Does Lake Worth suffer from Electoral Dysfunction?

These are a bunch of random thoughts about yesterday's election, in no apparent order:

• Our former Mayor Rene Varela should have stayed out his full term - doing that would have avoided all the expense and non-sense.  With a run-off election, which pretty much everyone expected, now we push the decision to the middle of July.  This is less than a month before the qualifying period for the November election.  I maintain it would have been better to have the Best Commission Ever appoint someone and have them defend the decision in the November election.  I also think that this whole thing came to be much earlier in the minds of the various operatives before it became general public knowledge.
• I am surprised at the relatively high turnout.  Most people were predicting a turnout of about 1,000 voters.  I thought it might be as high as 1,800, but to have just over 2,500 come out in late June - with 200 absentee ballots says that people were paying attention.  Click here for a link to the Supervisor of Elections website for the actual results.
• I thought it likely that there would be a vote split between Ramiccio and Maxwell and that proved to be correct, but I thought Lisa would out-pace Tom.  I guess that is where fundraising, many mailers and name recognition helps.  Maxwell happened to be weakest in the Highridge Road precinct where Ramiccio got 74, Waterman got 73 and Maxwell got 17.
• Was that a blender for making Margaritas on the trailer being towed around by the Waterman truck?  Wow, these people are cooking with gas.
• Heard that someone wearing a Waterman t-shirt was inside the polling location on E Street in District #1.  Also heard that Pam Lopez said it was o.k. since the law had changed.  This person was an actual poll worker apparently.  People at other precincts were being blocked om going inside if they were wearing a candidate's t-shirt.  Does anyone have a picture of this?  Did anyone actually see this?  This is third hand information so treat it as such.
• I have a feeling that the Waterman people expected to do better than they did and now they find themselves in a little bit of a pickle.  I think Tom Ramiccio represents a stable influence to a lot of people not satisfied with the chaotic nature of the city's recent history.  I think his campaign did a good job of proclaiming that Lake Worth's last glory days were due to him.  Not saying that is entirely the case, but I think it is the perception.
• Jo-Ann Golden and I had the longest conversation in recent memory.  It went something like this.  Jo-Ann:  "Did you get caught in the rain?" Wes:  "No."