Cheung Elected, Stohlman Trails
Cheung Elected, Stohlman Trails
Leland Cheung G has secured a position on Cambridge’s City Council in Tuesday’s election, according to unofficial results released Thursday evening. Tabulation of votes was complicated by the high number of auxiliary, or write-in, ballots, of which there were 3,590.
Tom Stohlman ’76 did not win a seat on the council.
Turnout was up by 17 percent this year, to approximately 16,000, according to Cambridge elections expert Robert Winters, who maintains the Cambridge Civic Journal at http://rwinters.com/, an excellent resource for elections and general Cambridge politics.
Incumbent Marjorie C. Decker, who was re-elected this year, ran a write-in campaign because a failure to file paperwork led to her absence from the printed ballots. Decker’s campaign was responsible for the unusually large number of write-in ballots.
Cambridge’s proportional representation system allows voters to rank candidates, voting a #1 vote for one candidate, a #2 vote for another, etc. Excess votes beyond the quota of 1595 votes are distributed to the #2 candidate, etc., etc.
Incumbent Candidates Henrietta Davis, E. Denise Simmons and Timothy J. Timothy, Jr. were elected in the first round; they had 1856, 1783, and 1746 #1 votes each, respectively.
Decker, the write-in candidate; Cheung,;and Sam Seidel were all elected in the seventh round. They had 1285, 754, and 900 #1 votes, respectively.
Stohlman was defeated in the 4th round; he had 378 #1 votes.
Full details of the election are available at http://cambridgema.gov/
—John A. Hawkinson