Post-Long Weekend Observations

* Denver's Mayor-Elect Hancock will be sworn in on the 18th of July. Bill Vidal, the outgoing interim Mayor has done a better than expected job in the interim since outgoing Mayor Hickenlooper took the Governor's office, in terms of the budget and police discipline. He's benefited from not owing anything to anyone and not having to run for re-election.
* Byers School, which has sat vacant since the Denver School of the Arts left for the old University of Denver music campus near Stapleton has a new tenant lined up, a new Denver School of Science and Technology charter school set to open, if I understand the matter correctly, in the 2013-2014 school year. This fills a huge hole in the West Washington Park neighborhood with a wonderful bit of infill, adds a good new educational choice to the Denver Public Schools, and makes a large number of people, my family included, who lobbied for it happy.
* My Fourth of July weekend found me at the Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado. A certain number of paid models and Renaissance Festival enthusiasts dress in costume - not strictly of any one historical period and often veering into fantasy. Among the most striking, because they come across as quite natural at first glance, were the little devil horns that some people wore, and the furry tails that a number of people (mostly women) affixed to their outfit as if they were natural. Also eye catching in general are other forms of headgear like garlands and fairy antenna, full back angel wing tattoos, and crows masks which are surprisingly frightening.  Genuine wings of angelic, fairy, and birdlike varieties were also in evidence, but rather less effective.  Opponents of weapons control will note that there are few other events where so many people openly bear arms (some fake, but a significant number of the genuine stainless steel and deadly variety).

* The Greeley Stampede, which I also made my way to this weekend, was more notable for the very strong presence of the National Guard, a lot of cliche Western Art, fried twinkies, alligator wrestling, and mutton busting.

* Aurora, Colorado is proposing major tax breaks and zoning accomodations for a Gaylord entertainment sponsored convention center project that, IMHO, is the last thing that the metro area needs right now.

* I don't recall if I mentioned the major new water compact reached this spring under Governor Hickenloopers guidance.  It diverts water from the Western Slope to the Front Range in exchange for giving the Western Slope more control of future diversion plans and other compensation.  The diversion plans include new hydropower for the state.

* Disney already has a radio station, a television station, multiple international destination amusement parks, a movie studio and a major line of characters.  How long will it be before they have a newspaper and sports leagues as well?

READ MORE - Post-Long Weekend Observations

Hancock Elected Mayor, Johnson Elected Clerk & Recorder

As a result of the Denver's municipal runoff election, Denver's new mayor is Michael Hancock, in a landslide, and its new clerk and recorder is Debra Johnson, by a nose. In both races, the winner of the runoff was the second place finisher in the first round.

Hancock brings a neighborhood oriented investment agenda and a commitment to ending abuses by the City's police force that have cost the city millions in settlements. He inherits a tight city budget and decades of wise municipal leadership that left Denver less hard hit in the financial crisis than many of its peers.

His personal biography is one of a man who has risen from humble circumstances as a black man in a poor Denver neighborhood from a family whose other members have not always stuck to the straight and narrow who has risen to lead his city, more or less the opposite of the life story of Chris Romer, his runoff opponent. He is also the second black Mayor of a mostly white and Hispanic city that had a KKK supported Mayor in the 1920s (Mayor Stapleton). Mayor Wellington Webb, Denver's first black Mayor, was a critical advisor in his campaign.

Most recently Hancock has served as the President of Denver's City Council, and endorsement from city council members who withdrew from the race or failed to make it to the second round of the election were key to his runoff round victory.

Voter turnout in the second round was about five thousand more (about 40% of ballots mailed were returned and considered valid) than in the first round, but runoff voters tended to return their ballots sooner than the first round voters who had more decisions to make and more candidates to choose from than in the runoff.

READ MORE - Hancock Elected Mayor, Johnson Elected Clerk & Recorder

Last Day To Vote In Denver's Municipal Runoff Election

Ballots must be received today by 7 p.m. Mountain Daylight Savings Time in Denver's Municipal Runoff Election to be counted. Drop off locations can be found here. Through Saturday, 84,655 ballots had been validly cast, and 193,736 ballots were still unreturned (1,636 ballots were rejected as invalid and 20,026 were returned as undeliverable). Of the ballots outstanding 69,764 were sent to voters whose registration were deemed inactive for failing to vote in the past. Those turnout figures exclude Monday and today's returns.

About half of the voters receiving ballots were Democrats, about a sixth were Republicans, about 1% were registered with third parties and the rest were unaffilated.

The turnout so far in the runoff election is well above turnout in the first round at this point in the election. In the first round of voting in Denver in this year's municipal election, 113,845 ballots were validly cast, including 47,483 on the last Monday and Tuesday. Thus, prior to the last two days, only 66,362 ballots had been validly cast in the first round.

READ MORE - Last Day To Vote In Denver's Municipal Runoff Election

Denver's Municipal Election Round Two

Ballots must be received in Denver's runoff election on Tuesday. Today is that last day the a mailed in ballot has a reasonable chance of arriving; delivering a ballot to a designed drop off (the instructions in your ballot have locations and hours of operation) is a better bet after today.

