Measure R's lead keeps growing

The lead for Measure R reached almost a full percentage point on Friday, as the Los Angeles County Registrar updated vote totals from the Nov. 4 election. Measure R now has 67.65% of the vote, the largest lead it has had. Two-thirds approval is needed for passage. The vote totals are still unofficial.

The lead for Measure R in terms of raw votes now stands at about 27,630. I'll find out the number of outstanding votes still to be counted on Monday. At this point, the majority of absentee and provisional ballots have been counted.

Measure R, if approved, would raise the sales tax by a half-cent in Los Angeles County to pay for mass transit and road projects. The largest project is an extension of the subway to the Westside.

--Steve Hymon

Comments

[Dana Gabbard]

Dan W., I don't know in re L.A. to Vegas. Do you mean the DesertXpress proposal with steel wheel on steel rail technology to be privately financed?

http://www.desertxpress.com/need.php

Or the maglev the California-Nevada Super Speed Train Commission has received $45 million in federal planning money for?

http://www.maglev2006.de/071_Cummings/071_Cummings%20Neil_ok.pdf

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jun/10/new-life-fast-train/

[richard schumacher]

The Vegas monorail can't be fixed. If there was any place in the US that an amusement park ride might have been usable for transit it's Vegas, but even there the inefficiencies and costs inherent in the technology have crippled it.

[Dan W.]

"And in San Jose, the BART extension vote has been declared a winner with 66.78% and only a hundred votes left to verify."

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That's wonderful.

- California passes High Speed Rail
- Los Angeles County passes Measure R
- San Jose area passes BART extension and Marin County passes commuter rail.
- Seattle passes a light-rail proposition
- Honolulu passes light-rail

It was a great election day for public transit in the pacific rim.

Could hight-speed rail between Vegas and Los Angeles, and somehow fixing the Vegas monorail be far behind?

[Roger Christensen]

And in San Jose, the BART extension vote has been declared a winner with 66.78% and only a hundred votes left to verify.

[Ken Alpern]

It's getting nicer and nicer to see how we can start "taking for granted" a larger budget in the future, and that we can continue with the funding and building of the Expo Line and Foothill Gold Line (including the rail yard which makes operations for both Gold Lines so vital) at a relatively unbroken pace.

Furthermore, the fixes to the Metrolink and freeway system that involve "shelf-ready" projects are as likely to receive federal funds in 2009 as anyone could hope for.

With Obama as a partner, we can get things built. With Waxman in charge of the Energy panel, maybe we can (putting aside his previous shutdown of the Subway) fast-tracking of federal funds as well.

[Juan]

The way I see it, there are around 123,000 ballots remaining to be counted, and its likely 112,000 or fewer of these ballots will have an R vote. Based on my calculations, Measure R needs a yes vote from 41.179% of these ballots to pass.

individual counts after election day have come in at
11/7 - 63.851% in favor
11/11 - 67.578% in favor
11/14 - 70.714% in favor
11/18 - 73.025% in favor
11/21 - 75.158% in favor

While this trend seems odd and not random, it does indicate that each additional stack of ballots being counted increasingly favors Measure R (and Obama for that matter, ballots that have been counted since last Friday have come in at 75.224% for Obama, while his overall percentage is 69.020%). This likely means that the registrar has deferred the tally of harder-to-count and provisional ballots until after the absentee ballots have been counted and that these provisional ballots are favoring Obama and R. The first batch of ballots on 11/7 were likely all absentee ballots, as that result was in the ballpark of Measure R's first result on election night.