Wednesday, November 19, 2008

History of voter turn-out in Vancouver


This handy-dandy chart* illustrates a simple issue in Vancouver: there is no "normal" voter turn-out. Voter turn-out is down this election, in both absolute and percentage terms, but it's up in some polls, and the overall drop was just under 8000 voters. The numbers aren't great, but they're still higher than by-elections (that bar is set pretty low, I know), and far higher than any election prior to 2005.

Why did the number of registered voters fluctuate so widely before 2005? There were no changes to who was eligible, as near as I can tell. The city adopted the Provincial Voters list, I think, which had far more people on it, but was that really why 30,000 more people voted in 2005? Was it simply a matter of extra voters' cards being mailed out to 120,000 more people?


* Excel doesn't allow for multiple x- or y-axes so I had to cobble this together using the paint function on Appleworks. What a ridiculous restriction.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good looking, Brenton. I wish I had your rigor, patience and tenacity. My own election analysis lies in ruins on my desktop.