The Mayoral Race

The marquee race for mayor is between Chris Romer and Michael Hancock. I made a choice and voted, but honestly, I am as ambivalent as I've ever been in an election. I'm not alone in this; Vincent Carroll at the Denver Post wrote a column saying the same thing.

Polling shows Hancock with the lead, although not an insurmountable one, despite the fact that Romer had the most votes at the end of the first round.  Voting in the Mayor's race once again closely followed ethnic lines in the first round, with predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods favoring Meija, predominantly black neighborhoods voting for Hancock, and white neighborhoods voting for Romer.  Most of the leaders in the Hispanic community have backed Romer in the runoff following the lead of Meija, but many of the runner up white candidates in the Mayoral race have backed Hancock.

Both are Democrats. Neither was my first choice. Both have political experience. Romer has a background as na investment banker who specialized in municipal bonds and focused a fair amount on out of the box solutions to the state's problems, particularly transportation, while in office in the Colorado General Assembly representing parts of the city including Congress Park. Hancock is our outgoing city council President with strong ties to the community. Neither have experience of CEO of an organization in any way resembling the City and County of Denver in either size or character. Romer has stronger ties to big business and has been the preferred candidate of big Denver names in the Republican party, and his father was a decidedly moderate Democrat while he served as Governor of Colorado. Hancock's natural instincts are to consider the impact of policy on the little guy, but he lacks the connection's to the city, state and national power elites that can help make things happen that Romer has at his disposal.

Romer has waffled on his stand on medical marijuana. Hancock has attacked Romer for taking big donations from strip clubs, equivocated on teaching evolution and is lukewarm about the right to choose. It is hard to tell how this will play out as the City develops policies for dealing with legal and illegal vices. Neither man seems to have an unwavering commitment to the sensible cost conscious, treatment oriented criminal justice and corrections administration reforms that Doug Linkhart has quietly but relentless secured in his tenure on the City Council.

Romer has promised to cut down on land use and licensing red tape, a legitimate issue that Hickenlooper also put on his agenda but never managed to pull off. Hancock seems inclined to refocus city attention on neighborhood level projects rather than big ticket centralized projects that most of his predecessors have focused upon.  But Hancock has less of a business orientation, for example, fumbling his handling of a situation involving the regulation of the city's taxi market in a way that seemed to help keep a new competitor out of the market for no legitimate reason. Hancock had personal involvement in developing the city's new zoning code (which is substantively probably worse than the hodgepodge that came before it despite being statutorily much more clean) and may feel a stronger stake in defending it whether or not it makes sense in a particular case out of respect for the process that created it, than Romer who has far less participation in that process.

Hancock's political style is more consultative, and community involvement is a natural instinct for him, but perhaps as a result, has few signature innovations as feathers in his cap despite the power he held in city council and he offered no substantive reforms other than greater community contract when asked by Colorado Public Radio how the city would look different after a year in his administration. Romer is better at avoiding falling into group think with independent ideas, but while this may show leadership, it also isn't unusual for his proposals to face opposition because he hasn't won sufficient support behind the scenes with all of the players involved before announcing them. He poses a greater risk of embarking on big new ideas that fall entirely flat. Neither man has the game changing capacity to walking into a room and suddenly secure seemingly impossible compromises that our state's most effective politicians, like John Hickenlooper and Andrew Romanoff, share (most recently seen in Hickenlooper's successful legislative battle to secure passage of the bill approving the state's regulations, despite a squabble over pay day lending regulation that he got state house Republicans to give up upon).

Both men acknowledge that need to continue and improve upon the efforts of Mayor Hickenlooper and acting mayor Bill Vidal to be more effective in disciplining bad cops and both have promised to remove a key figure in that process who has been roundly criticized - although under Vidal's administration public discipline has been stepped up; but it is hard to tell who would be more effective at securing that result. The fact that Romer was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police and that Hancock has closer political ties to communities that have been on the receiving end of police misconduct tend to tip the balance towards Hancock in my mind on this very important issue.

Romer's personal life has been unnotable. Hancock's personal life has been messier, for example, he didn't publicly acknowledge an out of wedlock child born two years before he married his current wife who is the mother of his two younger children until around the time he started contemplating his current run for office (thereby heading of the potential scandal of a child appearing out of the woodwork), but not in any way that obviously impairs his ability to serve the city as Mayor.

I could have probably dug deeper and found out more about the candidates before I voted and relied to some extent on a variety of endorsement cues and gut feelings rather than taking the time to really gather all the information I needed to make an optimal decision in what is a close call when lots and lots of information is available. But, I didn't have the time and both men are competent enough that I have considerable hope for Denver's future no matter who gets elected.

Also, notably, while some people have grumbled about negative campaigning in the Mayoral race, I'm not one of them. Honestly, I wish there had been more of it. A flawed Mayor can do a great deal of damage, while the difference between what a pretty good Mayor and a blandly competent one can do for the city is pretty marginal. (Neither runoff candidate is out of the park excellent this time around.) If a candidate has a serious flaw, or even does something that might provide a hint that there is a real probability that the candidate has a serious flaw even if it doesn't squarely prove that, I really, really want to know that as a voter. Civility has its place in politics, and untruthful negative advertisements do detract from the process, but truthful negative advertisements are vital to helping voters make good decisions.

