Looks like Mai Vang’s write-in campaign in Ward 6 city council race succeeded

Tonight I’ve been avidly following the national Blue Tsunami, with Democrats outperforming even the most optimistic election outcomes. The New York Times had the best coverage, thanks to their way-cool Needle that updates the expected probability of a candidate winning as results flow in.

Currently the Times has Democrats almost certainly winning 54 seats in the Senate, a seven seat pickup from the current 47. It could be 55 if Pertola wins in Alaska (just 22% of votes counted there so far; rated as a toss up by the Times) and 56 if Colom hangs on to an extremely narrow lead in Mississippi  And the House is projected to be 255-D and 180-R, a massive shift from the current 214 seats held by Democrats. Picking up 41 seats was on the radar of very few election prognosticators.

But when 8:20 pm came and I checked on the Oregon returns, my fingers were almost trembling on the keyboard of my MacBook Pro because I really, really, really wanted Mai Vang to prevail in her long-shot attempt at a write-in campaign in Salem’s Ward 6 City Council race. Initially Marion County didn’t show any write-in results for any race, including this one.

Now an update has occurred with this pleasing result:

So at the moment  it sure looks like Mai Vang has beaten Betsy Vega.

If it holds, this should go down in Salem election history as one of the best “snatch victory from the jaws of defeat” outcomes ever. Successful write-in campaigns are difficult to pull off. They require a lot of voter education and door-knocking. Mai Vang and her supporters, notably including Paige Barton (her campaign manager) and Progressive Salem deserve a lot of applause for the hard work they put into the write-in campaign.

Betsy Vega deserved to lose. As I said in “City officials ignored Salem charter in wrongly qualifying Betsy Vega as Ward 6 city councilor,” Vega failed the residency requirement to be a city councilor, but her narrow victory over Vang in the May primary election was allowed to stand only because of a highly dubious interpretation of the city charter by a Eugene attorney hired by the City of Salem.

Ward 6 voters rectified this miscarriage of justice by writing-in Mai Vang’s name on the November ballot. Kudos to them for recognizing that Betsy Vega wouldn’t have been on the ballot in the first place if city officials had taken seriously the requirement in the city charter that a city councilor reside in the ward they represent for the 12 months immediately before being elected or appointed to the office.

I’m also thrilled that Micki Varney has a healthy lead over Chris Cummings in the run-off election for the Ward 8 city council seat. Neither candidate got over 50% of the vote in the May election due to a small number of write-in votes in a very close race where Varney narrowly led. Hence, the runoff.

There’s more votes to be counted in both Ward 6 and Ward 8, so the victories of Vang and Varney aren’t assured, just likely.