OK, here's what I have.We know that 18,963 of the absentees requests come from the Eastern Shore, counting Cecil County. Frank Kratovil won all those counties. Using the same county by county percentages for Frank Kratovil and Andy Harris as they performed on Election Day, Frank should expect 10,364 absentee votes from the Eastern Shore, and Andy should expect 8,152. That assumes the same percentage of votes for 3rd party candidates. Again, that's assuming the same performance as Election Day. Typically, absentees favor Republicans, but there were slightly more Democratic requests this year than Republican requests.
Since there's only 13,335 absentees from the Western Shore still due, even using a percentage of 57% for Andy and 40% for Frank (that's Frank's low water mark and Andy's high water mark on the Western Shore), Frank can expect 5,333 votes and Andy can expect 7,734 votes from the Western Shore.
That brings us to a total of 15,697 for Frank and 15,886. And that assumes that every absentee ballot requested in turned in. In Wicomico, 4,016 were requested, but apparently only 3,300 or so were received. Now, there's still time for more to find their way to the Elections office date stamped in time to count, but that drives the total numbers even lower, working to Frank's advantage. If every other county sees a similar 80% return rate, you can cut each candidate's numbers accordingly.
Andy Harris should only pick up a net margin of TWO HUNDRED VOTES from absentee ballots using current projections for the Shore and being aggressively conservative for Harris on the Western Shore.
Keep in mind these numbers do not reflect provisional ballots, which will now be counted. I'm hearing Wicomico has in the neighborhood of 700 provisional ballots alone. There must be statistically significant numbers in the other counties as well. The political conventional wisdom is provisional ballots help Democrats, so that may well seal the deal.
Given Frank's edge of 900+ of Election Day votes, plus whatever provisional ballots are actually counted (which SHOULD help Frank disproportionately), I feel that Frank Kratovil should win election as the next Congressman from MD-01 by slightly fewer than 1,000 votes when everything is counted.
Guess we'll find out in a week and a half, huh?
UPDATE:
I failed to mention the party affiliation of the requests, as many on the blogosphere remind us that absentees tend to trend Republican. Well, not this time. As you can see from the links below, it's just about dead even in MD-01 with Democrats requests vs. Republican requests - 14,160 Democratic requests vs. 13,922 Republican requests (with 4,453 Others). I like our chances.
A few links for you.
MD Board of Elections Absentee Requests by CD (as of 11/04)
MD Board of Elections Absentee Requests by County (as of 11/04)
MD Board of Elections RECEIVED Absentee Ballots by Party and CD (as of 11/04)
MD Board of Elections RECEIVED Absentee Ballots by Party and County (as of 11/04)
2 comments:
Hey Duck,
Where did you happen upon the absentee ballot request numbers?
You might want to link or repost on DailyKos, some others might appreciate the numbers.
They are posted on the MD BoE Elections site. Obviously, we can't pull out the Anne Arundel, Harford or Baltimore County requests for just MD-01, but using some basic math, we can tell those are only 13k+ of the 33k+ requested.
And I did post most of this in a dKos open thread about undecided races.
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