"Students study link between victory and campaign signs" in the San Mateo Times:

BURLINGAME Connor Spiegelman and Connor Johnson had a pretty good idea who was going to win seats on the Burlingame City Council. The seventh grade students at Burlingame Intermediate School began watching the seven candidates campaign after noticing the abundance of signs all over the city. So, they looked at it as a behavioral science project, which entailed counting more than 2,000 campaign signs on Burlingame's streets and lawns. There were seven candidates vying for three four-year seats and one two-year slot in the November election. "We thought it would be interesting to see how much they (signs) influence the election," Spiegelman said. "(Now), we see it more as a polling factor showing the popularity of the candidate."

While results of their experiments showed that the candidates with the most signs won, the students don't believe that having a plethora of signs equals a win. Councilwoman Ann Keighran had 553 signs. Councilwoman Rosalie O'Mahony posted 431 signs, while Mayor Cathy Baylock had 205. Although candidates John Root and Gene Condon had more signs compared with Baylock, she still won because she was an incumbent, according to their research. It took them 20 hours to count through the signs between Oct. 16 and Nov. 6 and about 10 hours to analyze the data. Every street was given point values from one to four depending on the street's busyness. They then divided the streets into precincts.

"We knew Ann Keighran was going to win. She is very famous throughout Burlingame," Spiegelman said. "Rosalie was an incumbent (and on the council) for 15 years, so it came in as no surprise that (she won). Cathy Baylock is very popular, and Russ Cohen got more votes because Don Lembi hadn't been in office for a while." Greg Barnes, Spiegelman and Johnson's life science teacher, said their science fair project was not typical of the other assignments his students presented. They didn't place in the school's science fair, but they did get A's on their project, he said. "Does money play a role in politics?" he said. "I was excited that they wanted to take on that opportunity which has a real-world implication. With any experiment, you hope they get a real-world lesson from it." After all their work, charting the streets and analyzing the numbers, the two behavioral scientists decided that campaign signs probably do not influence how people will vote. "It matters how popular you are in Burlingame and if the person has a good record with the community," Spiegelman said.

What a great project because I have always wondered about how much a difference a sign makes. But did they take into account the large-in-your-face signs? Next project should be how many glossies can one mailbox take!

– Written by Fiona