Examining The CCSA Juggernaut: Who Bought Nick Melvoin?
The following graph shows relative voter turnout at the polls (“At-poll”) and via mail (“VBM” == Vote By Mail).
Please refer back and forth to it while reading slowly through the text. It’s not always intuitive what it shows and what it means, but there’s a lot to derive.
The voter results are displayed by voting “neighborhood”. LAUSD’s fourth district is very extended with three distinctly different regions, Hollywood (green type), the westside south of the Santa Monica Mountains (red type), and West Valley north of them (blue type). These are not conventionally bound neighborhoods and many stakeholders understand these designations differently. For this purpose a polling place’s address was assigned the LA Time’s 2008 mapping project’s neighborhood name. Occasionally when a polling place fell just outside of a neighborhood already populated by polling places, it was included with the others across boundaries in the interest of summarizing data.
Categorizing neighborhoods consistently and accurately for all parameters (e.g., votes, LAUSD4 and neighborhood boundaries, ethnicity, median house price) is difficult, but miscategorization “dilutes” the “signal”, resulting in more conservative findings of “less” rather than “more” relationship. This project could easily have assigned neighborhood designations more rigorously but for a big picture, quick understanding and because the resulting bias is likely to be weaker than stronger, it seems acceptable.
The data for each neighborhood are plotted as a function of the relationship between vote ratio for VBM and vote ratio for At-poll ballots.
The VBM (Vote By Mail) ratio of ballots is a single number that relates as a fraction (converted to a decimal for plotting) the number of votes received for Melvoin divided by those received for Zimmer in advance of election day, by mail. If they were equal, that ratio would be 1. If the ratio is >1, then Melvoin received more votes than Zimmer; Melvoin’s VBM support in this neighborhood is stronger than Zimmer’s VBM support. If the ratio is <1 then Zimmer received more votes than Melvoin; Zimmer’s VBM support in this neighborhood is stronger than Melvoin’s. Note these ratios aren’t exactly reciprocal – you can’t have a ratio <0 but you can have a ratio >1 that’s a huge number. This is OK. The numbers never got out-of sight like that.
Likewise the At-poll ballots are displayed as a single number that is a ratio of Melvoin’s/Zimmer’s votes cast at the polling booth on election day. Numbers Examining The CCSA Juggernaut: Who Bought Nick Melvoin? – redqueeninla:
