The final count is in and now the city council race can be dissected for clues about what happened and why. The biggest question before any political analyst would have to be; did the incumbents underperform, and if so, why? Beyond that, one wonders if the primary challengers to them made significant inroads on those incumbents.

First the raw numbers.

Of the 26,394 registered voters in West Hollywood, 5,303, or one in five (20 percent), cast ballots in the 2013 election. That marks a precipitous decline from the 2011 election, where 25 percent of the registered voters showed up at the polls. The number of registered voters increased by 1,898 this election season, but the number of voters casting ballots in 2011 was far higher, at 6,105. Of the seven elections held since 2000, the percentage of votes cast this year ranked fourth.

Ballots coming into the city council chambers for counting.

Jeffrey Prang again repeated as top vote getter gaining 2,709 votes (51 percent). John Duran took second place with 2,366, or 45 percent while Steve Martin came in third with 1,591 votes, or 30 percent. Mr. Prang and Mr. Duran won all but one precinct, the sixth, that being won by a handful of votes by Mr. Martin.

Jeff Prang pointed out on election night that the candidates who associated themselves with term limits failed, and that for term limits mastermind Steve Martin, losing “five times in a row probably indicates that his message isn’t resonating, Who knows, maybe eight times is the charm.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Martin claimed a victory of sorts; asserting that, “It is pretty obvious that we lowered the incumbents' Election Day returns to an historic low.” An analysis of past election campaigns, however, draws a different conclusion. Comparing past elections where Jeffrey Prang and John Duran stood for election or re-election this millennium, the 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2013 election seasons shows the following results:

2001:  Jeffrey Prang 2,837 (48 percent) – John Duran 2,682 (46 percent) – and Ruth Williams ran third and garnered 2412 votes (41 percent) in a field of nine with 23 percent voting.

2005: Jeff Prang again won the count with 2,923 (62 percent) while John Duran came in second with 2,521 (54 percent). In a distant third place ran George Credle, who took 1,249 (27 percent) of the vote in a six-person field. Nineteen percent of voters made votes.

2009: An even smaller field faced off in 2009; only four people ran for election to city council, among them Lauren Meister, known as spokesperson behind the successful Measure C (term limits) campaign. In that election, Mr. Prang again took first place with 2,751 (67 percent), John Duran second with 2,542 (61 percent) and Ms. Meister 1,530 (37 percent) of the 4,136 votes (18 percent of registered) cast.

The team of ballot counters tallying the results by precinct on election night.

It would seem then, that it was not Steve Martin’s campaign that kept the percentages of the votes for the incumbents lower than usual this year, but the larger number of people in the race. The numbers also show, contrary to Mr. Martin’s assertion, that Mr. Prang polled three percentage points lower in 2001 (48 percent to 51 percent in 2013) while only John Duran polled lower than he has historically - one point less in 2013 than 2001 (45 to 46 percent).

In an E mal to supporters, Mr. Martin blamed negative campaigning for his loss, saying, “We would have won had it not been for the last minute blitz of false accusations and mudslinging.”

That claim, however, also fails to bear up under scrutiny. A look at historic voting patterns for Steve Martin show that he failed to come close to a victory in any election this millennium, beginning in 2003, the year he lost his seat, when Mr. Martin won 1,852 votes of 5,041 cast, or 37 percent of the total.

Running again four years later, in 2007, he won 1,867 of 4,843 votes cast for 39 percent of the vote. In 2011, his vote total climbed in raw numbers to 2,320 of 6,120, but his percentage of the vote fell one point to 38 percent. In this, the 2013 election, his vote total fell precipitously to 1,591, or just 30 percent of the vote, a 21 percent drop off in support for his candidacy from years past.

Furthermore, Mr. Martin contends that his message was “so threatening to the ‘powers at be’ that they spent more than $100,000 to destroy our campaign.”

City clerk Corey Schafer going over questionable ballots in an effort to decipher validity.

How much of the drubbing that Mr. Martin took at the polls had to do with money spent on Mr. Duran’s behalf? An independent expenditure group - Friends of West Hollywood, A Campaign Supporting John Duran for City Council 2013 – raised $49,750 for John Duran and Mr. Duran himself raised $108,025, making the amount raised per vote $66.68.

Jeffrey Prang raised less than half that per vote, bringing in $30.16 per vote cast for him.

The campaigns will not say with specificity how much of that money was spent to defeat Steve Martin and how much went into positive campaign efforts on behalf of Mr. Duran, but no one believes that the level of anti-Martin campaigning reached the $100,000 mark.

Steve Martin, never a big fundraiser, collected roughly the same amount of money he does each time out - $28,145 or $17.69 per vote. He promised to continue to make guerrilla war on the council in between elections, saying, “I look forward to working with each of you to return our City back to its residents. We have a new generation of potential leaders and we are not letting the corrupt powers rule in peace.”

More than dumping a pile of money into the effort to keep Mr. Martin at bay, though, actions in this election showed how much the city council wanted to prevent Mr. Martin from regaining his seat on the dais. Despite a tremendous public falling out between John Heilman/Abbe Land and John Duran that began with the outdoor smoking ordinance and continued and became worse during and after the 2011 election in which John Duran supported John D’Amico against their slate, the pair of political enemies worked for Mr. Duran’s and Mr. Prang’s reelection by making telephone calls to constituents on the incumbents’ behalf.

The victors, John Duran and Jeff Prang.

In addition to that, a man who once ran alongside Mr. Martin turned against him, recording a robo-call for the independent expenditure group set up to support Mr. Duran that slammed Steve Martin. Community and animal rights activist Ed Buck told WeHo News, “The more you know [Steve Martin] the less you like him. As WeHo residents get to know him, the worse he looks to them. He’s so blatant in his lies and when caught in a lie he tries to cover it up in a joke or deflect the subject.

“But what I really got to me about this election was the toxic input of Steve and his supporters,” he said. “My goal is to get new people involved in making positive contributions to the community. As residents we ought to have a say in what goes on, but the Steve Martin idea that ‘they’re all corrupt; the city’s out to get you; the developers run the town’ only serves to split the community into factions without fostering discussion. It shows up on the comments in other online news publications and in his public pronouncements and only makes it harder to do good things in the city for its residents.”

West Hollywood Municipal Election Results UNOFFICIAL 11 of 11 Precincts Reporting
Jeffrey Prang	2709
Christopher T. Landavazo	917
Rusty Wiggs	67
Steve Martin	1591
Nick Garzilli	252
Tristan Schukraft	418
John Jude Duran	2366
Tom Demille	226
Sam Borelli	929
MEASURE C
Yes	3139
No	1888
Unofficial Results by Precinct
Unofficial West Hollywood Results by Precinct (click for larger image)
Unofficial Los Angeles  Results by Precinct  (click for larger image)