Friday, November 20, 2009

Ventriloquism

Hey, look at that!  I got Goldy to speak for me on 2009 voter turnout…

In actuality, we’d been talking about the general election and the (mis)perception of low turnout in King County for quite some time.  Goldy had previously written a couple of “election factoids” (here and here) as a followup to his earlier rants (here and here) about the Washington Secretary of State’s crusade against the state’s current “postmark” deadline for casting ballots.

For reasons that are no longer completely clear to me, those conversations inspired me to undertake the analysis he discusses today—voter turnout in this month’s big-city mayoral elections.  The spreadsheet and its data analysis are my work, but Goldy draws his own conclusions (and turns his own phrases) about what can be seen in those numbers.

I will point out that it wasn’t always easy to find the information presented in my spreadsheet.  For some cities, I had to go to the precinct-level canvass report to locate the total number of ballots cast (including blanks undervotes), and/or the voter registration data.  That entailed summing up the values from each precinct to derive an otherwise-unreported city count.  Thankfully, none of the cities in which such machinations were necessary have anywhere close to the ~1000 precincts here in Seattle.  Whew!!