Tempe YIMBY conducted a straw poll of its membership to gauge support for the various council candidates. It is important to note that this is not a scientific poll attempting to predict the results of the upcoming election, but a way to gauge which candidates Tempe urbanists support.

The vote was run from Monday afternoon to Friday morning. Thirty nine respondents voted in total.

MAYOR

Our poll for the mayoral race found overwhelming support for Corey Woods. Approximately 85 percent of respondents said they supported Woods for mayor. Around eight percent said they support Mayor Mark Mitchell tied with those whom did not support one candidate or another.

COUNCIL

The council race had a clear favorite as well, Casey Clowes. This was not enormously surprising as Clowes has run on an impressively urbanist platform.

The council section was conducted differently due to the number of candidates. Respondents were asked to select up to three candidates they supported for council, just as the Tempe ballot will allow them to do. Unlike Tempe, we asked respondents to rank candidates in order of preference. This allows us to slice the vote results in a few different ways.

First, we look at the raw vote count by simply tallying up the number of votes for each candidate, preferences irregardless.

Clowes was by far the favorite with 38 percent of the vote. Councilmember Randy Keating followed with 32 percent. Garlid at 29 percent, Councilmember Joel Navarro at 8 percent, and Marc Norman with just over percent.

Another way to look at these results is by weighting the vote by preference. In this scenario, first preference votes are given three points, second preferences three points, and third preferences one.

In this scenario Clowes gets 45 percent, Keating gets 30 percent, Garlid gets 20 percent.

Candidate	Vote %
Clowes	44.9%
Keating	29.9%
Garlid	19.8%
Navarro	4.2%
Norman	0.6%

Finally, a count using Single Transferable Vote, where a quota (in this case 25 percent) is established. Any candidate who reaches this quota has any surplus votes transferred to their second preferences.

Candidate	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3
Clowes	56.8%	25%	25%
Keating	18.9%	34%	25%
Garlid	18.9%	23.5%	30.3%
Navarro	2.7%	2.7%	6.6%
Norman	0%
No Candidate	2.7%

On the first round Clowes has a large surplus of votes. When these surplus votes are transferred, most go to Keating and a few go to Garlid. Keating wins on the second round and his surplus votes are transferred, putting Garlid over the threshold necessary.

Be sure to have a look at our candidate questionnaire responses if you haven’t done so already.