My town is 15,000 people of which 4,000 people are registered to vote. It has roughly 5,000 old timers and 10,000 newcomers. The town is divided into 6 precincts one for each alderman. Understanding the math of election is the first step to understanding how you get elected, in our local elections only 20% of the electorate is going to vote (our last election was less, close to 11%). Mayoral elections have some more turn out so for argument sake say 25%. Use 4,000 registered voters as a base number that mean’s 1,000 people are going to vote one way or the other, in the election. Therefore you need 500 plus 1 vote to win.

I always figure that 1/3 are going to vote for you and 1/3 are going to vote against you and you can’t do anything about it. The middle 1/3 is where you win or lose. Let’s take the math a little further; you have 333 votes already towards your needed sum of 501. 168 to go! Now your opponent has the same number, which is the bad news. What this math tells you is that in a town of 15,000 the election boils down to making 168 people happy. So in the six precincts in my town you need 28 votes extra to win.

Putting that number another way, every little vote counts. There are all sorts of ways you can create voters to recognize you name and vote. I will go into that in another blog.