BREAKING: Elorza poll watchers show 3,500 vote lead

A contact within the Elorza campaign has told me that their figures compiled by poll watchers show Elorza winning with a comfortable 3,500 vote margin. Given a hypothetical turnout figure of 35,000 voters, which is substantially higher that the usual midterm turnout, that would be a margin of roughly 10 percentage points, depending on the Harrop count.

Poll watchers, which Elorza had at each of the city’s 80 polling places, mark each voter’s name as poll workers call them out. They then look up the name on their anotated voter rolls, which also track that voters support level for the candidate. With modern data tools, poll watchers have become a critical part of election campaigns and they generally predict the outcome with great accuracy.

UPDATE 11/4, 7:30am — Preliminary numbers from the Board of Elections show 35,472 votes cast for mayor of Providence. Elorza received 3,375 more votes than Cianci, making his margin of victory 9.5 percentage points. Just sayin…