Measure R's lead shrinks

The lead became thinner for the transportation sales tax hike known as Measure R, as the Los Angeles County Registrar on Friday resumed counting ballots from the election.

Measure R needed two-thirds approval and Friday's tally brought yes votes down from 67.41% to 67.22%. There are still about 450,000 late-arriving absentee and provisional ballots to be counted, with the Registrar scheduled to resume its tally on Tuesday and Friday of next week.

Campaign officials for Measure R say they expect it will pass because the late absentee votes and provisional ballots tend to favor Measure R more than the early-arriving absentee ballots counted on Friday. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other proponents held a news conference Wednesday to celebrate Measure R's passage.

--Steve Hymon

Comments

[Dana Gabbard]

Steve K. is right. When I started being involved in transit activism 14 years ago public transit was a political backwater. One advantage Eric Mann (who runs the Bus Riders Union) had when he stumbled upon this issue is he had the stage to himself back then—nobody else was talking about transit. And the years of neglect by the local electeds gave him an easy target to attack and because they knew the situation was their fault the powers that be had little to say in their defense and eventually cut the deal w/Mann (aka the consent decree). Things are different now. And hopefully we can continue to making them better.

[Steve K.]

> Over successive decades,
> little progress has occurred
> in anything except perhaps
> corruption.

Not really sure what you are talking about. MTA public transportation in L.A. is better now than it ever was while I was growing up here. I can remember having to wait 2 hours for a bus sometimes while going to school. We now have busses like the Rapid that stop every 10-15 minutes. I use it almost everyday now. Is it perfect? Hell no! Does it need more work? Absolutely! That's why I voted yes on Measure R. But don't tell me there has been any progress. You must not actually have ever used the previous transportation systems.

[lsm]

"Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Thanks, Kymberleigh Richards, for the concise recap of the reorganizations leading to our present Metro. From other posts, I understand you are very much involved in transit planning. I am not; I am only a taxpayer who has to live in and travel around LA County. I do see, however, how my money is being spent and how our transit works. Although organizational process vitally determines any system, a system's results tell us how well it functions.

Historically, transit management in LA County produced some real boners. Construction disasters and cost overruns getting the Red Line to Hollywood, safety issues resulting from Blue Line design and prodigality erecting an extravagant headquarters building provide glaring examples of a bungling bureaucracy. With the reorganization you outlined, however, Metro has given us much better management. Operating a safe Gold Line, pioneering Rapid lines and bringing in a Gold Line Extension under-budget and on-time evidence a management team producing enviable results. Assuming we voters did our part and passed Measure R, the reorganized Metro appears prepared to do its part and manage our resources well.

Even with additional funding, the reorganized Metro faces daunting challenges. It must make up for decades of woeful neglect of our transit infrastructure and it must do so in the face of deeply entrenched and horribly divisive parochial politics. Going forward, let us see how the reorganized Metro performs. Let us look for it to leverage our funds by winning matching Federal grants. Let us watch it build new projects on-time and within-budget. Metro's recent track record suggests it will. This recent track record convinced me (and I hope at least two-thirds of the electorate) to trust Metro with my money and vote yes on Measure R.

[Gokhan]

Juan pointed out that many absentee and provisional ballots don't have a vote cast on Measure R. This means there are less remaining ballots to consider than I did. So, it looks more encouraging than my calculation, which assumed every unprocessed ballot had a vote cast on Measure R.

Estimated remaining ballots according to Daily News (http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_10928982): 374,000

Measure R voting rate on the previously processed absentee/provisional ballots according to the same source: 89.13%

Estimated remaining votes on Measure R: 333,357

Final outcome assuming the same absentee/provisional-vote trend: 66.83%
(66.67% or more is needed)
Margin: 4,679 out of 2,898,878 votes or 0.16%

Minimum Yes vote required in remaining ballots: 62.45%

Previous Yes vote on the absentee/provisional ballots: 63.85%

So, although the outlook is better than in my previous calculation, if there is any negative systematic trend, Measure R could easily fail.

Perhaps the best is to stop worrying about this and see the outcome when all votes are processed.

[Kymberleigh Richards]

J in Pasadena -

Your thought process ignores the history of the region.

Today's Metro (MTA) has been in place for 15 years, and was a replacement for the two-pronged RTD and LACTC. Guess why that happened? It was a re-examination by the state Legislature of the whole foundation for how we manage our transportation infrastructure.

RTD was itself a replacement for the original MTA (1958-1963) and was a recognition of how the whole foundation for how we manage our transportation infrastructure needed to be changed.

The first MTA was put in place because, after the private sector model for public transit began to fail, there was a wholesale change in the whole foundation for how we manage our transportation infrastructure.

I just went back 50 years, and we have been doing what you suggest all along. (In case you didn't recognize your own words repeated three times above.)

The success or failure of Measure R has nothing to do with the argument.

