The Winona County Auditor's Race Results

There has been a lot of discussion lately about my 12-hour Election Day write-in campaign for Winona County Auditor. Most questions I have been getting is how many votes did I end up getting and have I conceded the election yet? To answer the second question, yes it is official, I have conceded the race today in an email sent to the current Winona County Auditor Cherie MacLennan. Here is the email concession:

From: Jared Stene jpstene@gmail.com
Date: Nov 16, 2006 1:44 PM
Subject: Auditor Election
To: cmaclennan@co.winona.mn.us

Auditor MacLennan-

I would like to congratulate you on your recent re-election to the Winona County Auditor position. As you may or may not know there was a brief 12 hour Election Day campaign on the WSU campus for another candidate for the County Auditor position, that other candidate would be me. I would like to officially notify you that I am conceding this race. Although my campaign staff and I did not have the proper insight to file the proper write-in campaign papers, we feel that our last minute campaign generated at least 40 votes in about five different precincts including one vote in Wiscoy Township. I was inspired to run for county auditor at 8:30 am on November 7. Our campaign consisted of word of mouth, electronic notification via social networking websites, and phone calls. So again, I congratulate you on your re-election! I would of conceded earlier but wanted to take time and reflect on the matter first. Thank you and have a nice day!

Jared Stene

So as you read in the email we have no idea how many votes I got on Election Day only because there needs to be an intent to do a write-in campaign filed with the Auditor's office PRIOR to Election Day. This did not happen in the Jared Stene for Winona County Auditor's campaign. In the State of Minnesota all write-in votes are counted as "write-in" by the machines, the machines do not record who that write-in vote is for. Instead you need to file paper work so that way the election judges can count the write-in votes instead of just leaving them as "write-in."

According to the Minnesota Secretary of State's Election Reporting System website the results of the Winona County Auditor's race is as follows:

Nonpartisan CHERIE MACLENNAN 15946 99.14%
Write-In WRITE-IN** 138 0.86%

Now if you notice the write-in candidates experienced electoral domination by MacLennan. But how do we know how many votes I got? Well the real answer is that we will never know, however we can examine the results from the WSU precincts and assume that those votes were for Jared Stene.

Write-In Votes for Winona State University Area Precincts:
Ward 2 Precinct 1 (WSU West Campus): 6
Ward 2 Precinct 4 (Student Neighborhood): 8
Ward 3 Precinct 1 (WSU Main Campus): 17
Ward 3 Precinct 2 (Student Neighborhood): 9
Ward 3 Precinct 3 (WSU East Lake): 10
Wiscoy Township**: 1
TOTAL for Winona County Auditor***: 52


**Wiscoy Township is not near WSU campus, I talked with a student who is from there and voted there.

***UPDATE: I was informed by a SFP & FM reader and Jared Stene for Winona County Auditor supporter that she vote for me in Ward 2 Precinct 2. After looking into the results there I am not entirely sure if I can add the entire write-in vote total of 11 write-in votes for that precinct because I believe there is a healthy mix of students and Winona residents in that area. Most of our campaign reached out to WSU students, there was some Winona residents who supported me but the majority of the campaign was focused WSU students which is the reasoning behind selecting the WSU precincts for my projected vote count. But I have updated my total vote count from 51 to 52!

Also check out this article I found on The Onion.com: Write-In Candidate