20 Years of City Council Elections
If you are interested in such things, take a look over at Dick Howe’s blog. In the upper right hand area of the front page are several hyperlinks, each related to a subject that you may find compelling. The one I find myself frequently clicking is titled “ELECTIONS.” There you find:
Welcome to our “Politics” page where we combine our two interests, Lowell Politics and Lowell History. This page consists of two sections: The first is a link to our “lowellpols” site which is an alphabetical index of everyone who has held or sought elective office in Lowell during the past fifty years. The second section of the page consists of links to the voting results of various Lowell elections.
I have been crunching the election data for this century and the information Dick provides is very helpful, especially when looking further back than the year 2000.
I was curious about total ballots cast in city elections, particularly the ratio of that total and the number of votes garnered by the elected candidates. To get a rough idea, I plotted three values; total ballots cast, 1st place finish vote total and 9th place finish vote total against time. I used 1st and 9th as a type of bookend, as 2nd thru 8th vote totals lay between them.
Going back 20 years from the 2009 city election, you see:
The graph shows, with notable exceptions in 1993 and 2001, a downward trend in participation or roughly 10,000 less ballots cast across 8 city elections. In 2003, a “bottom” was hit and there is a slight recovery of 1,000 more ballots cast across 3 city elections.
Let’s zoom back to this century: (more…)
