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Turnout expected to break 4,000

September 20th, 2008 · 3 Comments

It’s still a steady stream, along with a few busloads from the Indo-Canadian community, which were welcomed with relief by some candidates and disgruntlement by others.

There had been some anxiety among those slates being supported by the Indo-Canadian community about their light appearance throughout the morning and early afternoon. Apparently there were a lot of weddings on this afternoon that were holding everyone up. But now they’re here.

Rey Umlas continues to pull out a noticeable Filipino vote, while everyone is noticing how light the vote is from the Chinese community. I think that is coming as a surprise to many candidates, who were disinclined to form an alliance with Rey in the early days because they weren’t sure the Filipino community would really show up. If he decides to run again in three years, there will be a lot more people paying attention to him.

What it looks like at this point is that for sure three of the council candidates will be elected and the three from the strong coalition of new candidates — Reimer, Jang and Dhaliwal. But David Eby is popular among a lot of voters, especially those who signed up originally for Gregor Robertson’s mayoral campaign and who are coming out in steady numbers. Rey Umlas is bringing in a lot of people and, since no one was willing to back him, he hasn’t put out a favoured list of council candidates to his supporters. So they could be all over the place. (The two most likely to benefit are Geoff Meggs and Heather Harrison, who did spend some time getting to know the community.) Demetri Douzenis and Catherine Evans might be popular among people who are Gregor sign-ups and don’t want to vote what’s perceived as the Raymond Louie list. And there’s no telling what might happen with the combinations of many people’s seventh and eighth choices.

If I were forced to guess, I’d say that the original Vision education group looks more likely to get in that the Chhina/Gregson/Clement slate. If I’m wrong and it goes the other way, I sure wouldn’t want to be the Vision executive member trying to deal with that. The original group is very tight and has a long track record of going to war when they think an injustice has been done. If it’s Vision voting that’s been the injustice, in their eyes, they’re not going to keep quiet about it.

I’d say the big park-board coalition, because it includes Raj Hundal, is likely to get elected.

In conclusion, I would just like to remind everyone that I am famously wrong, so take this all with a grain of salt.

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