Voters in Ocean Beach went for Bob Filner big time on Tuesday, Election Day 2012. Filner beat DeMaio by a margin of 19 and a half points, with Filner getting 53.9% and DeMaio obtaining 34.4%.
This is compared to the overall City vote where Filner won 51.5 ^% of the vote to DeMaio’s 48.5 %.
This was no surprise, as OBceans voted en masse for Filner during the June Primary as well.
One surprise, though, is the low turnout – a total of only 532 votes. Is this possible? Well, one factor is exactly which precincts were placed in the OB column. Without more info, this total appears to not include all the actual precincts that are traditionally counted as in OB.
Thanks to an interactive electoral vote map for the City set up by the U-T, we can check out different neighborhoods and how they voted in the mayoral election. The article does warn that the map is based on unofficial returns.
The map also shows a deep division between the south and north of San Diego and the candidates those regions supported – with the south-of-8 part of the city going heavily for Filner, and the north-of-8 vote going for DeMaio.
As can be seen by the map, Point Loma went for DeMaio (in red) – however the red area includes vast portions of the Peninsula that are not even populated – for instance the Cabrillo Lighthouse area – and the populated neighborhoods are not very dense. Filner generally performed well south of Interstate 8, and DeMaio in the north.
Above the north-side line, and besides Ocean Beach, Filner also did well in parts of University City and Linda Vista.
Neighborhoods of Point Loma that went for Nathan Flethcer in the June Primary appear to have either gone for DeMaio or leaned toward him. DeMaio picked up precincts in La Jolla, Del Mar Heights, Rancho Penasquitos and Rancho Bernardo that Nathan Fletcher had won in June.
Yet, Filner took two Paradise Hills precincts and two Nestor precincts that DeMaio won in June.
As the San Diego County Registrar of Voters continues to tally about 375,000 paper ballots outstanding – these results are only unofficial. submitted countywide. The registrar said it would provide its next update this Friday afternoon. It has not said how many of the ballots are from San Diego.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
there’s an issue with the data used in these charts. the turnout recording in these graphics- not just in OB, but everywhere- does not come close to matching the County’s Registrar’s claim that there was 80-85% turnout for the election. ALL the districts show about 50-60% turnout. So something is seriously wrong here.
I hope Doug Porter will follow up on Registrar Deborah Seiler’s seemingly inflated claim of an 80% voter turnout. I heard her interviewed on the radio the day before the election making the same prediction — which struck me as nothing short of wishful thinking. If it’s true, it will be a first in many many years, and we can all celebrate this spike in citizens exercising their right to vote.
What strikes me is the nearly 12% that didn’t vote for Filner or DeMaio in OB – since there were no other candidates on the top-two runoff ballot, does that mean that more than 1 in 10 OBecians didn’t bother to vote for mayor, or that there was a huge write-in campaign I missed? If so, who was the dark horse candidate that garnered so much local support?
I’m guessing that both my and my wife’s ballot’s didn’t count as being registered in “OB” – we’re mail voters who walked our envelopes in to the OB Elementary polling station on Tuesday. I also saw at least three other people (of the six total I saw voting after dropping my daughter off at school) doing the same thing – if we absentees aren’t counted as showing up to the polls it could at least partially explain the low official turnout numbers…
A reader left this comment at one of our email addresses:
“Some insight regarding the article mentioning the contradiction in OB precinct turnout percentages in the election. In the two OB precincts I gotv’d on election day for Filner, I had approx 190 voters targeted to get out the vote for. Of those 190, approx 50% or 100 voters, were counted as having cast their ballots by the poll workers. But, approx 50 or 25% of those 190 voters, were in receipt of mail-in ballots, and were accordingly not counted as voting at the poles on Tuesday by the poll workers , even if they had turned in their mail-in ballots, the day of the election at the voting location.”
Name withheld by request