Today is Nonpartisan Primary day in N’awlins. (Nonpartisan Election day is currently scheduled for May 20 [**but see below] . The Runoff. / Yes but runoff between Whom?)

Note: various other offices besides Mayor are Up too ~ including Orleans Parish Assessors (from 7 Districts), contests which NOLA.com / Times-Picayune reports have become Important and Hot due to the huge significance of post-Katrina property-assessment valuations. / NOLA.com will carry live updated results after 8 p.m.

[but Prior to then, any politiconerdy irishtrojans who might inadvertently drudge up any unethically-leaked unreliable Exit Poll data, and/or illegally-released misleading actualvote Early Returns, sleazily published upon any unspeakably evil sirenshrieking blogsites are cordially required to post them here as Updates. Thank you. :]

I won’t Blockquote it but I highly recommend this report on the Election Officials’ herculean & heroic but nonetheless foreDoomed efforts to insulate the vote against the inevitable Litigation by the Politicoes. Yes, it’s the Sacred’s Last Stand against the Profane. :) See especially the Jesse Jackson stuff. [**Prediction: in the unlikely event that Ray Nagin finishes 3rd or worse today, some Court somewhere will Further postpone the already-delayed May 20 runoff to allow more time for the unmeritorious Lawsuits to be heard. / Do you Know what it Means to Miss New Orleans. ;]

Dateline yesterday, today’s New York Times reports:

…Nobody knows how many people will show up to vote here on Saturday and whether most will be black, as in elections for a generation, or white. Nobody knows exactly how many people are in the city. A white mayor may rule at City Hall for the first time in nearly 30 years, or maybe not.

“We don’t know the racial composition of the electorate,” Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans, said. “We don’t know the racial composition of the evacuees.”

…For all the confusion, there is general agreement on the three leading candidates, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and Ron Forman, a local businessman. The latter two candidates are white, and if they are the winners on Saturday, it will represent a significant upheaval in the city’s power structure.

As many as 200,000 of the city’s 290,000 registered voters may be living outside New Orleans. Most are probably black, as were two-thirds of the 20,000 who already voted, according to the secretary of state’s calculations. The low participation indicates to Ms. Howell that most evacuees will not be voting. Having failed to delay the vote in court, many civil rights advocates have argued for weeks that the cumbersome absentee process would disenfranchise black voters.

…In an unusual move, Louisiana’s secretary of state has come from Baton Rouge to take charge of the vote.

There will probably be confusion on Saturday, but so has there been throughout an electoral season that feels grafted onto the city’s overriding preoccupation — whether New Orleans has any future at all.

[> “unusual”, to be Sure / “probably”, Indeed :) ~the guestblogger :]

…No candidate addressed what many said was the central issue, whether some flooded neighborhoods should be rebuilt. Over and over, voters interviewed this week — especially white ones — said they were looking for someone who would take a stand, and break with the past.

…The fault line is race. Most black voters are rallying around Mr. Nagin, expressing hurt over the scorn now aimed at him by former white supporters. The attacks on Mr. Nagin, derided by many whites as indecisive, flip-flopping and refusing to acknowledge that some neighborhoods might be too vulnerable to rebuild, are taken personally.

A bastion of black political power is seen as slipping away with the city’s changed demographics, and Mr. Nagin, not previously popular with most black voters, is regarded as the only defense.

“I don’t know nobody else but Nagin,” said Clark Joiner, a black construction worker in the Marigny neighborhood. “He didn’t do nothing wrong. He’s got a little plan. People just need to let him go along.”

Mr. Nagin “did all he could do,” Bishop B. L. Goss Sr. said in one of the old black Uptown neighborhoods on the river. “Nagin couldn’t have done no more than what he did. Let him stay there and finish what he did.”

Others here, weary of the trash, the ruined houses and the businesses teetering on the edge of collapse, do not relish that prospect. “All I see is indecision on the part of Nagin,” said Lance Wesa, a French Quarter jeweler who is white. Mr. Wesa said he might have to close his store for the summer.

“It’s a terrible time for this city,” Paul Poché, who is white, said as he watered his luxuriant garden in Bywater. “We’ve got to get it together, see what we can make out of the ruins. If the help’s going to come, it’s going to have come from somewhere else. Because this place is a wreck.”

Read the whole thing.