Saturday, September 05, 2009

Iowa City School Board Endorsments and Early Vote

School Board: Endorsments and Early Vote

The Press-Citizen backs Dorau, Johnson and Swisher, splitting the more difference between the Armstrong-Cooper-Johnson clusters of signs and the COPE endorsement of Dorau, Jordison and Swisher. Armstrong and Jordison are scarcely mentioned, and significant space goes to the non-endorsement of incumbent Cooper. Tomorrow the Gazette endorses.

I said early on that geography mattered in this election. Let's look at the returned absentees.

PrecinctRegistrationBallots returned%
IC01 (Coralville)10472380.36%
IC02 (North Liberty)8310280.34%
IC03 (Manville Heights and downtown)13178240.18%
IC04 (northside)6973460.66%
IC05 (west side)114451141.00%
IC06 (southeast side)6306220.35%
IC07 (near east side)9298890.96%
IC08 (far east side)5525330.60%
IC09 (Hills)81420.25%
    
CC01 (North Liberty)181340.22%
CC02 (Oxford)110590.81%
CC03 (Cosgrove)51230.59%
CC04 (Tiffin)1303282.15%
CC05 (Western Hills)75300.00%
CC06 (Amana)148410.07%


So Iowa City has 398 votes in, which is more than we've seen since 2003 when Mary Vasey made a strong but unsuccessful challenger bid.

We don't see the big turnout spike in North Liberty or Coralville that would indicate a surge specific to the third high school folks. Instead, the early votes came from traditional every-election voting areas: east siders and west siders.

That west side precinct covers a lot of ground, from the immediate Roosevelt neighborhood all the way out past the proposed Crossings school site. It also includes the Oaknoll vote.

But there is a specific spike in Clear Creek Amana: lots of early ballots from Tiffin.

There are still 32 domestic mail absentees out in Iowa City and 53 in Clear Creek Amana (the majority of those, again, from Tiffin). There's also close to 300 overseas ballots out; as we learned when we were watching closely in the dead heat sales tax election, most of those standing requests came in at presidential election time and they tend not to come back in local elections.

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