Ohio Voters Make Their Choices

I’m watching the election return information on the handy National Public Radio website. And the reports on the race between incumbent ID advocate Deborah Owens-Fink and challenger former Akron mayor Tom Sawyer show, with 262 out of 1005 precincts reporting, that Sawyer currently has 54% of the vote, and Fink has 29%. If this continues in the same vain, I’d say that that is a runaway. The two main candidates in the race are nowhere close to one another in the voter’s preference, and the ID advocate is the one on the losing end of that.

Of course, this is a commonplace occurrence. When the ID stealth strategies get uncovered and reported to the voters, often the response is to “vote the bums out”. It happened in Kansas in 2000 and in the primaries earlier this year. It happened in Darby, MT in 2004. It happened in Dover, PA last year following the Kitzmiller v. DASD trial. It looks like that may also be the case in Ohio. The race between Sawyer and Fink at this point doesn’t look at all close, but the one in District 8 between incumbent Jim Craig and challenger Deborah Cain is a good deal closer, with Cain at 55% and Craig at 45%. That is still a respectable margin of difference, though.

Update: With all precincts reporting, lopsided wins for pro-science candidates are noted in Districts 4 and 7. Tom Sawyer garnered almost double the number of votes as Deborah Owens-Fink, though his campaign spent about a fourth half of what the Fink campaign did. I guess that there is only so much that savvy marketing can do to conceal a policy of ignorance as good education for students. That seemed also to be the case in the race between pro-science incumbent G.R. “Sam” Schloemer and multi-millionaire challenger John Hritz. The two pro-science candidates in District 3 split the vote, allowing the pick of a group (Citizen USA) that endorsed anti-science advocates Fink and Hritz in other districts, Susan Haverkos, to win with a non-majority of votes (38%) but a 6% lead over the next candidate. Pro-science candidate Deborah Cain in District 8 still leads with 52% of the vote, but that race has not yet been called, I assume to allow counting the absentee ballots. The pro-science candidate, John Bender, is leading so far in District 2.