The Associated Press is reporting (via the Herald) that Mark Fisher just missed a spot on the ballot to be the conservative, “full-platform” as he calls himself, candidate challenging presumptive nominee Charlie Baker for the Corner Office. It seems to me there is a combination of fuzzy math and interesting rules interpretation at work. The rules say one must get 15% of the convention vote and when you count votes you generally only count votes cast, but 64 blanks were counted in the vote total holding Fisher to just 14.765%. Baker got 82% leaving a little bit of wiggle room, possibly enough to credit Fisher with barely 15% of votes cast. If there were exactly 2500 delegates, 82% would be 2050; add 64 blanks for a total of 2114, leaving Fisher with 386. Therefore 2436 votes were actually cast which should be the basis for this calculation. Baker would have received based on these assumptions 84.15…% and Fisher 15.85…%, with both numbers running several decimal places, but it would have given Fisher what he needed.
Meanwhile, we can’t mock them this year for not even being able to field candidates, though I suspect many of these will be token opponents. They also nominated the following:
Former State Rep. Karyn Polito of Shrewsbury for Lt. Governor
Dave D’Arcangelo of Malden for Secretary of the Commonwealth
John Miller of Winchester for Attorney General
Mike Heffernan of Wellesley for Treasurer and Receiver General
Patricia Saint Aubin of Norfolk for Auditor of the Commonwealth
Hopkinton Selectman Brian Herr for United States Senate
I know they have few legislators, but I thought more of them would be interested in moving up. It’s also interesting that they have their convention before signatures are due. If one of their endorsees doesn’t qualify due to lack of signatures the state committee is authorized to name a different nominee, though I think that person would still need a number of votes in the primary at least equal to the number of signatures needed.
Christopher says
He posted this video on the Mass Political Profs blog (great site, BTW). It’s 15+ minutes and I did not take time to watch, but it sounds like it shows the part of the convention where the votes were announced and somehow 10 blanks became 64.
jconway says
I need to hear more about him, but I think a competitive challenge against Galvin is nice, and a truly non-partisan technocrat with forward vision who’s actually excited about getting people to vote could do great things there. Of course, he might be another Republican rube, I need to learn more.
The rest strike me as Rubes.