O'Malley falls further behind in latest numbers

All retention judges, with one exception, seem to have won new terms in the November election. Judge Shannon O'Malley is the sole exception. In the latest updates released by the Cook County Clerk and the Chicago Board of Elections, O'Malley's percentage has dropped below 59%. A judge must win better than 60% "Yes" votes (typically phrased as 60% + 1) in order to be retained.

In the most recent update available online from the CBOE, O'Malley has 362,961 "Yes" votes out of a total of 675,437 votes cast in his retention race. That translates to only a 53.74% "Yes" rate, down from the 54.64% "Yes" rate FWIW reported a couple of days ago.

O'Malley continues to have more "Yes" votes in the Cook County suburbs (463,292 in the latest update) and a higher favorable percentage of 62.85% -- but this number is down from the 63.28% favorable percentage O'Malley had in the update we reported earlier in the week.

When the vote totals are aggregated O'Malley now has 826,253 "Yes" votes out of a total of 1,412,579 votes counted in his race. Taken together, O'Malley has only a 58.49% "Yes" vote, down from 59.18% earlier this week.

Although the City and County have both added votes to the totals reported in the O'Malley retention race, the City has not publicly updated the outstanding ballot figures since November 10. At that time there were still 47,664 VBM ballots returned, but not yet counted, and another 6,100 provisional votes yet to be examined. The County's numbers, updated today, show only 1,635 uncounted VBM ballots actually received (a increase of roughly 500 over the total FWIW reported earlier this week) -- and 27 provisional ballots remaining (none were reported in FWIW's last update).

Both the City and County report large numbers of VBM ballots sent out but not returned. The City states that 38,208 VBM ballots were sent out but not yet returned; the County reports 48,602, down from 51,987 in FWIW's last published update. Tempus fugit. Most of these votes, 10 days out from Election Day, are likely not coming back.