Further analysis of the 2002 Charlottesville City council race reveals some interesting tidbits.

First, there was some confusion in media reports of the election day turnout and how miserably it compared to City Council elections of the recent past. It looked for a while like this May's election tied the 1998 one for poorest attendance by the Charlottesville voting public. Unfortunately, we now know that this year was even worse than '98. Slightly more than one in five active registered voters - 22.1% to be exact - came to the polls in 2002, while one in four (25.6%) voted in 1998. The discrepancy in reporting had to do with a little-known but not insignificant category of people called "inactive registered voters." They amount to roughly 2,000 people on the Charlottesville voter rolls. Turnout figures rise and fall based on whether you include these people in your pool of "registered" voters or leave them out. Formerly, they were included in turnout reports. Currently (and, according to Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta, in the future) they are not.

Single-shotting was the strategy promoted this May by the Charlottesville Republican Party through which voters were encouraged to vote only for then-candidate, now-councilor Robert Schilling and not use their second vote. There was a definite, and much-discussed, increase in single-shotting over previous years, but how significant was the increase? Well, significance is in the eye of the beholder. In the 1998 City Council election (a race similar in makeup to the 2002 race - two Democratic candidates, one Republican, and one independent in a two-way race) 82 percent of the voters used both their votes. Conversely, 18 percent (826) only used one of their votes, or "single-shotted" (the jury is still out on the past tense of this verb). In the May 2002 election, 72 percent used both their votes while 28 percent (1,240) single-shotted. One can correctly say that the portion of voters who chose to single-shot increased by 50 percent - which sounds significant. But one can also say that the percentage of single-shotters among all voters increased by only 10 percent - from 18 percent to 28 percent. Which reminds us of the old saw: "There's three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

- Jim Heilman, July 8, 2002