Thursday, January 10, 2013

Cheshire election history (1979 - 2011): District 2

Following my previous post on the 1st District's election results from the past few decades, I now offer you the trend and results for the 2nd District:
Unlike the 1st District, the 2nd District has not had any elections in which the winner has received less than 50% of the total potential votes. Though 1997 did see it's own unusual situation.

In 1997, 18% of the voters chose to cast no ballot, despite the fact that there was both a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot. Among the other three districts -- for the 30+ years covered -- no race exceeded an 11% blank rate, except in uncontested races.*
Finally, I've prettied up the data I pulled from the Election Records. You can find all of the Council District election results I used by clicking here.

With regard to the data in that spreadsheet, you'll probably notice some inconsistencies. For example, some years show absentee ballots segregated from precinct numbers. That's how I found it in the records. I suspect it simply got counted by different people over the years and their method of counting would change. That is, some years would see the absentee ballots counted in Town Hall by candidate, but not by precinct. Yet other years show no absentee ballots, presumably recording those ballots in each precinct's total.  And for the two most recent elections, absentee ballots by candidate, by precinct are available. So I chose to record those numbers as such.

Hope you're finding this interesting.  I do!

Tim White

* Since 1979, there have been only two uncontested races in Council Districts. Both of them were in the 1st District. The first was in 2001 with Sheldon Dill and the second was in 2011 with David Schrumm.

1 comment:

Tim White said...

I just noticed that I had the google docs "election data" restricted. Sorry about that. But I changed it, so anyone should now be able to access it.