CD 22:’Voter Intent’ Cannot Be Determined By A Poll

Everyone from Pasadena to Clear Lake seems to have their panties in a major twist about the latest Houston Chronicle-11 News poll in Congressional District 22.

Call me an eternal optomist, but that poll doesn’t really scare me that much.

According to the poll, 35 percent of people will vote for a write-in. Thirty-six percent will vote for Nick Lampson leaving Lampson with a presumably razor-thin margin of victory.

Not so. There are three write-ins. Although Shelley Sekula-Gibbs gets all the media attention (and leftover scraps from the NRCC’s “big kids” table), she isn’t the only write-in, meaning that the “write-in” vote is split three ways, in some form or fashion, with Sekula-Gibbs presumably getting the most votes. That would still put Lampson well out in front of his “principal opponent.”

The other thing that this poll fails to account for or measure (and why polls in write-in races are not necessarily useful) is how many voters who say they will write-in someone will: (a) remember to do so; (b) have the time to do so on election day; and, (c) successfully cast a write-in vote.

Letter (c) there is the all-important one. While one county is doing some freaky “laws of averages” type thing to determine which variants of Shelley Sekula-Gibbs will count on any given day (seriously, someone in that county should have read a court decision or two about voter intent), others aren’t doing that and are being more strict. Either way, some people will just type in “shelley” some will put “SSG,” and some will do other things. Bottom line: a lot of write-in votes will be tossed out the window because they are cast incorrectly.

And, of course, you have to realize that straight ticket Republican voters (which many of the  voters in CD 22 happen to be) will actually record no vote in the race  and, if they don’t do a write-in (and what trained “straight R” voter has ever done that?), they don’t cast a vote.

Further, considering the ballots in the Houston portion of the district are already long enough to reach from the moon to Jupiter, I think you won’t see just a whole lot of people standing around for 20 minutes spinning an E-Slate dial trying to cast a write-in vote that they know won’t make a Republican win.

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Written by Vince Leibowitz

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