I have spent a lot of time in the last week compiling information from the preliminary results of the last county-wide election. I began to notice something. The "Times Counted" was usually higher than the votes "for" or "against" COSI 14 (this also shows up in the other levies, but I didn't think the effect was as dramatic). So I took the time to write down the
"times counted", registered voters, precinct, "against" and "for". I then put these into a database using Microsoft Access, and generated a few reports. This one "Voters Grouped by Towns" I used to generate two calculate fields: "How Many Didn't Vote" (Votes-For-Against), and "Percentage Who Didn't Vote In COSI Levy" (Votes-For-Against/Votes). The five "top" precincts that had the largest percentage of voters that didn't vote either way on COSI were:
| Precinct | Votes | Levy | Against | For | How Many Didn't Vote | Percentage Who Didn'tVote | |
| Tol 6K | 44 | COSI 14 | 11 | 28 | 5 | 11.38% | |
| Tol 13G | 46 | COSI 14 | 13 | 28 | 5 | 10.87% | |
| Tol 8D | 56 | COSI 14 | 18 | 32 | 6 | 10.71% | |
| Tol 13L | 118 | COSI 14 | 36 | 71 | 11 | 9.32% | |
| Tol 13B | 54 | COSI 14 | 16 | 33 | 5 | 9.26% | |
If the numbers I put down, and added are correct Toledo had 1009 people who voted for other issues or candidates, but didn't vote either way on COSI, and the county as a whole had 1942 voters who didn't vote either for or aginst COSI. If they had voted for COSI, the levy would have succeeded. If they had voted against COSI, the levy would have failed by a larger margin. Instead, they didn't participate on that issue.
posted by oldsendbrdy on Nov 25, 2007 at 04:39:17 pm #