One week after the School Board election, a growing suspicion is emerging in certain sections of the community that bullet voting was a crucial but still clouded key to Nancy Goldberg’s first-place finish as well as the unexpected defeat of Board President Scott Zeidman.
Did bullet voting — choosing only one candidate when two seats were open — make a pivotal difference in Ms. Goldberg’s 304-vote victory over Laura Chardiet, who captured the second seat by edging out Mr. Zeidman by 28 votes?
A foolproof answer probably will not be known unless or until Ms. Goldberg and her team speak out.
Data researcher George Laase believes bullet voting played a significant role in shaping the outcome.
Says Mr. Laase:
Ms. Goldberg appeared on 58 percent of ballots and won 34.5 percent of the votes cast.
Ms. Chardiet appeared on 50.5 percent of the ballots and received 30 percent of the votes cast.
Mr. Zeidman appeared on 49.8 percent of the ballots and received 29.6 percent of the vote.
Speculating, Mr. Laase:
“These numbers suggest that Nancy won the largest number of bullet votes, which greatly helped her and strongly hurt her two opponents.
“Bullet voting was consistently higher in the mail-in votes,” he said, and that was where Ms. Goldberg took her first long lead, which she maintained throughout the count.
Sixty-two percent of the 1, 203 bullet votes were cast by mail, where Ms. Goldberg took a 213-vote lead over Ms. Chardiet and 226-vote lead over Mr. Zeidman.
Thirty-eight percent of the bullet votes were made on Election Day, suggesting that when voters go to the polls, they tend to vote for both open seats.
“Where bullet voting was low, Scott did better,” Mr. Laase said. “Nancy did well where bullet voting was high.
While the final bullet vote total is not yet known, 19 percent of the main round of ballots — 1,203 out of 6,417 — came from voters who chose just one candidate while ignoring the second line. (This data does not include the updated vote count posted last Friday.)
In recent years, said Mr. Laase, bullet voting in Culver City elections has escalated from the low teens to the high teens. “Something is going on out there,” he said.
