On election night back in February the only vote totals made available by the Chicago Board of Elections were the citywide totals. It wasn't until around 11 or midnight that the ward by ward totals were available. There isn't a whole lot of interesting analysis that can be gleaned from just the aggregate totals so I probably won't be doing much tomorrow night.
My hope is that the major media outlets cover this election night well, I thought they did a good job with the runoff. Keep an eye on the Sun-Times, on election night in February a few of their reporters were discussing ward by ward totals well before the Chicago Board of Elections was making that data publicly available. Also, WBEZ has had a lot of good data work throughout this election.
Here are a few of the questions I think people will want to try to quantify on election night, if possible.
- How many total votes are projected: (total votes counted so far) / (whole number percent precincts reporting / 100)
- What percentage of the uncounted vote does the candidate who is behind need to win in order to move ahead?
- Separate the wards by majority African American, majority Hispanic, majority white and no majority, how did each candidate do? How many total votes in each area? Which areas saw the greatest increase/decrease in support levels and turnout?
You should be able to answer the first two questions even without ward by ward totals. Also, the CBOE should be able to tell you how many vote by mail applications were processed and how many ballots were returned so far. The remainder will be a useful number, if there are 20,000 outstanding VBM ballots and the election night totals are within 20,000 votes you'll want to know that. Any vote by mail ballots have to be postmarked today to be counted but they can be received at any time in the next few weeks.
Unlike November there is no same day registration so the total number of uncounted provisional ballots will not be as significant.
Speaking Engagement
On Thursday afternoon I will be speaking at a lunch panel on the Chicago municipal elections sponsored by the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. The event is at noon in the French Room of the Union League Club, ticket info is available here.
Post Mortem
I typically do a post-mortem in the day or two after the election to cover all the various insights available from the data. For this election I have agreed to be part of a larger and more comprehensive written report, I will probably even have to double check my spelling and grammar. The report should be available early next week, I'll provide a link when it is available.
