NumbersCentral: Danville City Council Undervotes

We’re continuing to play with the numbers from last Tuesday’s Danville City Council elections. In this NumbersCentral article, we’re going to take a look at the “undervoting” issue and how it played out in all of Danville’s precincts.

In the May 3rd election, voters elected five candidates to Danville City Council. 6221 voters cast ballots in the election, so that means there was a maximum of 31105 possible votes cast. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

There’s nothing illegal about casting less votes than seats available, and there are lots of reasons that voters do that. We’re not going to get into those reasons here, we’re just going to look at what the numbers showed. Let’s take a look at that now.

So what does this mean? Let’s get a Big Board out.

• The undervotes in this year’s election were significantly higher than the previous election. Only 83.9% of the available votes were cast versus around 91% in 2014.
• There’s no high correlation factor this year, but there’s a medium one that rings true every Danville City Council election. Undervoting happens more frequently in the black-driven precincts.
• We can’t tell what actual percentage of ballots cast had undervotes on it. A ballot that had only one vote would significantly drop the total average. As an example, the overall average of approximately 4.2 votes could have came from a representative sample of five ballots with a distribution of (5, 4, 4, 4, 4) votes or a sample of (5, 5, 5, 5, 1) votes.

We can’t draw any firm statistical conclusions from this data, but the overall pattern is enough to be significant. That makes this a NumbersCentral article that’s more for show than for detailed analysis.

We’ve got more coming up here on SouthsideCentral!