Election Limbo Part II, Day 14: John Blutarsky Edition

The voting is over right?  Please tell us the voting is over right?  That’s what the schedule says, that’s what the calendar says, but if there’s anything we’ve learned from this election, it’s that we should never say it’s over.   

We thought it was going to be over June 25.  Then we thought Baker won on the 26^th.  Then we thought Smith won on the 27^th.  Then we thought it would be over after the recount.  After the Election Commission botched that one, we thought it would be over after the court hearing, and their own personal recount.  We bet Smith hoped so too, because he was ahead then.  But was it over any of those times?   

Nope.  A new election was scheduled.  So we thought it would be over on September 24.  But then S. John Crittenbaker decided to extend the election two weeks for the freedmen, and then, AFTER ELECTION DAY, they decided SOME Cherokees could still vote, as long as, heaven forbid, they didn’t mail in their absentee ballots.  The Election Commission then decided that Cherokees who voted by mail deserved just as much an opportunity to vote as the ones who live in Tahlequah.  But it’s still not over.  Not even today.  Or tomorrow.

When will it be over?  Well, to quote an American icon:  “Nothing’s over until we decide it is!  Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”

Ummmm…. No.  

We’re putting the over-under for the inauguration as Halloween.  Which side is the smart money on?

Stayed tuned: tomorrow we get unofficial, semi-formal, partial results from the election commission.

Cherokee Truth will tell you what the numbers mean tomorrow night.

Election Limbo Part II, Day 5: Predictions Based on Truth (but predictions/guesses all the same)

We are kind of used to early voting, which Cherokee Nation Election Commission calls, oxymoronically, In-Person Absentee Voting.  That all happens before the election.  Today, we’ve entered the brave new world of late voting, which occurs when the rules for an election change after Election Day.  Only in the Cherokee Nation, right?

Well, there’s been a big fuss by both candidates about what this means, and if it’s fair.  Today, we’re trying to figure out how much it will matter, if at all.

We have no official numbers, but our reliable sources say the election commission was not that busy today.  Nowhere near what it was like for a typical day of early voting.  According to the Election Commission, about 1100 people voted in early voting for the September election, in four days of walk-in voting.  That’s 275 folks a day. 

So let’s guess about half that today, just to be safe: maybe 150. 

We know from the June election that Baker won the Tahlequah walk-in voting 609 to 427 (which of course is why he and Crittenden-- S. John Crittenbaker-- probably wanted it reopened after they took a close look at the turnout)

That’s basically a 60-40 split. 

A 60-40 split for 150 voters is 90 for Baker and 60 for Smith.  So, if Baker gains 30 votes a day on Smith, for five days, he’ll be 150 votes closer to (or further ahead of) Smith than he was before Baker asked for the rules to change.  That’s not an insignificant number, but it’s hardly earth-shattering.  

If Baker does gain 150 votes here, how many does he really gain overall?  Because while his plan was only to allow Cherokees in Oklahoma to vote, the election commission said that to be fair to all Cherokees, absentee ballots could be turned in late too.  And those tend to favor Smith.  Using the original count numbers, Smith got about 56% of mail in ballots, to Bakers 44%. 

So for every 100 late absentee ballots that come in, Smith would stand to gain 12 votes on Baker.  Let’s just guess and say 200 total come in.  So Smith nets 24, and Bakers gain is down to 126 votes.  Finally, there’s the freedmen vote, but only the freedmen who haven’t already voted and aren’t already included in the 8787 voters that scared Baker on Sunday and had him asking for the rules to change.

Smith, Baker and everyone else seem to think most of those will go to Baker, but how many will that be?  We’ve heard there are 1000 or so Freedmen voters.  How many more will vote that haven’t already?  200?  300?

So here’s our guess, based on the facts at hand.  Baker nets about 150 more votes than Smith on walk-ins.  Baker nets 300 more than Smith freedmen votes that haven’t been counted.  And Smith gains 30 or so on Baker with late absentee ballots. That means Baker's maneuvering to change the election rules after the fact might gain him 120 votes or so.  The freedmen that he already has in his back pocket are another few hundred.  So a best case scenario for Baker is he picks up 420 votes from where he was on Saturday.  Is that enough to ease his fears?  Considering that the voting was so close in June, he has to be at least happier.

Keep in mind, this is all guess work, but based on the known facts that we have on hand.  Feel free to give your own guesses, but please use facts to back them up.

Election Limbo Part II, Day 1: Can We Tell Who Won?

Since we won’t have election results to talk about until at least October 8, and we have to amuse ourselves somehow, we’ll take a look at some of the numbers that are available and try to figure out what they mean.  So, we’ll give you some cold hard truth, and then we’ll tell you what we think it might mean.  Don’t argue with the truth, but feel free to give your opinions, based on facts, for what you think happened yesterday.

First, we’ll start off using the June election as our model.  Smith won by 5 or 7 votes, depending… Baker got the most votes in the recount, during which hundreds of votes disappeared because the election commission screwed up.

And let’s not debate that… the election commission says it screwed up the recount, and the Supreme Court went back and counted them all and found the votes were there all along.

Anyway, the election commission can’t count the ballots, but they can at least tell us how many there are.  And they have.   There were 8787 ballots cast yesterday, compared to 8054 on election day in June.  So, can we tell anything by where those 733 additional ballots were cast?

In June, Baker won District 1 and District 2, Smith won districts 3 and 5 and 4 was pretty much a toss up.

According to our math, there were 13 more votes in District 1 this time around, and 122 more votes in District 2.  If these new voters vote like their neighbors did in June, Baker will get more of those votes than Smith.  In District 3 there were 276 new votes and in District 5 there were 134 new votes.  Again, it looks like these voters would be more likely to vote for Smith than Baker, and since there 275 more of those votes than in districts 1 and 2, Baker might be worried.

