Rossi v. Gregoire math
After Gregoire opened up an imposing 14,300 vote lead, the Washington governor’s race has gotten much more interesting, as Rossi now trails by only 4,000 votes, according to the Secretary of State.
The SecState page has a lot of very useful numbers, breaking down not only votes by county, but also listing the total number of votes yet to be counted in each county. I ran these numbers and determined that, if each county’s uncounted ballots line up with their counted ones, Gregoire will come out ahead by just under 2,000 votes, triggering an automatic recount.
However, the Rossi camp does not expect that to be the case. The polls were swinging his way in the final days of the campaign, and they anticipate that the absentee ballots mailed in closer to the election will be more favorable. So, I ran some more numbers. Right now, Rossi is pulling in 41.3% of the vote in Seattle’s King County, one of only three counties he lost by more than 10%. If he pulls in 43.3% of the 120,000 ballots left to be counted there, and all other counties maintain their trends, he’ll win by 2,700 votes, no recount needed. In fact, even if he only increases his lead by 0.9%, he’ll pull ahead by 100 votes.
The trend is clearly moving in Rossi’s direction, and as long as he does only slightly better in these late ballots than he has done so far, we’ll have our first Republican governor in 20 years.
If you’re at all interested in my numbers, here are the votes counted, here are the votes yet to count, and here is the Excel spreadsheet I used to crunch them numbers. And, while I’m at it, here are the recount rules.
UPDATE: Thanks to Stefan for the link. His post gave me some ideas, so I’ve got Version 2.0 of the spreadsheet available. It’s much more user friendly, and you can more easily tweak the statewide numbers with this one. It’s remarkable how little of a bump Rossi needs.
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November 6th, 2004 at 12:23 pm
Well, I linked these stats to http://josef-a-k.blogspot.com/2004/11/great-gubernatorial-vote-count.html and you may also want to see http://josef-a-k.blogspot.com/2004/11/great-news-for-dino.html because I briskly talk about the trends FOR Dino.
BUT I did the calculations last night and came to about the same conclusion. The only way I went to sleep at 1-something AM was that Rossi was surging at the end & conservatives traditionally vote late.