Green Party Polls 5.6% in Pennsylvania Statewide Partisan Judicial Race

On November 7, Green Party nominee Jules Mermelstein polled 5.6% of the vote for Judge of the Superior Court, a partisan race. The unofficial vote tally for him in this low turnout election was 106,614 votes. He is the first Green Party nominee for statewide office in Pennsylvania who polled as much as 3%.

The ballot listed four Republicans, four Democrats, and Mermelstein. Not everyone calculates percentages the same way in a multi-winner race. My calculation for the denominator uses the total vote cast, divided by the number of seats, in order to approximate the number of voters who cast a ballot. The state election returns page here uses a different method, which indicates that no one running got as much as 20%, which is misleading.


Comments

Green Party Polls 5.6% in Pennsylvania Statewide Partisan Judicial Race — 2 Comments

  1. Your method overestimates the number of voters. If we take the Supreme Court race and assume all voters voted in the Superior Court race, then the average voter voted for 3.67 candidates. If we assume that all voters voted for either four candidates (i.e. they understood the ballot) or they voted for one candidate (i.e. they didn’t understand what “Vote for no more than four” meant – and it is incorrect to instruct a voter to “Vote for four” even though it is more likely to be understood), then 89% voted for four candidates, and 11% voted for one.

    Using the total number of votes in the Supreme Court race as the denominator. Mermelstein got 5.1% of the vote.

    By the way the overall results were quite interesting.

    For Supreme Court

    Sallie(R) defeated Dwayne(D)

    For Superior Court

    Maria(D), Deborah(D), Carolyn(D), and Mary(R) defeated Craig(R), Geoffrey(D), Emil(R), and Wade(R)

    For Commonwealth Court

    Christine(R) and Ellen(D) defeated Irene(D) and Paul(R)

    It appears about 85% of voters voted for two Commonwealth Court candidates.

    Geoffrey not only was male, but his name suggests that he is an upper class snob. He might consider running as Jeff Moulton, and drop the Junior.

    In the Commonwealth Court race it appears that Ellen and Irene split the vote among Democrats who only voted for one, plus those who wanted one Democrat and one Republican, where Christine was much preferred over Paul.

  2. NONPARTISAN executive/judicial offices via AppV.

    Bad enough having partisan hack legislators — even via PR.

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