After a particularly slow start, the Northeast poll ended up with a total of 1,388 votes, which is the lowest total so far (Natchez had 4,502 and the Coast had 4,191). Not too bad considering, I guess. Perhaps not coincidentally, the poll results ended up the most lopsided of the polls so far, with the top poller, the Lyric Theater in Tupelo, gaining 17% of the votes, compared with 5% for Longwood and 7% for Fort Massachusetts in the other polls.
Two of my favorites, the Midway School in Tishomingo County and the Booneville Church of Christ, ended up tying for last place. Just remember that, in heaven, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. I was somewhat surprised that the first Corinth property on the list, the Corinth Machinery Building, is in 11th place. Corinth does not show up well in this poll, and it should have.
A few MissPresers have asked how these results are all going to be tabulated in the end. The answer is “I don’t know yet.” Obviously, there does need to be a mechanism–or at least I think there should be–for those regions that had large numbers of voters to end up with a larger share of the final 101 without eliminating entire regions that didn’t get as much interest. We want all regions to be represented on the final list, but it doesn’t seem right to have properties that only got 50 or 60 votes to beat out properties in other regions that got 100 votes. It’s possible once we have a few more polls under our belts, we’ll see that we can just compile the final list based purely on number of votes for each property. That would be the easiest and probably the most pure, but if we end up with wildly varying voting totals, it may not be the most reasonable. We shall see. As I’ve stated before, the world should be grateful that I’m not a statistician or a poller.
Anyway, here’s the results you’ve all been waiting for while I’ve jabbered on:
Which poll should we do next? Seems like we need to move to the central part of the state.
Why don’t we do Jackson and the center of the state next?
Posted by Tom Barnes | March 21, 2011, 9:20 amWhile our state is on the subject of “one man, one vote”, if you adjust simply for population (not considering unequal access to technology and the effect of socially-driven ballot box stuffing that might occur, say, by people who [rightfully and righteously] want to support a community theater), the voters of Webster county (population 9,852) turned out in support of their landmarks in much higher percentages than those of Lee county (population 81,913).
It is likely that different population and tourism numbers also account for the meager number of voters in the NE Miss poll numbers compared to those of Natchez and the Gulf Coast.
Posted by Tom Howorth | March 22, 2011, 1:44 pmperhaps there can be something done similar to the way congress and senate are selected.
Posted by Thomas Rosell | March 22, 2011, 2:16 pmSee, Tom, this is why I’m a monarchist. It’s so much simpler than messy democracy :-)
The electoral college idea has merit, although I’m not sure I it would look in practice. I had thought early on that maybe a better way than open polling would have been a closed poll only for e-mail subscribers, but that’s assuming all regular readers are e-mail subscribers, which isn’t a safe assumption. Plus, it just didn’t seem right to me. On the other hand, watching really worthy properties get left in the dust while properties that I myself added to the poll at the last minute gain huge vote totals on the basis of an active and pugged-in constituency doesn’t sit right with me either.
Posted by ELMalvaney | March 22, 2011, 8:24 pmIt’s your world Malvaney us Toms just live in it. :)
Posted by Thomas Rosell | March 22, 2011, 10:44 pm