[TRU Research] Data on voting by income

Mon Sep 28 09:49:10 PDT 2020

I’ll be working on it next weekend most likely!. (Gotta do my TRU work too after all...) So anything we can come up with this week is great!

> On Sep 28, 2020, at 9:44 AM, Jim Walseth <jim.walseth at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Katie et al,
> I'll do what I can in Tableau Public with this (anyone can BTW). Maps are my speciality so that could happen. And I can make prettier plots with correlation lines. Maybe not until this evening though. When is the Crosscut article due?
> Jim
> 
>> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 8:47 AM Katie Wilson <katie at transitriders.org> wrote:
>> Interesting! Thanks Doug, this is great. I wonder why they stop counting after 91%, that’s a weird stopping point. 
>> 
>> I don’t know about converting the districts. And actually I’m just realizing, since the voter turnout data is % of registered voters, ideally we’d want to combine the two datasets to get a picture of percentage of eligible voters to who voted.
>> 
>> If we can’t convert the districts, I guess from the point of view of putting the registered voter correlations into words, it would help to be able to say something like:
>> 
>> In the (10% or 20%? not sure which is best) of districts with the lowest median income, average voter registration was X%, while for districts with the highest median income it was Y%
>> 
>> and similarly for the % of households below 200% FPL measure, though looking at the graphs it appears that the median income correlation will be much clearer. It’s kind of interesting how the dots for the highest percentages of low-income households are really all of over the place when it comes to voter registration. I wonder why that is.
>> 
>>> On Sep 27, 2020, at 10:09 PM, Douglas Sexton <sextondouglas at comcast.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Definitely can see some correlations. They stop counting after 91% voter registration. I have ugly knockoff excel so hopefully you can make prettier graphs than me. I'm not sure how hard it is to convert voting districts to census districts so I haven't tried 2A/2B. Still open for someone else to try!
>>> <image.png> 
>>> <image.png>
>>>> On 09/27/2020 9:38 PM Katie Wilson <katie at transitriders.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Awesome, thank you Doug!
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sep 27, 2020, at 9:24 PM, Douglas Sexton < sextondouglas at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I made a csv file with the census voter registration and income data combined. I also attached the json that was tricky to find with the income data and a script I used to convert it to csv in case anyone wants to check my work or use it for something else. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Haven't made the scatter plot yet! Will do that in a sec.
>>>>>> On 09/27/2020 8:13 PM sextondouglas < sextondouglas at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Giving it a go right now
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> -------- Original message --------
>>>>>> From: Katie Wilson < katie at transitriders.org>
>>>>>> Date: 9/27/20 7:50 PM (GMT-08:00)
>>>>>> To: research at transitriders.org 
>>>>>> Subject: [TRU Research] Data on voting by income
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Hey all,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I’m going to shamelessly use this list to ask for some data help for a Crosscut column I’m working on, not directly TRU-related. Nationally there’s  a strong correlation between voting rates and income— as you might expect, poor people tend not to vote. I was looking for something about the strength of this trend in Washington state or King County, and I found  this story, which is good but not super detailed. However, there is also this map and data set: https://www.communitiescount.org/voter-registration-voter-turnout 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I played around with the layers in the map a little, enough to know there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. It looks like you can download .csvs, but I’m not adept enough with the format to figure out quickly how to get to what I want. I’m interested specifically in correlations between:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 1. Percent registered voters by census tract
>>>>>> 2. 2019 general election voter turnout by precinct
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> And, in the King County demographics layer —> Income:
>>>>>> A. Median household income
>>>>>> B. Percent below 200% of federal poverty level
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I’m interested to see how each of 1. and 2. correlate with each of A. and B. Perhaps in the form of scatter graphs? 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> If anyone is interested and has time to dig into this, let me know— and maybe reply on this list if you’re working on it so no one is duplicating efforts unless they want to.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Thanks!
>>>>>> Katie
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Katie Wilson
>>>>>> General Secretary
>>>>>> Transit Riders Union
>>>>>> https://transitriders.org 
>>>>>> 206-781-7204
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The Transit Riders Union is a democratic organization of working and poor  people, including students, seniors, and people with disabilities, taking control over our own lives, and building up the power we  need to change society for the good of humanity and of the planet. We will  fight to preserve, expand, and improve the public transportation system in  Seattle and beyond, so that every human being has access to safe,  affordable, and reliable public transit.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I also write opinions for Crosscut.  Sign up for my newsletter here.
>>>>>> 
>>>>> <CensusVoterRegistrationAndIncomeData.csv> <parse.py> <query1-398.json>
>>>> 
>> 
>> 
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