Thomas Breen photo
Aaron Goode (right) overseeing Thursday's RCV mayoral straw poll in Westville.
There was no need for an instant runoff in Thursday’s Westville ward committee straw poll for mayor, as two-term incumbent Justin Elicker won a majority of votes on the first ballot.
But, for the fun of it — and to practice running a ranked-choice-voting election — the neighborhood Democrats assembled in Edgewood School’s auditorium counted a second round of votes anyway, and shed a bit more light on this year’s mayoral race in the process.
Fresh off of a similar win the night before in Morris Cove, Elicker emerged on top again on Thursday following the Ward 25 Democratic Ward Committee’s vote for which mayoral candidate the neighborhood’s co-chairs should endorse at the July 25 citywide Democratic Town Committee convention at the Betsy Ross School Parish House at 150 Kimberly Ave.
That convention will determine which Democratic mayoral candidate’s name will appear at the top of the ballot in the Sept. 12 primary.
Elicker supporter Barbara Segaloff (center) pitches Harvey Feinberg on supporting the incumbent as he heads inside Edgewood School to cast his ballot.
Brennan supporter Ben Berkowitz says hello to former Mayor and Ward 25 Democratic Ward Committee member Toni Harp.
Rebecca Borné supports her preferred mayoral candidate (and husband) Liam Brennan, alongside retired judge Maureen Murphy.
On Thursday night, the venue was Edgewood School at 737 Edgewood Ave. A half-dozen candidate supporters rallied outside of the school, holding signs for former legal aid attorney Liam Brennan (who lives in Westville) and Elicker. No one appeared to show up to rally votes for fellow Democratic mayoral challengers Shafiq Abdussabur, a retired police sergeant, and Tom Goldenberg, an ex-McKinsey consultant.
Thursday’s vote followed a mayoral candidate forum that Ward 25’s Democratic co-chairs put on in June alongside fellow co-chairs from Ward 26, 27, and 30.
Westville Alder Adam Marchand (right) casts his ballot. Marchand won the committee's unanimous endorsement for another term as alder.
Goode, Judy Sparer, Janis Underwood, and Malcolm Welfare preparing to count the first round of ballots.
After all the votes were cast and counted at around 7:30 p.m., there was a clear winner.
Two-term incumbent Elicker secured 21 votes in the first round of the straw poll, Brennan got 11, Abdussabur 8, Goldenberg 0.
As democracy buff and ranked-choice-voting advocate Aaron Goode explained, since Elicker won a majority of votes on the first round of counting — 21 out of 40 — he won the election.
“If no candidate got a majority in the first round, we would go to a second round of voting,” he said about how the ranked-choice-voting method of running an election works.
In that hypothetical second round, the candidate with the least number of votes from the first round would be eliminated from contention, and the votes that had gone to that candidate would be redistributed based on each ballot’s second-ranked choice. That would go on and on until a candidate emerged with a majority of the votes.
“But,” Goode concluded, “because we have a candidate that has a majority in the first round, the election is over and that candidate is the winner.” Namely: Justin Elicker.
After a round of applause for the winner from the dozen-plus Democrats assembled in the room, Ward 25 Democratic Ward Committee Co-Chair Janis Underwood encouraged Goode and the group to move on to a second round of ballot counting anyway.
“Let’s do it just for fun,” she said. “I think it’d be good to know” how to run a second round of a ranked-choice-voting election, even if it’s not necessary here, and even if the end result won’t change because no number of second-choice redistributed votes would bump a candidate above the winner.
Welfare and Sparer move on to a second round of counting.
And so volunteer ballot counters for the night Malcolm Welfare and Judy Sparer did just that.
The second round of voting went by before it had even started, as the candidate with the least number of votes in the first round, Goldenberg, had no ballots available to be redistributed, since he hadn’t secured a single first-rank vote.
The third round of voting took a minute longer, as the vote tabulators redistributed the eight ballots that had gone to Abdussabur, who had received the second-least number of votes in the first round of the election.
After Sparer counted through the paper ballots first and Welfare double checked, the tabulators announced that, after a third round of counting and after Goldenberg and Abdussabur had both been eliminated, Elicker still had 21 votes and Brennan now had 18. (One ballot had been “exhausted,” Goode explained, meaning that it was no longer valid in a third round because it had been cast for a candidate already eliminated.)
What did all of that mean?
Well, as Goode explained, all of the committee members who had voted for Abdussabur had listed Brennan as their second choice (except for one, who had listed Goldenberg, on that aforementioned “exhausted” ballot.) And none had listed Elicker as their second choice.
Really bad news for Goldenberg, but bad news for Elicker as well: he is the second choice of no one, and there are very large constituencies of insiders who want anyone but Elicker. In the actual primary, of course it's "first past the post", so he seems assured of victory even with a plurality. Still, he has a lot of work to do to shore up support in his party and the city.