The winner of the Great Geneseo Election Contest sponsored by the Geneseo Store was John ‘Toat’ LaGeorge. He was one of only two people out of 186 entires to correctly predict the order of finish of all nine candidates. The other was Liz Van Sickle, a 8th grade student at Geneseo Central School.
Toat won the tiebreaker by predicting 27.1 percent as the share of the vote that the winning Supervisor candidate would get. Apparently he was expecting a tight election, however, Will actually got 35.7 per cent. It is reported that the teacher who gave the students the form misunderstood, and told the kids not to fill out the tie-breaker or Liz might have won.
Toat received the Grand Prize of a $100 gift certificate, but store owner Neil Moynihan decided to give Liz a $50 certificate as well. Well done! It is interesting that all the so-called political experts, including me, were outdone by Toat and a 8th grader. Of course the odds of getting it all right was 2,880 to 1!
Asked whether working at the college for 32 years had sharpened his chops in political science, Toat said, “No, I just took a wild guess!”
Perhaps it is hardest for those closest to the election to see things the most clearly. After all, many people say nice things to candidates so as not to hurt their feelings. I certainly thought I would do better than I did, but that’s the way I have felt in every election. I guess you have to be an incurable optimist to participate at all!