The Race To Be Clerk and Recorder

I also looked into the runoff Clerk and Recorder's race again before voting in that race between McCarthy, my neighborhood whom I should have known better when I first posted about the race who had a much better campaign than I had given her credit for having, and Debra Johnson, Aurora's city clerk. The really good news is that two other candidates for the office, whom I sounded criticized in a blog post prior to the first round were defeated (in one case by a margin smaller than the number of people who had read that blog post).

Again, I didn't have as much time to scour the scarce information about that race as I would have liked, and despite having personally spoken at some length with McCarthy and heard interviews with Johnson on the radio, I ultimately drew a blank on the issues that mattered most to me: "what agenda does each woman have to make changes in the office on day one?", and "who is more likely to make the right decisions on close election administration decisions?" Neither woman articulated much of an agenda or really answered the question of what problems they would solve when in office. Both seemed to manage to avoid giving answers on election administration questions in the statements I heard from them and the materials I reviewed that shed much light on how they would handle those issues differently from their competitor.

I ultimately voted for McCarthy, because she seems to have more political sense and more of a sense that she is entitled to use the authority of the office to the fullest, despite the fact that Johnson's experience is more directly relevant and that Johnson seems to have some sensible detail oriented ideas for improving the apolitical aspects of the office's operations. But, as in the Mayor's race, I didn't have a strong preference for either candidate and was voting as much as anything on gut feeling at a time when I felt that I didn't have the time or energy to get enough information to be comfortable that I'd chosen the person most likely to have the right instincts in close cases and to be the most effective manager of the office administratively (for managerial competence can frequently be as important as policy preferences and attitudes in this kind of post).  This was a very close decision.

The Big Picture

There are a few second round city council district races as well, but I have completely ignored them for the selfish reason that those are choices that I am not required to make myself.  The key point is that the first round of the race eliminated essentially all of the bad possiblities and have given voters time to take a closer look with more information available at the two candidates that remain in each of those races.

Four days from now, electoral municipal politics in Denver will be over for another four years and we will have a new team of leaders who have the ability to fix our city's problems and to help up realize its possibilities if they rise to that challenge, no matter who wins. Denver has been blessed by more than two decades of really outstanding mayors and strong municipal leadership on city council and in its other elected offices, that has allowed it to weather the financial crisis better than many peer cities, and to have a lot of neighborhoods that are vibrant and growing after starting from a pretty miserable place in the early 1980s, despite the fact that it is effectively landlocked. I sincerely hope that our next crew of municipal leaders, who have very big shoes to fill, will manage to continue this proud tradition.

READ MORE - Denver's Municipal Election Round Two

Denver's Election Results

In Tuesday's non-partisan election, Denver voters re-elected their incumbent auditor, chose two city council members for "at large" seats, and elected eight of eleven city council people from single member districts (five in uncontested elections). Turnout was 38% of the ballots distributed, with ballots going out to all active registered voters in the City, slightly below the norm in the last couple of municipal elections, but not horrible either.

There will be runoffs between the top two finishers in the first round in City Council Districts 1, 5 and 8, and in the races for Mayor and Clerk and Recorder. All of the races with runoffs happen, not coincidentally, to be open seats. As my own city council district race was uncontested, the ballot that I will receive and return by June 7 will have only four names for two offices on it, and I've given those names at least some consideratioon already in the first round.

The Case For Non-Instant Runoffs

Proponents of a system once called the "single transferable vote" and now called "instant runoff voting" would favor a system where you get to vote a first and second and perhaps higher order choice, allowing the election to be decided all in one go, even when no candidate receives a majority.

The case for considering the preferences of voters who didn't vote for the plurality candidate when no candidate receives a majority is a good one. Denver voters, for example, have not infrequently backed a runner up in a runoff election, suggesting that a combination of more information and the preferences of candidates who supported someone who was not one of the two finalists don't, as a reliable general rule, strongly favor the plurality winnner in this kind of non-partisan race.

I prefer the system used by Denver, Louisiana and France, where there is a runoff election, because it allows me as a voter to have more time to research viable candidates and consider my options before making a decision in the second round, even when the candidate that I favored in the first round is not eliminated. Any decision that causes decisions upon which there is not a clear popular preference to be made based on more information and deliberation than would otherwise be devoted to the decision is probably a good thing.

I also have little confidence that my fellow citizens would make second choice decisions that are as good if they didn't have this extra time. I've written wills and trusts for people for a decade and a half, and most of my clients, even when they are well educated, find it a strain to think about "what if" hypotheticals beyond the situation that would exist if they died today. Most people are better at making decisions in a "what now" context than in a "what if" context. Frequently, I have to spend a long time talking people through the ideas by telling little stories at length "what if you and your partner and your children all died in a car crash today, the people you've mentioned who are still alive are . . . . who would you want to inherit from you now?"

There is also more of an incentive to do good media coverage of a runoff election between two candidates proven to be viable and reasonably close in electoral strength which may reveal new critical data than there is in the waning days of a nine or more way race.

