"In Ward 17 El-Amin only beat Smith by 1 (one) vote."

"Only"? Wrong word and punctuation.

Two wards had fewer than one hundred people vote? Wow.

Never mind. Just figured out those wards cover two senate districts.

Given that Smith won by over 2,000 votes there are many factors that determined the outcome. Turnout is one that I can't evaluate until I compare yesterday's numbers to previous elections. However, it looks like turnout was significantly higher in the 4th district than in the rest of the city.
A few other observations:
Since Gambaro basically did not campaign in the northern half of the district, he needed to run up much bigger margins in the south. Losing the 23rd and 12th wards to Smith was especially crushing. Those were wards where pro-life Dems (Favazza, Barry, Stoll) outran pro-choice Dems (Smith, Smith, Carnahan) in the 2004 3CD primary. With Smith taking roughly 40% in the 10th and 16th also cut into Gambaro's numbers in those wards.

What many observers noted as a weak Boykins campaign is evident in the numbers too. Boykins lost the 4th ward by more than 200 votes even though almost all of the ward is in her state rep district. El-Amin beat Boykins in other wards that are split between their two state rep districts (1st and 18th).

Thank you for the spreadsheet! When will we get precinct brakdowns?

oh man precincts - i could waste a couple hours on that.

i couldn't wait and put the totals into an excel spreadsheet also, and figured percentages by ward. then i threw them into regions for the heck of it (north, mid & south) just to see how each candidate pulled outside their homebase. you can download over here:
http://stl.diatriber.com/archives/002029.html

you can also change which ward goes into what region (it was just my opinion on each) and it will recalculate for you.

Some sincere thank yous:
To Brian, for compiling the spreadsheet and posting it.
To Blunt's E-Board: This is the quickest I've ever experienced getting ward breakdowns. (Could the guv send the city guys to the county too?)
To Diatriber: I wish I had seen your spreadsheet before I did my own.

Only tangentially related to election last night...

Edwin Russell sent a complaint to the Missouri Secretary of State complaining that the touchscreen voting machine he used in StL County didn't meet privacy or paper trail requirements. In particular, the machine in question apparently had a broken/inpoerative printer and didn't produce a receipt.

Mr. Russell posted his letter to the St. Louis Indymedia Center newswire:

http://www.stlimc.org/newswire/display/1987/index.php

Is anybody concerned that the touch screen doesn't provide privacy if you have a problem with the system?

I noticed a potential flaw in the touch screen system. Several people had trouble voting because the card was not programmed properly the first time. Theoretically, a person could vote and then claim his card was not programmed properly. And people could make a concerted effort to defraud the system. The voting records would eventually catch the difference in vote totals, but could you tell which votes were fraudulent.

I guess it's unlikely. Just wanted to see what others thought.

Turnout was another factor in Smith's victory. Simply put, some of the north side wards did not turn out. I compared Tuesday's turnout in each of the wards of the 4th senate district to their turnout in the 2004 presidential election (overall, turnout Tuesday was 25% of 2004 turnout).
Tuesday's high turnout wards, relatively speaking (percents in parentheses):
16 (32%)
23 (30%)
10 (28%)
8 (18%)
15 (28%)

Tuesday's low turnout wards:
27 (16%)
19 (17%)
22 (20%)
17 (20%)
14 (20%)

If my memory is correct, all the higher-performing wards are on the south side, while all but one of the low-performing wards are on the north side. The 27th ward is largely outside of the state rep districts held by El-Amin and Boykins. The high-turnout wards noted above were carried by Smith (3 of them) and Gambaro (2). The low-turnout wards were carried by El-Amin (4) and the 14th was carried by Smith. I don't have a blog to post the file on, but if you email me I'll send the numbers.

Chris, I worked as a technical specialist on Tuesday, and I can assure you that voter fraud couldn't occur as you described, unless the election judges weren't doing their jobs. If someone returned their card and requested a new one, both a Democratic and a Republican judge were required to approach the touchscreen and insert the first card. If the card had already been used to vote, the screen would say so, and the voter couldn't get a new card.

The Mayor will more likely get his charter school bill passed through the legislature.

He will set up charter schools with predominantly white attendance boundaries.

"predominantly white attendance boundaries"??!

You can't be serious. South City is increasingly diverse, making it near impossible to draw a predominantly white enrollment area for any school of realistic size. Even in Southwest City, where you could come closest, enough white children would still be attracted to area parochial schools, such that the resulting public or charter enrollment could still be diverse. This is already proven today in that Buder and Woerner elementary are the only two schools in the entire SLPS district, where minorities are the minority, but the enrollment is still not far from 50/50, when even nearby magnet schools are majority minority.

Wow! So, the 25th ward didn't vote? Those un-American bastards!

"Wow! So, the 25th ward didn't vote? Those un-American bastards!"

The 25th Ward is not in the 4th Senate District.

===He will set up charter schools with predominantly white attendance boundaries.

Look at Confluence's attendance numbers. I think they finally got a white student (humor folks), but seriously, trying to paint Jeff as looking to create segregated charter schools is one of the dumbest claims I've ever seen.