This is going back to last year’s election for Mayor of Chatham-Kent, Ontario, Canada. Chatham-Kent is a bit different than many places. The municipality is considered the entire county. Below is the map and legend outlining the municipality.
Here are the results of the election. Mayor Randy Hope was re-elected with 31.3% of the votes.
There are couple of different ways I wanted to look into the election. You can see that Mayor Hope had the most votes in all 6 Wards. Though First Past the Post as a voting system has its own issues, there’s really not much I can do to look at how differently the outcome might have been with a different one.
Below, I focused on how all the candidates performed in each ward against their average result. The average of each candidate for each ward was compared to the average without the ward of comparison. This prevents the comparison you’re trying to make from affecting itself.
You can quickly pull from this table that Mayor Hope outperformed in Ward 1.
His biggest competitor was Crew. Some pretty close results.
In every Ward, he carried the popular vote. Though, certainly not by large margins except for the 1st Ward. With the winner selected, let’s jump into looking at how Mayor Hope won. Here are the results by division.
It jumps out the Ward 1 was where he did the best. For the most part, he was otherwise pretty consistent across all other Wards.
And here it is actually mapped out. The darker the area, the higher percentage of the vote that he got.
And now zooming into the highest population center, Ward 6, the town of Chatham.
Again, darker is more votes. It’s interesting to which neighbourhoods had the highest support for the re—election of Mayor Hope.
And finally a look at voting results between 2010 and 2014. Mayor Hope finished with a higher percentage of the votes in 2010. This was partly due to 1 less candidate, but there also seems to be a greater split of votes between candidates and more viable candidates in 2014.
As you can see, Mayor Hope took a smaller percentage of the vote in 2014 compared to 2010 in all but 1 Ward.
The data for the elections was taken here. Maps and charts were created by me in R and excel.