Friday, December 24, 2010

Happy Holidays

May the human spirit prevail.

(n.b.: Jonathan is no relation, nor is the composer.)

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Some Preliminary Results for November 2010

I've run the set of Transparency Project scans through the counting software and have preliminary results. More precise results will need to wait until I've had an opportunity to go through things much more carefully, but I feel comfortable releasing the percentages I've calculated for some of the races.

For some close races which had substantial interest, here are my preliminary percentages compared with the official results. Please keep in mind that the variances of 1/10 of a percent are very reasonable given that my count still needs to properly resolve over-votes -- where there were too many votes in a contest -- and is still missing approximately 150 sheets which were refused by the counting software. There are also a small number of very-lightly-marked ballots from which a very few additional votes will be harvested, but these should have little effect on the percentages.

DA
Gallegos 52.0 vs county 52.08
Jackson 47.7 vs county 47.61

Eureka Ward 3
Newman 44.3 vs county 44.18
Kuhnel 42.0 vs county 41.95
Manns 13.5 vs county 13.59

Supervisor District 5
Cleary 49.1 vs county 49.04
Sundberg 50.5 vs county 50.38

Progress Update 4

Complete sets of ballot scans are now available from the Humboldt County Elections office. Even when compressed, the data takes up six DVDs, so it is more than I plan on posting to the 'net (others might, though). The uncompressed, higher quality images take up something like a dozen DVDs.

As I mentioned in an earlier update, our percentages track the official percentages, which is what you'd expect. I will post my calculations of initial race percentages here, probably later today, so any interested parties can compare them with the official results.

As the Transparency Project only received the very last of the ballots on Tuesday, I don't plan on posting absolute numbers until at least a few days from now, after I've had a chance to rerun counting software, go through ambiguous votes, and look at some of the 350 images (out of 207,000+) that didn't get processed automatically.