NumbersCentral: Voter Precinct Statistics

The numbers are in and SouthsideCentral is churning them into interesting reports. In this first NumbersCentral from the May 3rd Danville City Council elections, we’re going to take a look at what precincts turned out the highest percentage of voters. We’ll also take a look at which precincts turned out the most voters.

Let’s get started. We’re treating absentee ballots as their own separate precinct because that’s the way that they’re tabulated.

Danville is divided into 16 voting precincts. There used to be 17, but the Forest Hills one was folded into the Langston precinct because of accessibility problems at Forest Hills Elementary School. Here’s the map showing the precincts…

As you can see, these precincts are very unevenly drawn. That’s perfectly legal, because Danville’s local elections aren’t based on precincts or wards. As long as you’re able to cast a vote at the precinct you’re supposed to, everything is fine with the world. The number of registered voters per precinct range from Gibson’s 369 up to Ballou Park’s 2765.

It would look a lot nicer if Danville was completely redistricted to make a better balance of voters per precinct, but that would take a lot of time & money to get it done. If Danville was ever to go to a ward-based election, that redistricting would have do be done to even out the areas of the city. Right now, it’s not causing any problems.

Anyway, let’s take a look at how many people showed up to vote on May 3rd.

That’s a very large swing of actual voters. The top seven voting precincts make up 3903 voters, and that’s almost 65% of the 6011 in-person votes that were cast on Tuesday. If you’re a candidate that wanted to get the most bang for your buck when it came to poll workers, those seven precincts were the ones to concentrate on.

These statistics also point out that the bottom five precincts (Gibson, Green St., the Museum, Stonewall & Glenwood) produced 810 actual voters. That’s less than 14% on the in-person voters in the city. If you’re a candidate with limited resources, let’s face it… those areas of the city would the last ones for you to focus on.

Ballou Park’s turnout was more than Gibson, Green St., the Museum & Stonewall combined. (698 vs. 595)

After looking at those statistics, let’s now turn to the percentage of voters that voted in-person in the precincts.

There’s good correlation to the size of the precinct and the voter turnout, so these numbers do bring up some interesting observations. Let’s pull out a Big Board for this.

• The overall voting percentage in the city was around 25% this cycle. That’s sad, but still one of the highest ones recorded for any City Council election.
• Six out of the top seven number-of-voters precincts were also in the top seven of percentage turnout.
• Five out of the bottom seven number-of-voters precincts were also in the top six of percentage turnout.
• From the best performance (Langston – 31.74%) to the worst performance (Salvation Army – 15.96%), that’s an almost doubling of the percentage of turnout.
• That also shows that working hard in the top six or seven precincts not only would have been a smart move for cutting costs, it would have also been a smart move for maximizing a candidate’s return of investment.
• Coates & Park Avenue precincts are a lot of the territory than Danville took on in the last annexation. These numbers show that area was very important in the election results.
• The North Main Hill area (Salvation Army, Stonewall, Glenwood precincts) were strong under-performers when it comes to votes being delivered in this cycle.

So there you go with the first NumbersCentral analyzing 2016’s Danville City Council voting results. We’ve got a lot more planned in the coming week or so… and it’s only here on SouthsideCentral!