In an election with many candidates there is a tendency to engage in satisficing decision making, i.e. researching until you find an acceptable choice rather than trying to research carefully enough to find the best choice. If most people make their decisions that way, and no one candidate receives a majority of the vote, the likelihood that the first round winner was not the optimal choice is pretty good. So, the chances that additional information before the runoff election is held will improve the quality of the decision making process is pretty good.

This is particularly true in a case like City Council District 8, which was entirely a write in election due to the death of incumbent Carla Madison shoertly before the election. The very short schedule for that race meant that there was very little time for the thirty-nine candidates in the race to run full fledged campaigns that could have afforded the general public the information they needed to make an optimizing decision. About 28% of voters in that district didn't cast a vote for the office at all, and each of the candidates that made the runoff from the 5,361 write in votes cast captured only about 1/7th of the votes cast. Eleven candidates received at least one hundred votes (including the two candidates making it to the runoff), and five candidates received more than three hundred votes (the number of signatures needed to petition onto the ballot in ordinary circumstances).

The Benefits Of Ballot Access

It is also a good moment to observe the benefits that accrue to being on the ballot, even in an election like this one, where voters could complete their ballot at their leisure "open book" at their kitchen table, rather than without access to pertinent information in a voting booth under time pressures, a relatively ideal environment for write in candidates.

The practical ability of voters to cast a write in vote if they are determiend to do so is illustrated by the fact that in City Council District 8 almost four-fifths of voters managed to cast a valid write in ballot. Also, no city council race in the city, with or without names on the ballot had an undervote of less than 5% and the average undervote was considerably higher. Thus, no more than 18% of voters were discouraged by the all write in character of the race from casting a vote, and the average undervote percentage in contested city council races was closer to 10%, suggesting that perhaps only one in seven voters was discouraged by the write in character of the District 8 vote from casting a vote.

In the Mayoral race, every candidate who appeared on the ballot received at least 0.46% of the vote (519 votes). Marcus Giavanni, the most successful of the three write in candidates for Mayor, who mounted an active campaign with at least as many signs up around town as some of the other candidates whose names appeared on the ballot, nonetheless garnered just 21 votes. The cutoff to make the second round in the Mayoral race based on the unofficial results was 30,314 votes (27% of the total). The third place candidate in the Mayoral race, after conferring with campaign legal counsel, has announced that he will not challenge the unofficial vote count. None of the races in the first round were close enough to trigger an automatic recount.

In the Council Member At Large race, in which the one of the five candidates appearing on the ballot with the least votes received 8,437 votes (6% of the total cast in a race where each voter could vote for up to two candidates), none of the three write in candidates received more than 121 votes. The cutoff to win a seat, according to the unofficial results, was 31,603 votes (22% of the total number of votes cast in a race where each voter may vote up to two times).

Unless no one is who appears on the ballot is running for an office, it is almost impossible to win a write in campaign, in an ordinary electoral environment where the barriers to ballot access for credible candidates who have their acts together is not overwhelming. But, this isn't necessarily deeply troubling from a democratic perspective, because the practical reality is that the candidates who did not receive access to the ballot probably had a very dim chance of winning office even if they had been granted access to the ballot. No write in candidate outside Council District 8, which had no candidate on the ballot, received more than 121 write in votes in an election where three hundred signatures on a petition are required to gain access to the ballot - a requirement that is less than 1% of the votes that were actually required to win or advance to a second round in a citywide race this year.

No candidate outside Council District 8 in a city council race received more than 70 write in votes, less than 1% of the votes received by the winner in that city council district, an otherwise uncontested incumbent.

An Expensive Mayoral Race

Campaign spending in this election was considerable.

Romer, through last Thursday, spent about $1.4 million on his successful campaign, which turns out to be about $43 a vote. Hancock spent about $711,489, which equals about $23 per vote.

Theresa Spahn spent $108,288 but got only 3,332 votes, roughly $32.50 a vote. Councilman Doug Linkhart had spent $152,199 through last Thursday on his campaign that received a total of 10,557 votes, about $14.41 per vote. Viewed this way, the biggest winner was probably Thomas Wolf, who dubbed himself the "free candidate" because he accepted no money and spent only $250. He got 2,106 votes, about 12 cents a vote.

Running the election, of course, also wasn't free, although the city of Denver, as is typical in mail in elections in Colorado, didn't provide postage to voters, which cost voters who didn't hand deliver their ballots 61 cents each, a barrier that probably had a measurable effect on turnout.

READ MORE - Denver's Election Results

Last Day To Vote In Denver Municipal Election

It is too late to mail in ballots in Denver's all mail municipal election, but ballots can still be dropped off in person until 7 p.m. Click the link for the Denver City government in the sidebar for more information. After that votes will be counted (with the first release of information containing a surge of ballots received and counted before voting closed).

In the City Council at large race with two seats in contention, this round of balloting will be decisive. In all other races, the two top candidates in races where no candidate receives a majority of the votes cast for that office will return for a runoff election. Races where this could happen include the races for Mayor, Auditor, Clerk and Recorder, and individual council district city council seats. For example, the several polls conducted so far in the Mayor's race make it very unlikely that any one of the nine candidates on the ballot who are still running (and additional candidates running on a write in basis) will receive a majority of the vote in the first round.

