After a couple days of reflection on this week’s election, here’s some thoughts I had on it.
•With Ocean City elections, it’s always interesting to observe the “single shooting” practice. For those unfamiliar, due to Ocean City’s unique setup of being able to vote for multiple non-partisan council seats, many voters do not use all their available votes. In this election, each voter had the opportunity to cast four votes for council candidates. The numbers prove once again that many voters did not choose to use all their votes, resulting in their votes carrying a higher weight than if they should had spread their choices out.
For example, in Tuesday’s election, there were 2,485 voters, meaning a possible total of 9,940 votes for council could have been registered. When you add up all the votes cast for the five council candidates, there were 7,362, resulting in only 74 percent of the possible votes being utilized.
When this sort of thing occurs, and it’s entirely reasonable and acceptable for candidates and their supporters to implore these tactics, there’s usually a runaway winner. That was the case with John Gehrig winning 20 percent of the possible votes, followed by DeLuca, 15 percent; Dare, 14; Knight, 13 percent; and Cymek, 12 percent.
For what it’s worth, Mayor Rick Meehan received 1,891 votes, or 76 percent of the possible votes he could have received since there were 2,485 registered voters. That’s actually an impressive total since voters did not need to even cast a vote for him since he was unopposed. He was re-elected back on the filing deadline by virtue of not being challenged.
•It was the great write-in effort that wasn’t. Late last week it appeared Tony Christ had an idea for a late plan to lead a write-in effort for former Ocean City Councilman Vince Gisriel.
Reached last week, Gisriel acknowledged being informed about the write-in campaign. While not a party to it, Gisriel said, “Frankly, I’m flattered by it. I’m not knocking on doors or anything like that. If the community saw fit to elect me, I would be honored and duty-bound to serve again.”
The idea was floated and led by Christ and a handful of citizens associated with the Ocean City Taxpayers For Social Justice group.
“I am wholeheartedly leading the charge and I’m proud to do it. It’s really my pleasure. It’s a crapshoot I understand this late in the game, but Vince is a polar opposite of what you have now at City Hall,” said Christ. “He watches every penny. It’s a spur of the moment type of thing here, and we are going grassroots and word of mouth trying to get him in there between now and Tuesday. I personally plan to vote in Virginia first thing and come to Ocean City and join everyone else who will encouraging the write-in for Vince.”
The only major issue with that was Ocean City election system doesn’t allow write-ins. Reached Friday, City Clerk Diana Chavis, who manages the town’s election process, said there is nothing in the charter in regard to write-in candidates. In Ocean City municipal elections, residents cast their votes by pulling a lever in an old-style voting booth system. There’s no mechanism within the voting boxes for a write-in vote to be cast, according to Chavis.
“We don’t have a provision in our charter for a write-in candidate. The ballots are set up and the machines are programmed for the ballot as approved by the Mayor and Council,” Chavis said. “Absentees ballots have already gone out and everything is well in place.”
•When I woke up Wednesday morning, I was looking forward to seeing all the drastic and ridiculous comments and predictions from Clinton supporters online. They were fun to read.
My issue with all the gloom and doom and dark prognostications of the country’s demise is the Democratic Party should look within when marveling over Trump’s victory. It’s difficult for me to believe Trump is going to be our next president, but the democrats have nobody to blame but themselves. In my mind, the democrats lost the White House. They set up the system for Clinton to be the nomination by pitting her against two underachieving opponents in Sanders and O’Malley. Others who wanted to run were discouraged because it was Clinton’s time. They put all their weight behind Clinton, who is a divisive individual.
From the beginning, Clinton, who won the popular vote but lacked the electoral votes, was obviously a highly flawed candidate with a number of weaknesses, chief among them being she did nothing to set herself apart from President Obama, who she lost to eight years ago. She would have continued to lead like Obama. The democrats should have recognized early on the American public has had enough of established politicians and their rhetoric and they wanted change. The question was: Do you want four more years of Obama or a drastic change in a different direction with a political neophyte?
The answer was the latter.
