on the cover / By Hank Sims

Election Atlas

Visualizing the results of the Nov. 4 election

(Dec. 11, 2008)  For California voters, the two biggest races in the Nov. 4 election were the presidential race and Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Humboldt County voters voted similarly in each of the two races — they chose Barack Obama over John McCain, 62 percent to 34 percent; they voted no on Prop. 8 60 percent to 40 percent. (See “Map Gallery” below.)

But comparing the Prop. 8 maps on the cover of this issue with the presidential maps inside, we see several regional differences in the vote. Hoopa voted fairly strongly for Obama, yet also voted yes on 8. Two Fortuna precincts voted for Obama, but all of Fortuna voted yes on 8. So did Loleta, several precincts on the Eureka outskirts, and part of McKinleyville.

Second District presidential votes

GALLERY >

More such maps follow. We are supplementing the maps with information garnered by the first-of-its kind Humboldt Transparency Project. The project’s primary purpose is to provide a check on “black box” voting, in which an inordinant amount of trust is placed in closed-source software and machinery. The project has been as smashing success, uncovering a serious software flaw on its first full run-through. (See this week’s “Town Dandy.”) However, making ballots open to the public has a side-effect; it gives us an immense opportunity to look deeply into the mind of the electorate, probing its psyche in ways that have never before been possible. We take a quick first pass at this in the following charts and graphs that follow.

A note: The maps herein are drawn from Humboldt County’s officially certified election results, with the following exception. Because of the counting flaw in Diebold software uncovered by the Transparency Project, results from precinct 1E-45 have been updated with data provided by the project. (See this week’s “Town Dandy.”) Unfortunately, by press time we were only able to update results pertaining to candidates in local, state and national elections; state and local ballot initiatives have not been updated. The charts and graphs, however, are made with data from the Transparency Project. With the exception of precinct 1E-45, the two sets of numbers are very close — less of a tenth of a percentage point in every case we’ve examined.

SECOND DISTRICT

The three-way race for Second District Supervisor was probably the hardest-fought local competition in this election cycle, as well as the county’s most unusual. The death of incumbent Roger Rodoni in an automobile accident shortly before the June primary plunged the race into chaos. Rodoni’s name stayed on the ticket, along with challengers Clif Clendenen and Estelle Fennell. He finished first, with Clendenen a close second. At the time, the unusual circumstances of the race seemed to indicate that Clendenen and Fennell would compete head-to-head in a runoff.

However, it was determined that Johanna Rodoni, who had been appointed to finish out her late husband’s term, had the legal right to run as a write-in candidate in the November election. Fennell and Clendenen would appear on the ballot. Clendenen ended up finishing first, with 37.9 percent of the Second District vote. (Four and a half percent of district voters didn’t cast a ballot in the race.)

On the first maps in this series — a district-wide map and an inset of the City of Fortuna — Clendenen appears in yellow, Rodoni in red and Fennell in blue. The shade represents the high vote-getter’s margin of victory against the second-place finisher in each precinct. It shows Clendenen maintaining a comfortable margin in most of heavily populated Fortuna (his hometown), with Rodoni taking the middle section of the district and Fennell running very strong in sparsely populated SoHum. (For Rodoni, we are counting the total of all write-in votes, virtually all of which were cast for her.)

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