READ MORE - Last Day To Vote In Denver Municipal Election

Denver's Race For City Auditor

Three candidates are running in Denver's municipal election for which mail-in ballots have been sent out and must be received back by May 3, 2011. The auditor's job in Denver's City government is basically to be an independent voice charged with identifying fraud, waste, abuse, corruption and other opportunities to get better economic deals for the city than it currently has in place. The office has also historically been a launching ground for heavy weight contenders in municipal government including former Mayor Wellington E. Webb, and the man who can in second place to Mayor Hickenlooper when Hickenlooper was first elected as Mayor, Don Mares.

One candidate is incumbent Dennis Gallagher, who is a bit of a gadfly on the liberal political scene, has had a generally successful and scandal free term of office, and is most famous for getting a proposition that makes businesses pay property taxes at higher rates than residential property owners into Colorado's Constitution. Since 1970, he has spent four years as a state representative, 20 years as a state senator, eight years on Denver's city council and is now the incumbent auditor. He runs with the support of former Denver Mayors Hickenlooper and Webb. His office has identified multiple cases of significant questionable spending during his tenure, and he has certainly not fallen prey to group think or bureaucratic capture by the rest of city government. During Hickenlooper's tenure, the City Charter was amended, in part in deference to the way in which Gallagher was running the office, to remove some of the more routine financial auditing duties from the position and to place those duties instead in the set of responsibilities of a new senior Mayoral appointee. Some would interpret this removal of responsibilities from the office as a criticism, but Gallagher did not object and it is part of a larger trend in how fiscal responsibilities are allocated in state and local governments. Thus, like the federal GAO, the focus of the auditor's role has shifted from an accounting oriented one to a more general accountability oriented role.

A second is Marcus D. Richardson, a long time career employee of the Denver auditor's office under four successive auditors who also had experience as a career auditor before coming to Denver. He is clearly competent and knows where the bodies are buried in city government. He is African-American. The main difficulties he faces in this campaign are that (1) all of his accomplishments as an auditor are also those of his boss whom he is running against, (2) his campaign basically calls for a continuation of the status quo approach to how the office is run apart from increasing diversity in the office, (3) he has identified no compelling reason for the voters to vote against Gallagher as a referendum on his performance in office, and (4) Richardson, as a career civil servant, hasn't had much of an opportunity to develop the political clout and savvy needed to be influential in a position whose power derives as much from having a bully pulpit as it does from having technical expertise. Locating accountability issues is only part of the job; one also has to generate enough public outrage about those issues to have them corrected. Gallagher's independent and populist streak has been a generally good fit for that bully pulpit role, while Richardson is untested in this part of the job.

Note also that Richardson isn't necessarily foolish for having run what seems in hindsight to be a hopeless campaign. It isn't unusual for a candidate to drop out of a race for public office for some reason mid-term, or to have a candidacy derailed by a late breaking scandal, and you have to be in the running to take advantage of an opportunity like that if it arises. He also establishes himself as someone interested in a more prominent role on the political scene than he holds right now, and because he has run a very clean campaign, he hasn't necessarily made many enemies by doing so.

Finally, Bill Wells is running on a campaign to abolish elections for the position he is is running to fill, which makes his agenda for the office seem a bit contradictory, as does the fact that he thinks it is appropriate manages to slip an attack on President Obama's budget process into his answers to questions from the Denver Post about his position on the issues in the city auditor race. He worked in Denver city government in the 1970s and early 1980s, left Denver to run a family trucking company in Pennsylvania where he served in the local city government, and returned in 2002. He is currently a semi-retired TSA employee. While he is not obvious either incompetent (he has a relevant professional credential and is not too cranky on his website despite its sloppy appearance), he is hardly a serious contender to an incumbent who is a state political legend and is largely out of the loop about what has been going on in the inner workings of Denver City government for the last thirty years.

There is some merit, by the way, in having a non-elected auditor. Arguably, voters are ill equipped to evaluate the qualifications of someone running for the office in a low profile, non-partisan race that will always be second banana to the Mayoral and city council races. In state government, the auditor is appointed by the legislature to provide a legislative branch check on executive branch excess (in addition to the check provided by having a divided executive branch). But, Denver's experience with the position has by and large been quite good. A bad auditor is not in a good position to harm city government, while a good auditor can make a valuable contribution. Also, alternate means of appointing an auditor may be less likely to attract someone who can break free of the "group think" of the rest of City government in a context where the politicians, after long hours working together, can become blinded to possible areas of concern, and may be less likely to attract someone with the political moxy and presence necessary to be effective in the job.

READ MORE - Denver's Race For City Auditor

Boigon Out; Who Is Left In The Running To Be Mayor Of Denver?

The race to bethe mayor of Denver has lost its highest polling female candidate, city council woman at large Carol Boigon, who in turn endorsed Michael Hancock. 

It isn't obvious, however, that many voters will be swayed by her endorsement of her city council ally.  He needs a boost in support if he is to displace Romer or Meijia, who are currently on track to make it to a runoff election in a race where no candidate is likely to win majority support in the first round.