There are 188 new votes in District 4, which as we mentioned was a toss up, but who knows how those will end up?

Based on the walkin, from the looks of it Smith had a good day.

Also, there is the matter of the 4000 additional mail-in votes.  Smith tends to do well on those, and won them in June, so the fact that there are more of them could also be troubling Baker.

0 Days Until the New Election: Voting, Watching and Waiting

A lot of watching and waiting left to
do in this election.

Polls are open for just a little while longer, but, as one of our readers has pointed out, even though the polls close at 7, they won’t start counting votes until October 8, or maybe later.  Why?  Because of the agreement reached by our APCSJC and then signed off on by the federal court.

FYI: This is a picture
of Bill Clinton.

Looking closely at the federal court order, it actually says that we have to “refrain from counting all ballots in the September 24, 2011 Special Election until after October 8, 2011.” Not to go all Bill Clinton on you with legal definitions (he’s the guy who said “It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is."), but it looks like to us that maybe we can’t even start counting votes until the stroke of midnight and October 9 starts.

And then it’s a couple of days at least to certify, and then maybe a recount (those are always fun) and an election challenge in court.  So maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a new chief by Halloween. 

Regardless, vote if you haven’t already, and if you have, keep watching and waiting.

1 Day Until the New Election: You Must Vote Tomorrow*

Cherokees get to vote for Principal Chief again tomorrow.  Aren’t we lucky?  But we want to make this perfectly clear:  Cherokees by blood HAVE to vote tomorrow.  There’s been some confusion, even on this page, saying that walk-in voting has been extended, but that’s only the case for freedmen, because of the federal court order.

Also, if you got an absentee ballot, you have to get it to Tahlequah tomorrow as well, unless you are a freedman, because they have until October 8 to return theirs.  

The point being, if you vote tomorrow, it will count.  If you don’t vote tomorrow, you might be screwed, unless you have a court order that applies to you.  

No matter who you want for chief, please vote tomorrow.  This means you.

Four Days Until the New Election: Beat to the Punch

So today was the day a federal court judge was going to tell us how or if we could run our own election, but it turns out the Freedmen and the BIA, working with APCSJC beat him to it.

According to media reports, our election is not only going to be this Saturday, but also the next few Saturdays. 

Crittenden cut a deal with the BIA and Freedmen that gave them their citizenship back, and allowed them to vote-- even extending the timeframe for voting until October 8, though the regular election is still on for Saturday.  Which Crittenden basically told us he’d do a few days ago if we were listening, when he said:  "They may have helped put me in office. I believe they're entitled to vote again.”

We’re not sure how this works, because the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled that freedmen weren’t citizens, so how can APCSJC agree in federal court to grant them citizenship anyway?

We’re not sure, but he did.  His statement on the Cherokee Nation web site says “I am especially concerned about the funding that has been withheld.  I hope the action today will allow those $33 million in HUD funds to be released to us.  It’s a significant sum and the people at the Cherokee Nation who work in housing programs will not have to worry about the funding or services to our people.”  So, I guess if the Cherokee Nation does something the BIA doesn’t like, all they have to do is tell us they won’t give us any money and we’ll do whatever they say. 

So now the BIA and the freedmen get to tell us who votes in this upcoming election, not our Supreme Court and not our own Constitution.  How do the candidates feel about that?  Well, they are both pretty sure it is the other guy’s fault.

Baker blamed “Smith and his Supreme Court” for trying to steal the election and then demanding a new election, spending a fortune on lawyers and then losing the case.

All of which is a little weird,  considering that if the court was going to steal the election, they could’ve just made Smith Chief a few weeks ago and saved us a lot of trouble.  And that it was Baker who argued for a new election after the Supreme Court told him he had less votes than Smith, the court gave him what he wanted!  And that the Cherokee Nation didn’t lose the case, APCSJC just handed over the decision about who votes in our election without much of a fight.

Smith blamed Baker by saying "The agreement in the federal court is in direct violation of the decision of the highest Cherokee Nation court that Freedmen are not citizens of the Cherokee Nation.”  He said that Crittenden was doing Bakers dirty work, getting Freedmen special treatment and accusing them both of “sell(ing) out the Cherokee Nation to the BIA and non-Indian freedmen descendants for a few votes.”

To put this all in perspective, the people in Taiwan this morning are reading about us in their paper.  Here’s the message they are hearing: “Osiyo, y’all.  Cherokee Nation is a sovereign nation.  We’re just waiting for another nation to tell us how to run our elections and government.”

6 Days Until the New Election: Barenaked Ladies Edition

If I had a million dollars.... I'd build a tree fort in our yard!

If you had a million dollars what would you do with it?  If you answered run  two campaigns  for Principal Chief, you would need every penny.  Between Smith and Baker, more than $1,171,000 is invested in this campaign.  

The Tulsa World did us a semi-favor by posting some information about the latest campaign finance reports, but they managed to not post the actual reports online, so those are still to come. However, we can get to the basics now and the details later.

In August, Smith raised $ 102,979.12 and loaned himself $38,000.    That makes his fundraising total (our math, not the World’s)  $494,544.19, and his loan total of $78,301.91 for a total available to his campaign so far of: $572,648.10.  Which sounds like a lot of money, and it is, until you realize Baker’s stack is just as big.

Between August 16 and September 15, Baker raised $152,851.97, bringing his fundraising total to $444,297.59.  With his loan total of $155,000, the total money available to his campaign so far is $599,297.59.

So we’ve got what has to be the first million dollar campaign in Cherokee Nation history, and we still don’t have a chief!  We’ll post more on the campaign finance reports (and links to the reports themselves) of both candidate  soon.