[Spokker]

"I'm thinking of pushing a measure to reorganize MTA and bring in real oversight. Thirty more years of this garbage is nuts. People are so desperate they will vote for anything."

What is your plan? And I don't mean anything hostile by that question. It's just that I see you say that the MTA is this and that a lot of the time and I would like to hear how you would run a transit agency as huge as the one that oversees transit operations in Los Angeles.

I think one thing I would look at is requiring all board members and high ranking employees to take transit to that huge building at Union Station.

I don't know how hard line I would be about it or whether I would be able to get away with it, but if a board member felt that getting to MTA headquarters on public transit was too difficult or uncomfortable, I would say, help fix it or resign :)

[eclexia]

It's funny that the County Registrar staff has drawn a "50%" line onto the graph, but no "2/3" line. I guess somebody skipped their civics class in school.

[Gokhan]

Your point is very valid, Juan, and if we consider the fact that many unprocessed ballots have no vote on Measure R, then there are significantly less remaining votes on Measure R. This is certainly very encouraging for the passage of Measure R.

[Jeremy R]

So, will the election be official by the end of this year?

[Juan]

Gorkhan,

I did similar calculations, but you failed to consider that not all voters who cast ballots have voted on Measure R

On Wednesday, when Measure R was at 67.413% (and 2,423,043 total Measure R votes cast), the Registrar reported 3,073,099 Turnout + Absentee ballots cast. This means only 78.85% of voters voted on Measure R.

The latest change on Friday added 142,478 new total votes on Measure R, which came in 63.851% in favor of Measure R. However, the Registrar reported 319,692 new absentee and turnout votes since Wednesday, indicating that only 45% of these new votes included a choice on Measure R.

Taking the high end of Steve's estimate of 250,000 ballots remaining, and assuming that 78.85% of these ballots have a vote on Measure R, Measure R needs 59.53% of these votes in order to pass.

Unless these remaining votes differ significantly from the election night totals and the additional ballots, (say, they're somehow all from La Habra Heights) Measure R will pass.

If votes continue to come it at 63.851% in favor of R, I calculate that R will pass with 66.975% of the vote, or 8,517 votes.

One anomaly: I did some calculations on votes cast for president and total votes in "election statistics" on lavote.net and it seems that only 83.09% of voters cast a vote for President, so it's possible that not all of the ballots identified in "election statistics" have been tallied. So, if all votes that have been tallied cast a vote for President, we could assume that 91.01% of voters cast a vote on Measure R. This would mean Measure R needs a 60.484% margin on the remaining ballots to pass, which is still lower than has been observed with the additional ballots since Wednesday.

[Gokhan]

Regarding the absentee ballots, we don't know whether they are processing early ballots (bottom of the pile) first or late ballots (top of the pile) first.

I've also made a simple statistical calculation to see how much random fluctuations can be with the new ballots. The statistical confidence level right now is more than 90% that Measure R will stand. But this doesn't take into account the systematic trends, such as early versus late ballots, provisional vs. absentee ballots, etc.

[lsm]

Now I am curious, how do campaign officials for Measure R know that the late arriving absentee and provisional ballots tend to favor Measure R more than the early-arriving absentee ballots counted on Friday? Have they unofficially counted the uncounted ballots? Are they considering who usually votes late absentee and provisional, assuming the same voters did so also in this election and projecting how these folk voted on this particular measure? Did they consult an Ouija board? My questions are not sarcastic; I genuinely would appreciate hearing from those who know the methodology involved.

[J in Pasadena]

> death sentence for LA transit

Give me a break. The MTA is the death sentence for LA transit. Over successive decades, little progress has occurred in anything except perhaps corruption. We'd be better off if "R" fails and the whole foundation for how we manage our transportation infrastructure is re-examined. I'm thinking of pushing a measure to reorganize MTA and bring in real oversight. Thirty more years of this garbage is nuts. People are so desperate they will vote for anything.

[Gokhan]

-- Alert -- Measure R on the brink of failing --

142,478 ballots have just been added to the Measure R votes. This is the trend:

Previous: 2,423,943 votes 67.41%
Current: 2,565,521 votes 67.22%

It's obvious that the absentee and provisional ballots are favoring Measure R much less.

Quick calculation:

New ballots: 90,973 Yes, 51,505 no --> 63.85% Yes
Estimated remaining ballots: 605,000 - 142,478 = 462,522

So, if the remaining ballots have the same trend, we will have additional 295,323 Yes and 167,199 No.

Therefore:

Yes = 1,633,442 + 90,973 + 295,323 = 2,019,738
No = 789,601 + 51,505 + 167,199 = 1,008,305

Estimated final result: 66.70%

This is only a +0.03% = 1,042 out of 3,028,043 votes margin!

So, consider Measure R in deep coma. We won't know if it will make it until every single vote is counted by early December.

And, if Measure R fails, it will be a death sentence for LA transit.