Reply to Matt DeFerranti v. John Vihstadt

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Congrats, mindless voters.  You got what you deserved.  I'll sit happy here in NA, but I'm sad today b/c one of the few politicians who actually cared about Arlington got drowned out in your stupid blue wave.  Trump minions are bad, but so are you.[/quote]

Yeah, the “NA screws over SA politically” trope is officially dead now.[/quote]

SA actually screws themselves over[/quote]

How do? SA voters are outnumbered 2 to 1, at least, by NA. Why do you think they've gotten the short end of the stick for 70 years? It's simple math.-[/quote]

Go look at the precinct voting returns and then tell me it was NA that just elected MdF.[/quote]

Ok did that. Here's your math lesson.

There are 31 north Arlington precincts, and 23 south Arlington precincts. Setting aside the 20k absentee ballots, which are probably disproportionately from NA, 53% of MdeF's votes came from NA precincts. 46% from SA -- even though percentage wise, as you seem to be pointing out, SA precincts broke most heavily for him. It's he same for vihstadt, though an even larger percentage of his votes came from NA -57/42.

North Arlington elects everyone, it's simply bigger and a larger share of the population is eligible to vote. And that is why SA gets served last.[/quote]

Wow, I can't believe you are being that dishonest about what happened in this election. The NA precincts broke for Vihstadt 51%-49%. The SA precincts broke for deFerranti 58%-42%. If only NA voted, Vihstadt would have won. SA bears full responsibility for voting him in.[/quote]

But it's not about "if only NA voted" because that's a fantasy. It's about where each candidates votes actually came from. You're looking at marginal differences (vihstadt won NA and lost SA) but what really matters is that MdeF got almost 23,000 votes from NA -- not counting provisional ballots -- and fewer than 20,000 from SA. So who got Matt elected? That's right, north Arlington did. Not without help from the south, but you need to lose NA by more than a percentage point before claiming that south Arlington singlehandedly elected the next county board member.[/quote]

Wow, you're really going all-in on this. I can't believe you can say with a straight face that the part of the county that voted for Vihstadt was responsible for MdF winning because they didn't vote for Vihstadt by a sufficiently large margin to overcome SA's strong vote for MdF. Which is it -- do NA voters overwhelm SA voters so that SA voter's voices don't count, or do NA voters not vote strongly enough to drown out SA voters? You can't have it both ways.[/quote]

You're pretty worked up so I'll keep it short this time. It's not even clear that JV won NA; it's plausible he didn't but we can't know for sure the disposition of those 20k absentee ballots. I think a great number of them came from party line voters too excited to wait until Election Day and I think they were probably younger and NA too. So you're on thin ice claiming JV won NA, what with a 1% margin. What's undeniable is that North Arlington has more votes. That point stands. And lived experience bears out the reality that political power is concentrated in NA.[/quote]

What is your source for your assertions that the absentee ballots came disproportionately from NA, and that the voting trends among those ballots were different from in-person voting? Surely you have more foundation than "This would help my argument so I want it to be true."[/quote]

I don't stake any of my argument on that suspicion, but since you ask, my guess is that a large portion of absentee ballots are college students studying/living elsewhere. That is a common way one becomes eligible to vote absentee. And yes, there are more of icy voters from north Arlington than south. Another example of how north Arlington is bigger than south: it has two high schools and south has one.

For the purposes of my argument all that's required is to acknowledge that we don't know precisely how many are NA or sa and that matters wen we're talking about "winning" NA by 1 percentage point.
[/quote]

If you're not staking your argument on your suspicions about absentee ballots, then I can't tell what your argument is because nothing you say seems to hold if you're willing to acknowledge the possibility that the majority of North Arlington voters really did vote for Vihstadt. I also do not understand the relevance of your "North Arlington is bigger" point unless you're trying to claim it somehow effectively disenfranchises South Arlington, even though that clearly didn't happen here because MdF won despite the best efforts of neighborhoods like Williamsburg, East Falls Church, Rock Spring and Westover. [/quote]

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