Cambridge, MA, USA, Two New City Councilors Elected in City Election on November 5. One incumbent leaves involuntarily.

Cambridge, MA, USA, Two New City Councilors Elected in City Election on November 5.  One incumbent leaves involuntarily.

The terrible things in process on the Charles River are very much not a matter of ONE bad city councilor.  They are the result of NINE bad city councilors OUT OF NINE.  And there are many other issues of interest to the voters than the outrage IN PROCESS on the Charles River.

Cambridge had an election yesterday.  The election is by proportional representation, an electoral format which does result in preferential election of nine at large candidates.  One incumbent did not run for reelection.

Our congratulations go to the newly elected members, Patty Nolan and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler.

Patty Nolan is a long time School Committee member.

Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler has posted the following Candidate Statement on Cambridge Civic Journal’s (Robert Winters)’s candidate page.  This is copied from http://vote.cambridgecivic.com/sobrinho-wheeler.htm.

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Candidate Statement

I work with environmental programs at a nationally-recognized land policy think tank in Cambridge. My work supports land conservation projects around world, and I help land trusts, academic institutions, and community organizations find the tools they need to build sustainable communities.

Outside my day job, I'm also involved in community organizing to make Cambridge and our region more just, equitable, and resilient. I'm a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and have been involved in campaigns to support residents who face eviction, steep increases in rent, and poor living conditions like mold, lack of heat, and flooding. I've also worked with organizations like Our Revolution Cambridge, City Life/Vida Urbana, and Cambridge Bicycle Safety to create a city that works for everyone. You may have seen me testifying before the city council on issues related to tenant protections, bike safety, or efforts to create more affordable housing and stop displacement.

I’m the son of a woman who grew up on a farm in Iowa and a man who grew up in the Portuguese colony of Goa in India. As a result, I speak Portuguese, am conversational in Spanish, and have eaten a lot of sweet corn with butter.

I am a renter, an organizer, the son of an immigrant, and a democratic socialist. I live in Mid-Cambridge between Central and Harvard in a triple-decker with my three roommates.
Learn more about my campaign on my website or via Twitter.

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Losing incumbent is Craig Kelley.

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Geeky supplement.

This system of voting took more than a week when Cambridge was working with paper ballots because candidates were ruled winners or losers one at a time based on whether they could possibly still win the election at any particular point in the count.

Robert Winters of the Cambridge Civic Journal Blog had an early comment that Craig Kelley could still defeat Dennis Carlone based on votes which have still to be manually counted, a relatively small number.  (Naming Winters to avoid plagiarism.  This sort of analysis has been normal in past elections.)

On looking at the numbers based on Mr. Winters tabulation on his blog, this vote count was the final count based on which Kelley was declared the final candidate to be counted out in the “unofficial” election procedure, “unofficial” because paper ballots had yet to be counted.  This tabulation by the election commission was based on “transfers” from Burhan Azeem when it was clear that Mr. Azeem could not win.  Of Mr. Azeem’s 1340 votes when he was counted out, Kelley received 57 and Dennis Carlone received 62, for 1864 and 1923 votes respectively.

Whatever the number of so far not counted votes is, based on these numbers and with Kelley and Carlone the only two remaining candidates to receive transfers, it would be required for Kelley to get an additional allocation of 39 votes to tie Carlone, assuming Carlone gets NONE of the transfers.  The difference in proportion for two candidates who received almost the same number of transfers in the last unofficial count at this stage would be decidedly inconceivable, albeit not impossible.