Going into this afternoon’s dramatic countdown of outstanding votes at City Hall, the conventional communal wisdom is that Jeff Cooper will retain the bulk of his lead over Meghan Sahli-Wells in their nail-biting race for a City Council seat three days after the election.
He leads by 42. The reasoning maintains that is too big of a gulf for her to overcome.
With 436 late-arriving mail-in and provisional ballots to be counted under the eye of City Clerk Martin Cole — 10 ballots were ruled ineligible by the County Registrar’s office — Mr. Cooper brings in his 2,279 votes to Ms. Sahli-Wells’s 2,237.
At 12:30, Mr. Cole announced the vote count will go forward between 4 and 5 o’clock.
Former Councilman Alan Corlin, a master of numbers, has spent the last two days studying a spread sheet, breaking down election scenarios into almost arcane levels.
Mr. Corlin concludes the 42-vote margin will barely budge. He said his best guess is “Jeff will win by between 38 and 44 votes.
“After running the numbers, there is no mathematical calculation I can come up with that has Meghan winning.
“All of my calculations are based on the total number of votes that were cast on Tuesday (just under 8,000).”
Of the 436 that will be tabulated this afternoon, Mr. Corlin gauges that Mr. Cooper will take 126.7, Ms. Sahli-Wells 126.1, which is about how close they were to each other throughout the 80-minute vote count on Election Night in Council Chambers.
The remaining votes, Mr. Corlin says, will be divided, unevenly, between incumbent Scott Malsin, who handily won re-election, and Robert Zirgulis, who finished a distant fourth.
“All things being the same,” said Mr. Corlin, “you would rather be 42 ahead than 42 behind going into this afternoon.”