Chris Romer, James Meijia, Michael Hancock and Doug Linkhart, in that order, are the strongest polling candidates remaining in what is now a nine way race for Mayor.  Boigon had been polling in fifth place with 8% support.  It isn't obvious whom supporters of eliminated candidates would support in a second round runoff election. 

Theresa Spahn, who was polling even more weakly than Boigon before Boigon dropped out of the race is the only woman left in the running, and may pick up Boigon supporters who would like to have a female Mayor.  Also running, but very unlikely to either win or even make it into the second round of voting are: Danny F. Lopez, Jeff Peckman, Kenneth Simpson, and Thomas Wolf.

Some people have characterized this race as a Romer v. not Romer race, but it isn't obvious that this is the case. Strategic voters who recognize that their favorite candidate is unlikely to make a runoff election may choose to vote for Meija or Hancock to influence who makes it into a runoff election.


The race looks likely to track the election that ultimately put Hickenlooper in office the first time around, with African-American plurality precincts likely to favor Hancock, Hispanic plurality precincts likely to favor Mejia and white plurality precincts likely to favor Romer.

Republicans in Denver have been most public in supporting Romer and Hancock in this official non-partisan race, although the momentum of Republican support appears to have swung towards Romer.  Linkhart is the most prominent progressive leaning social liberal in the race who has devoted much of his efforts while in office towards developing a less punitive and less expensive stance on criminal justice issues.

I hope to find time for another post on this race before votes are cast that sums up the key points that distinguish each of the mayoral candidates, as I will need to do that in any case before voting myself.
Ballots in the all mail election are already in the hands of voters, and they must be received by May 3.

READ MORE - Boigon Out; Who Is Left In The Running To Be Mayor Of Denver?

Denver Clerk and Recorder Election Just Got Easier

There are four candidates listed by the Denver Clerk and Recorder's office election division as running in Denver's all mail in ballot municipal election in which ballots go out in the mail today and are due back on May 3, 2011. They are: Tom Downey, Sarah McCarthy, Jacob Werther, and Debra Johnson.

I won't be voting for Tom Downey or Jacob Werther for Clerk and Recorder. Why?

Tom Downey is in running on the strength of his ties to Scott Gessler, our current Republican Colorado Secretary of State, who has repeated made negative headlines in his brief tenure of office, and also made headlines during the campaign for his less than stellar work as an election lawyer, as well as his endorsements from other Republicans. Gessler has been a stern advocate for gutting campaign finance laws, disenfranchising voters without a solid factual basis, holding onto excess departmental funds that the rest of the state's budget needs, and not working full time at the job he was elected to carry out. While Mr. Downey was hired by Bernie Buescher and merely retained by his new boss, Scott Gessler (he runs the Business Division), he does not have the political good sense that his position requires. If he doesn't know that Gessler's endorsement is toxic, he deserves to pay for that mistake by losing my vote.

I had already ruled out Jacob Werther on the basis of the criticism that Dan Willis, a reliable straight shooter in this area with personal knowledge of the candidates.  He has identified Werther as a man who comes across as an unbalanced conspiracy theorist, or at the very least, as someone who jumps to suspicions of wrong doing without having facts to back up his suspicions.

This leaves two candidates still in the running for me: Debra Johnson and Sarah McCarthy.

Johnson is the appointed city clerk of Aurora whose only drawback seems to be a complaint filed against her by the Downey campaign related to campaign finance filings that seems to be related to technical problems with Denver's e-filing system  Her experience, character and lack of eagerness to associate herself with people who exemplify everything that is wrong in election administration in Colorado recommend her over either of the two men in the race. The fact that she is supported by Pam Bennett, whom I know from working with her in the Democratic Party of Denver to be a level headed and sensible person also speaks well to her suitability for the office.

I don't yet know much about Sarah McCarthy's qualification for this office, other than what can be found on her campaign webpage, which deserves kudos for being bilingual. She has IT expertise, has been active in civic affairs, and has a background of involvement with the eminently respectable League of Women Voters. She currently leads a small non-profit organization and has a long history of responsible public sector and non-profit experience.

Of the two, Johnson has the more directly relevant government experience and the stronger campaign, so, at least in the first round, I will be voting for her. I believe that voting for Johnson is the best way to increase the likelihood that neither Downey nor Werther get the job. If both Johnson and McCarthy both make it into the final round, I can look more closely at the two to evaluate each of them on the merits, as I believe that either could probably do the job competently. But, for now, the most important priority is to prevent a runoff between Downey and Werther, and I believe that Johnson is more likely to succeed in doing this than McCarthy.

READ MORE - Denver Clerk and Recorder Election Just Got Easier

Denver Fires Bad Cops

The City of Denver has taken the encouraging move of firing two more bad cops who lied to investigators about using excessive force, despite videotape to the contrary.

Manager of Safety Charles Garcia has terminated two officers, Kevin Devine and Ricky Nixon, for lying about details in an excessive force case.

The two were accused of excessive force during an incident caught on camera outside the Denver Diner in 2009. The videotape shows an officer with a club pushing several women to the ground. A second officer is seen spraying mace into the face of a woman who is kneeling after being brought to the pavement by the first cop.

