Kudos to Macomb County Clerk Carmella Sabaugh and her crew for taking another step forward in providing easily accessible election returns to the public.
Sabaugh upgraded her election results web page so that voters can discover, in one click, these pieces of information throughout the night on each individual race: the number and percentage of votes received by each candidate; the number and percentage of precincts that have reported; the percentage of the absentee votes that have been counted; the number of votes cast for each candidate -- in each precinct at the polls, and by absentee.
By the end of the night, the Sabaugh site also provides the total number of votes cast and the percentage turnout in each community and school district where elections took place.
But here’s the best part – you can check on several races, learning everything you need to know, in seconds. That’s because the clerk had added a box on the right side of the page called the “Race Selector,” which allows a voter to click on one race after another without leaving the main election-returns page.
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| Sabaugh |
The side-by-side windows are especially convenient in a large county like Macomb, where on Tuesday night we had 35 candidate races and ballot proposals. For those who want to browse quickly, a big red bar graph at the top of each info window portrays the current state of that race. For those who want more, there’s plenty.
For example, without reciting actual numbers, last night someone interested in local politics could learn all of these things in about one minute:
* The Mount Clemens mayor is trailing, 55-45 percent, but there are still absentee ballots to be counted in four of the seven precincts;
* The Clinton Township police and fire millages are off to a fast start, leading by a 63-37 percent margin, but votes cast at the polls in 10 precincts have not come in yet;
* The Fraser City Council race is much too close to call as just 25 votes separate the third-place and fourth-place candidates;
* And the Armada schools’ “sinking fund” proposal is cruising toward approval with 60 percent of the vote secured and nearly all of the ballots counted.
Needless to say, The Macomb Daily newsroom’s election night crew loves the upgraded website. I suspect Sabaugh’s tech-savvy deputy, Todd Schmitz, played a major role in creating the improvements.
And I would suggest that every county and big-city clerk in Michigan might want to give Schmitz a call and find out how he and his colleagues accomplished this upgrade.
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