.  13,561,900 people cast a vote in the Presidential election.  That’s over 200,000 undervotes at the top of the ticket.  As a point of reference, Prop. 3 received 12,638,905 votes, an undervote of 1.1 million (one out of every 13 or so voters, in other words, stopped at the top).  Most of the propositions are the same, except for Prop. 8 which received 13,402,566 votes and lost by over 560,000.

• Hannah-Beth Jackson lost by 857 votes.  Thanks, Don Perata.

• In CA-03, Dan Lungren would up with just 49.5% of the vote and the center-left coalition (Bill Durston and the Peace and Freedom Party candidate) got 48.2%.  This is clearly the top priority among House races in 2010.  The final spread in CA-04 was 1,800 votes.  In CA-44, Bill Hedrick wound up 6,047 votes shy of Ken Calvert, and if he runs again, that will be a race to watch.  The center-left coalition in CA-46 (Debbie Cook and the Green candidate) received 45.9% of the vote, a good achievement in that district.  Nick Leibham would up with 45.2% in CA-50, which seems to be the ceiling, as Francine Busby topped out around there as well.

• Lots of interesting numbers in the Assembly.  Alyson Huber’s final margin of victory was 474 votes.  John Eisenhut was only 4,680 votes shy in AD-26, Fran Florez lost by 1,310 votes in AD-30 (with pathetic participation), Linda Jones came up 4,761 shy in AD-36, and Ferial Masry lost by 8,230 votes in AD-37.  There’s a path to 2/3 here, considering that we’re three seats away.  AD-65 and AD-68 are marginally promising as well.

Uncategorized

To Merge or To Merge, That is the Question

Across the state, a vote just concluded. You may have missed but, over 300,000 votes were sent out. The voter base was bigger than the number of registered voters in at least one state.  So, what was this vote? Well, here is the exact question that would profoundly affect some of the biggest unions in the state:

Please choose one of the following options:

Option A: Option A would create a new statewide local union with jurisdiction for all California long-term care workers. under this option, SEIU lont-term care workers who are currently represented by United Healthcare Workers- West (“UHW-W”), Local 6434, United Long-Term Care Workers Union (“Local 6434”) and Local 521 would be united in a new long-term care local union, and Local 521 would be united in a new long-term care local union, and Local 6434’s charter would be revoked.

option B: Option B would create a new California statewide local with jurisdiction for all healthcare workers currently represented by Local 6434 and UHW-W, and long-term care workers currently in Local 521. Under this otion, these healthcare workers would be united in a new SEIU health care local, and the charters of Local 6434 and UHW-W would be revoked.

And that’s pretty much all of the question.  Interestingly, there’s no option for the status quo.  That little tidbit seems to be the reason for protests from at least one of the unions involved, UHW-W.  Of the 309,000+ voters, slightly less than 25,000 votes were actually turned in. That computes to a turnout rate of about 8%.  On the other hand, a petition with over 125,000 signatures was turned in to protest the vote. I was unable to find the actual results of the vote.

The vote was advisory, so no action will be necessarily affected by this vote. On the other hand, as this was a purely symbolic vote, you have to think that the large petition will carry at least as much weight. Either way, one would have liked to see some sort of ability to write-in something in.

The little tiff between the SEIU International and UHW-W will likely come to head in the short to middle term.  We’ll keep you apprised if we hear of something on that front.