Confidential voters are folks whose information is not on the public voter rolls for reasons of protection of their identity, typically related to restraining orders and the like, so that they can't be found by people who might be e.g. stalking them.

(I assume CZ was also a Yes vote, based on your count.)

Truly there are few things and few industries more efficient than the modern data center and we don’t really accomplish anything by having fewer of them aside from less redundancy (ie more unreliable service) and greater centralization. That this likely uses *more* power and water is unavoidable.

(To be clear, this approach was completely wrong, but there was also a much larger problem, where they *undercounted* the number of test ballots for City Council by around 750 in addition to overcounting by 66.)

The reason for this is that the RTR report and ballot tapes columns both measure *valid* ballots. What the city produced as counts for test ballot deck sizes were (seemingly) based on subtracting number of *total* ballots in the Election Night runs from the machine tapes, counting "invalid" as test.

But that choice wasn't offered. Instead, the City (seemingly) withheld information from the Commissioners and the public, and the Commission therefore voted to release results that were known by the City to have issues; even if they hadn't resulted in a change in who was elected, that sucks.

We still don't know exactly what was actually known on election night. Based on what we know now, I would (personally) have probably voted to release the results, with an asterisk of "We know that there are some number of additional results in here that shouldn't be, we don't know the impact."

The whole point of having appointed a bipartisan group of officials who formally vote to release results feels like it should be to to ensure that decisions about results are made in a fair way; City staff withholding that information doesn't let them make an informed decision.

I did see that the gap between the spreadsheet and the votes in the Council Rounds was large -- we counted 22040, the results from the city had it at 23719. I looked over our columns for duplicates, but didn't see any, and didn't have another good idea as to where we lost 1700 ballots.

Before worrying about a PAC, have you already built an organization that has volunteers organizing turnout for council votes, works with elected officials to drive policy, and makes endorsements around Election Day?

Raising money can change outcomes, but building an org probably must come first.

Bullister votes to Hanratty are going to include a fair number of “#1 bullister, #13 Hanratty” type votes; I can totally see a “I will fill all 15 slots, but vote for no incumbent” approach happening there.

runtime: 700 minutes

Rather than "endorse" meaning "approve of the views of", it is more like "Can commit 1000 volunteer hours to supporting the election of."

I think it's a really good approach to ensure that they don't use endorsements lightly, and also to make sure that their endorsements are effective.

The DSA isn't really doing "endorsements": endorsing a candidate is really "committing the DSA membership to an active political project to campaign". The Al-Zubi sign-holders I met yesterday across the city were DSA-member volunteers helping run the campaign. This leads to a very different meaning.

mostly my feeling is that we gave people a couple extra hours of "lower stress drinking" ;)

CCC would not endorse someone with Wilson's politics if they were "yet another white man" is a position I firmly believe. (And Wilson has been willing to accept their endorsement, which candidates with more experience with the racist/bigoted NIMBY group are not willing to accept, even if offered.)

The CCC would not normally endorse a candidate who had voted in favor of upzoning. I think that Wilson's very strong anti-bike lane position gives them some cover to endorse, but I think that if there was not some additional identity politics ("We need to have at least *one* Black Friend")...

In the 2023 election, Wilson let herself be sort of a "fill in the blank" candidate: she had previously been on School Committee, and didn't say much on most issues, so people could just fill in the blank.

In this Council, Wilson has been staunchly anti-bike, but voted in support of upzoning.