The two officers are the third and fourth terminated by Garcia, who took office last month. He fired Officers Devin Sparks and Randy Murr for "deceptive acts" in the case of Michael DeHerrera, who Sparks threw to the ground as he talked on a cell phone in LoDo.

The long overdue trend in still very welcome.

Interim Mayor Bill Vidal has also recommended the removal of a step in the process of disciplining police officers that has become redundant, delays the process and has favored unreasonably mild discipline for bad cops. Most Mayoral candidates in the current Denver Mayor's race favor the change.

READ MORE - Denver Fires Bad Cops

Daylight savings time and other annoyances

* So, we're back on daylight savings time, which takes more of the year than standard time. Daylight savings time is like the ultimate popular kid stunt: "I can make the entire country pretend its an hour ealier than it really is, just because I can get everyone to agree with me." And, of course, once it takes off, you really have no choice but to go along. Still, losing an hour in the spring is brutal.

* Washington Park in Denver has a special magical glow that keeps it attractive regardless of what is going on in the outside world. But, I'm beginning to think that it may be a force field instead. I've been trying to stop paying $17 a month for free TV by setting up an antenna. Before I started getting basic cable, I'd tried it from a powered antenna inside my living room and get one or two channels. This weekend, after going to the trouble of setting a powered antenna up on the highest point on my roof, I got absolutely zero reception. Needless to say, I am not very impressed with the digital broadcast TV revolution, although it may simply be that Wash Park is as much of a TV dead zone as it has a reputation for being a cell phone dead zone.

* Another of the great mysteries of life is why old computers accumulate problems. They produce stray, seemingly meaningless error messages. They slow down. Virus scans and disk defragmentation stops helping. It might be possible to remove accumulated programs, but who knows what it is safe to remove. It reaches the point where you'd like to just run the restore disks and start over, but of course, by that point you've invested money in programs and misplaced the restore disks and the original programs with their access codes.

* Then, of course, there are the dreaded smart phones. I held out for the longest time. But, finally, about three years ago, I had to give in because it was expected that you have access to e-mail at all times for work. But, every now and then, you have to change phones, and the switch is painful. It takes weeks to get it back to the unsteady compromise that you have with the machine before you switched, when you knew how to work what you needed and it all worked smoothly.

* My daughter embarks on the brave new world of Home Economics (or whatever they call it these days), today. Rumor has it that the cooking agenda is full of things that we would never actually cook in our own house for want of nutritional value, but such is life. Hello Hamburger Helper(R)!

* The 8.9 magnitude Earthquake which initially seems to have spared Japan too much damage, now seems to have actually inflicted a Katrina class blow as more news reaches the world.

* The situation in Libya is getting ugly, as Kaddafi and the rebels civil war. (On the bright side, the monarch of Oman appears to be ready to convert from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in the next thirty days.)

* Japanese manga and anime make frequent use of images and scenes that draw on the characters of the real story, but rather than being blubs are just riffs on the concepts that aren't part of the story itself, something quite rare in American media (as is the habit of having the author reserving space to directly address the audience). Is there a general name for these extraneous sketches?

* Why do the Denver Assessor's office have a nice online interface for its records, while the Denver Clerk and Recorder's office, which is just as automated, does not have its grantor-grantee index and file images available online? Both are public records. I suspect it is so that the clerk's office can make us pay 25 cents a page for copies and make title companies pay for bulk downloads to escape that problem. But, I'd surely favor any candidate in the current clerk and recorder's race who would promise to put the grantor-grantee index online.

* Some days, you think humanity is on the right track. Some days, you read the news from Cleveland, Texas (mass child molestation of eleven year old in a small town capture on cell phone video), and you are rather less hopeful. Ironically, the crime of taking the video will probably garner stiffer sentences than the underlying crime itself.

* For reasons mysterious to me, a wave of male enhancement product spam is deluging this blog at the moment, I am trying to review new comments an delete the bad ones a rapidly as I can. I still don't see why it is so hard for regulators to determine who the vendors being advertised are, trace them with sample transactions, and use the vendor records to shut these people down. It really is just a handful of industries that leave the bulk of them, and apparently there are not that many spam purveyors out there comprising the bulk of the traffic. They money trail ought to be auditable. Maybe all those SEC employees who were using government computers to watch porn could do it as a form of community service.

* We are about to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day (indeed, many people did this past weekend), after the man famous for converting the pagans of Ireland to Catholicism. Garrison Keillor's show this weekend (part of the show, apparently originally from 1997 are here) explained why this makes quite a bit more sense than celebrating Saint Olaf's day, something riotously funny to a fellow ex-Lutheran. But, in an era of anti-imperialism and distrust of institutions, why not celebrate Saint Francis of Assisi Day instead? (He has a Saint's Day on October 4, but it isn't all that big a deal.) Perhaps Saint Francis Day could be substituted for ever more controversial Columbus Day (October 12), as a day of Italian-American pride.

* The newspaper comics this weekend also posed the ultimate elementary school boy query for March: In a battle between ancient Romans (associated with the Ides of March) and Lepricauns (associated with Saint Patrick's Day) who would win? The particularly frightening aspect of this query is that there is apparently now a television show devoted to such questions, asking in a recent episode with quasi-scientific rigor, who would win in a fight between the Musketeers and the Manchu warriors (whose ancestors apparently have formed an immigrant community to the north of Denver).

