Yes, Your Vote Really Can Matter!

Yesterday was election day, and thankfully now all the mailings and annoying TV ads can stop. There were some surprisingly close votes yesterday, including close calls for long time incumbents Russ Carnahan and Charlie Dooley, but the closest race I personally voted on was for the 24th district State Senate between Barbara Fraser and John Lamping. The Post article has Lamping winning by 239 votes, but at the St. Louis County election site they have added up some additional votes and his win dropped to just 172 votes from among 60,000 votes cast (30,384 versus 30,212) for a winning margin of 0.28%. There were also 74 write in votes who could almost have made the difference in this contest. So for anyone who thinks their vote did not matter you are wrong! If just a few hundred folks had decided not to vote the election could have gone the other way.

As for the results, I was happy to see both hotel taxes (Clayton and Richmond Heights) were defeated, I was surprised to see how close the "puppy mill" vote was, and I was surprised to see how large of a victory there was for the "earnings tax" proposition. Now that Prop A has passed the city earnings taxes can actually come up to a vote next April, and that will determine whether the city income tax actually changes or not. Since the votes from the city were strongly against the proposition (41,712 against and 26,423 for it), the tax will likely remain anyway, so it should have little effect on the St. Louis city income tax. It will just mean one more issue to vote on every 5 years for the city residents. I also found the school district votes interesting. The Hazelwood, Pattonville and Lindbergh school issues all passed, but Mehlville's failed and Kirkwood did a smart move in breaking their vote into two issues. Kirkwood had said if only the school improvement bond issue passed they would not need to raise taxes, but if the athletic facilities one passed they would need to raise them, so the bond issue for school improvements passed but the other did not. Did they really think residents would be willing to give themselves a tax increase for better athletic facilities in these tough times? If they had been lumped together as one bond issue it most likely would have failed so it was a good thing they split it up as they did. We did not have a vote in the Ladue district since we already had one in April of this year. Our enrollment in the school district keeps growing, so it is definitely good that we have more facilities where we can expand.