The key to Webber’s win: Noble voters
After school board member eliminated in instant runoff, 72% of her votes went to mayor-elect
Kate Noble voters clinched it. Mayor-elect Alan Webber couldn’t have done it — crossed the 50 percentplus-one threshold required to win a ranked-choice election, that is — without Noble’s supporters.
Those ranked choices make for strange bedfellows. Or coalitions. Call it what you like. To be sure, Webber’s appeal and his campaign — with its record funds, an inclusive citywide message and solid ground game — was what won Webber the most votes.
But the instant runoff that decided Tuesday’s mayoral election went four rounds, the maximum possible with five candidates in the field.
Webber routed his four rivals with his 39 percent plurality of first-place votes, led the way through every subsequent round, picked up most of the redistributed votes from two of the three eliminated candidates, and crushed the runner-up, Ron Trujillo, by a 2-to-1 margin at the last.
The overwhelming support of the bloc of Noble voters after she was eliminated in the third round finally brought Webber what he needed to leap over the victory threshold — one of many pieces of the rankedchoice numbers puzzle that delivered Webber to the mayor’s post in the city’s first instant runoff, an election that will be remembered well by those who followed the results late into the night Tuesday after interminable delays in announcing results.
Noble, a school board member, and Trujillo, an outgoing city councilor, were within a hair of each other in that third round, according to the unofficial election results. Trujillo, with 27.8 percent, led Noble, with 27.4 percent — a margin of 89 votes. (Webber sat comfortably
ahead at nearly 45 percent.)
But, as Noble was behind, even if only just, she was cut by the ranked-choice algorithm. Of her 5,565 votes to be redistributed, 9 percent were “exhausted,” meaning those ballots could not be transferred to another candidate, either because the voter did not rank anyone else or only ranked candidates beyond Noble who already had been eliminated.
Only 1,032, or 19 percent, of Noble’s voters went to Trujillo; 3,996 of them, or 72 percent, went to Webber.
At that point, Webber, who surged to the finish with 66 percent of the final vote, had won. And the declaration, issued by City Clerk Yolanda Vigil only minutes before midnight, set off a roaring scene of mass jubilation at Webber’s election party.
Other numbers of note in charting the path to victory in New Mexico’s first rankedchoice contest:
City Councilor Peter Ives finished last in the first round, with 6 percent, or 1,238 votes. When Ives’ votes were redistributed, 32 percent of them went to Webber, 26 percent went to Noble, and 17 percent went to Trujillo, while 141 ballots were exhausted, meaning 141 voters ranked Ives as their first and only choice. Ives’ council term runs through 2020, so he did not risk his seat on the governing body in running for mayor.
The next to be eliminated was Joseph Maestas, the outgoing councilor, who earned 8 percent of the first-round vote. Thirty-five percent of his voters went to Noble. Close behind in the Maestas redistribution was Webber, who took 34 percent. Twenty-two percent of Maestas voters ranked Trujillo next, and 142 voted for only Maestas.
Trujillo had 6,686 votes in the final round — his first-place votes plus those that were redistributed to him from those who ranked Ives, Maestas or Noble ahead of him. But the vast majority was the former. A full 75 percent of Trujillo’s votes were from people who ranked him first; the other fourth came in the redistribution process, a signal that, in an election format that gives candidates an incentive to seek second- and third-place support, Trujillo earned scarce down-ballot support from the supporters of other candidates.
Conversely, Webber earned 38 percent of his total support from redistributed votes, the largest chunk from Noble supporters.
Webber earned not only 66 percent of the ballots in the final round but 63.5 percent of the total votes cast — a “true” majority some feared the ranked-choice format might not produce if there were an excess of exhausted ballots.
Only 804 voters’ ballots had been exhausted after the final round, meaning 96 percent of city voters ranked Webber or Trujillo somewhere on their ballots. City spokesman Matt Ross, who led the municipal voter education campaign, said that showed voters had grasped the new ranked-choice format.
“That’s huge. That’s a big indicator that the voting population understood,” Ross said. “Or, if they didn’t, walking into the polling place, they were able to get the help they needed from poll workers.”
Ross said the vote breakdown by city district was not yet available Wednesday. Now, about those delays … The city clerk emerged to announce results four hours and 45 minutes after the 7 p.m. close of polls, the latest final results to be divulged in any of the municipal elections across the state Tuesday.
Well before then, the first-round results had been collected by the Webber campaign from the various voting centers after polls closed, leading to a strange dynamic in which there was a sense of the shape of the race emanating out of Webber’s campaign headquarters amid hours of radio silence at City Hall.
The City Council late last year decided that the winner would be announced first, rather than through a piecemeal round-by-round process; though the body’s directions to the clerk’s office did not seem to specifically preclude that the first-place vote results, or early and absentee vote totals, could be revealed before the round-by-round process began.
Ross referred questions to the clerk’s office and Vigil, who did not return messages seeking comment Wednesday. On Tuesday night, thought, Vigil told The New Mexican she believed the delays were attributable to the new ranked-choice format.
Steven Bennett, regional sales manager of Dominion Voting Systems, the Denver-based provider of the state’s election software, disputed that, saying there had been no hitch in the ranked-choice software.
Bennett, who dispatched five Dominion technicians to assist in Santa Fe on Tuesday night, said his workers informed him the clerk’s office simply did not begin to receive information from polling places until around 9:30 p.m.
“From our perspective, everything worked exactly perfectly,” Bennett said. “There were no issues. No concerns. The ranked-choice algorithm worked just fine, and it reported.”
“But you can’t run an election until you have the data,” he added. “And data comes from the polls, and if you take a long time to get the data back from the polls, that’s what’s gonna happen.”
Webber, along with the crop of councilorselect, are scheduled to be sworn in at a ceremony 5:30 p.m. Monday at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center.