* Also, in hopeful news, the Denver Post has reiterated its support for abolishing or narrowing the scope of the death penalty in Colorado. Narrowing the scope of first degree murder to exclude neo-natal homicide by women in the throes of childbirth and felony murder that does not involve triggermen or people who have solicited a murder would be a good start, and if applied retroactively, would improve the state of the state budget and greatly reduce the ranks of juveniles serving life without parole in the state.

READ MORE - Daylight savings time and other annoyances

Who Should Be Denver's Next Mayor?

Among the candidates running for Mayor in Denver, which will have a non-partisan election in May, followed by a runoff between the top two candidates if no one candidate gets a majority in the first round are:

City Council President Michael Hancock,
Councilwoman At Large Carol Boigon,
Denver Pre-School Program Director James Mejia
Councilman At Large Doug Linkhart,
State Senator Chris Romer (who stepped down to run for the post), and
almost a dozen other candidates with no serious chance of winning.

The election that ultimate put Mayor John Hickenlooper featured strong ethnically driven voting in the first round with Latinos mostly favoring the leading Latino candidate, African-Americans mostly favoring the leading African-American candidate, and whites mostly favoring the leading white candidate.

A similar outcome with Hancock capturing the African-American vote, Mejia capturing the Latino vote, and Romer probably emerging as the leading white candidate, seems possible this time around, although perhaps this time around the voting will be less ethnically driven, particularly in light of the fact that Denver Republicans seem to be converging around support for Hancock, in the absence of any actual Republican candidates in the race in an overwhelmingly Democratic jurisdiction.

I have some familiarity with, or have done some preliminary research on each of the top five candidates at this point, but would very much welcome input from readers and campaigns on the virtues of one candidate over any other in the comments.

READ MORE - Who Should Be Denver's Next Mayor?

Colorado Politics Recap

* Governor-Elect Hickenlooper is now Governor Hickenlooper. He's has the near impossible task of balancing the budget ahead of him, but at least the NY Times is writing nice stories about him and even the Republicans haven't gone into attack mode yet with our new Governor. Now we're in for an exciting four months of the legislative session including highlights like the redistricting of Congressional districts, with a partisan split between the State House and State Senate. The party line, shared with President Obama, is that Hickenlooper wants to create jobs. Despite having fewer tools at his disposal to do so, I have more faith that Hickenlooper will be successful than I do that President Obama will. We also have a new Republican State Treasurer and Secretary of State.

* We also have a new Mayor in Denver, Bill Vidal. Unfortunately, he is the guy is charge of the department that recently failed to adequately discipline two corrupt parking enforcement officers, until there was a public outcry over it. The caretaker administration will end this spring when a sucessor is elected in Denver's municipal elections. I'm starting to get calls from candidates' organizations (not personal ones) seeking my support. The last real race was in 2003, in which I supported Penfield Tate in the first round, and John Hickenlooper in the second. Hickenlooper had no serious competition in 2007. Tate is not running this time around.

* The report of a grand jury investigation into lies under oath and attempts to suborn perjury by Denver Police Officer Paul Baca that did not result in an indictment, despite denunciations of him in open court by a judge and recorded court testimony that strongly suggests he was lying, has been sealed by the Denver judge presiding over the case. The Jefferson County special prosecutor appointed to prosecute the officer has appealed the ruling but isn't allowed to comment on the grand jury report or the contents of the order closing it. It isn't that unusual for a prosecutor to ask that a grand jury report be sealed in order to permit the prosecutor to continue an investigation, perhaps with a future grand jury. But, it is quite unusual for a grand jury to write a report of its own, and even more unusual for such a report to be suppressed over the objection of the prosecutor in the case. Perhaps there are good reasons for doing so, but an appearance of impropriety results any time a high profile corruption prosecution is closed without full disclosure of what happened.

* One of the school board members in Greeley, Brett Reese, who is also a pretty difficult character in his role on the school board, is using his low power radio station to broadcast dubious and outrageous conspiracy theories about Martin Luther King, Jr. without even providing authorship for the sentiment, as we head into the holiday named after the Civil Rights leader. It is his free speech right to do so, but it also shows bad judgment on the part of someone who should be a role model for the students in the district. Respecting other people's right to say stupid things is honorable. Using your own resources to say stupid things just shows that you're stupid. Also, while the school board member's official line is that he is simply allowing people to air concerns about a cult of personality, it sure sounds like crackpot conpsiracy theory racism to me. Oh, and he's also decided that the way to respond to the controvery he has created is to carry a gun. Brett Reese looks a lot more like a nutjob who is an embarassment to the Greeley. Fortunately, as just one member of the Board, he can't do much harm by himself and still belongs in the "mostly harmless" and "do not feed the troll" category.

* What sort of jerk steals somebody's else's dead wife's ashes? As this story comes from Colorado Springs, it is hard to know.

* Daily Kos and Colorado Pols both have compelling documentation today and in the past few days of the pattern of Tea Party's incitement of violence with its campaign rhetoric. I don't have the stomache to post about it at the moment, but it is there is you are so inclined.

READ MORE - Colorado Politics Recap