Raise the Hammer

While it may be true that "no destiny-altering votes have taken place because of imbalances in our ward representation" during the current term of council,

To clarify, I was referring to the fact that Wards 7 & 8 have not suffered in any critical project decision-making vote that, for the sake of argument, might have turned out differently had there been an additional ward on 'the Mountain'. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) I was not addressing anything outside of that, especially as I agree with what John has said here.

(And I'm obliged to note that The Hamiltonian has received a response from Councillors Whitehead and Duvall:

http://www.thehamiltonian.net/2012/04/you-may-recall-that-we-asked-question.html It seems that

...as Councillors that represent the two most populated wards in the city, we have spent a lot of time meeting and speaking with residents of our wards in the last several years. And at no time did anyone come forward and stated that we need more politicians, need to spend more money and that the current governance structure is not effective.

Comment edited by mystoneycreek on 2012-04-20 08:26:15

Funny how some people like to wax poetic about the need for more engagement at election time from less affluent voters, but then resist simple changes like this that seek to put them on a balanced playing field. It reminds me of the loud refrains of 'nobody will be allowed to drive a car anymore!' anytime it's suggested that pedestrians actually have a sidewalk to walk on, or bikes get the odd, disconnected bike lane next to 4 lanes of traffic.

Could you please post the data you used to create the graph? Thanks.

They're in my prior article linked above. X axis is income per capita. Y axis is the reciprocal of population, multiplied by a scaling factor of about 68,000 (to make the y-intercept equal to 1).

Terry Whitehead irritates me more and more and I sincerely hope he gets ousted next election. Just shuffle Ward 14 into more of 12 and then 12 into 11 and 8, and then 11 into 6,7 and 8.

Great post, John. Thanks for sharing, and highlighting the class dimensions of this issue.

The graph is a bit confusing to me. Seems to me if you have to interpret a graph then it's not doing its job. Would it make sense to plot a line showing the mean between the wards? Then you might see the extremely important observation graphically: 'In other words, you get one vote for Council just for being alive, and another vote for each sixty thousand dollars you (and your neighbours) earn'

I'll try to add the line of best fit later today and send it Ryan to update the article. No access to a real computer at present.

Some might say the first question to ask statistically is if there is a significant correlation shown in these data. If R2 is 0.25 then the correlation (r) is 0.5
With 13 degrees of freedom the critical value for p=0.05 is 0.55 If we can agree that this is a reasonable value for p then we should reject the hypothesis that the relationship is significant.
There is 1 ward with a quite high Representation value (>4). If we were to reject that ward as an outlier then I imagine things would be much less impressive. To determine the reasonableness of doing this it would be very nice to have the raw data so that we could measure its distribution.

With so few data points, the leverage exerted from that single outlier is pretty huge. If you excluded it, I agree, the regression line would be almost flat.

Even without the raw data, you can see that the remaining data points (excluding the outlier) hover between 1 and 2.8ish. I calculated 2.1 as a rough estimate of the mean based on estimates of the points on the graph.

Again, using rough estimates of where those points lie, I calculated a standard deviation of 0.3, which means the outlier with a score of 4 would be more than 6 s.d.'s from the mean (a pretty good reason to exclude).

The poor are ignored because they have no political power and are off the radar as target audiences during our so called "democratic" election process.

Will changing ward boundaries,really change anything?

The emphasis should be on organizing, building solidarity amongst community members, to infrom the masses about why the structure will live under is not accountable or transparent, a system that rolls over so many of our fellow human beings in the name of profits.

A slightly different take on the issue that yields some interesting data:
Below are some stats of the different wards sorted by household income.

ward income residents voters residents per voter
2 41307 37815 19424 1.946818369
3 45481 39910 23670 1.6861005492
4 51879 35635 23721 1.5022553855
5 57429 38965 25755 1.5129101145
1 63662 30080 20767 1.4484518708
6 63963 40645 28266 1.4379466497
7 67749 58395 40571 1.4393285845
9 76151 26695 19235 1.3878346764
8 78043 48400 34259 1.412767448
10 83741 24975 19350 1.2906976744
11 86334 25900 24655 1.0504968566
13 90585 24695 18439 1.3392808721
14 93633 15920 12147 1.3106116737
15 106619 25490 18609 1.3697673169
12 126715 31040 24449 1.269581578
totals: 504560 353317

While there is a reasonable correlation between average household income and total residents in the ward (R=0.5 when fit to a power function) it is of course the case that all the residents in a ward will not be eligible voters. Looking up the number of eligible voters in each ward from the 2010 election results available here:
http://old.hamilton.ca/clerk/election/2010-election-results/default.asp
gives the number in the chart above labeled as "voters". Running a regression on average household income vs number of eligible voters in each ward yields a very low correlation (R=0.2 when fit to a power function).
As can be seen in the rightmost column the lower income wards have more residents per voter than the higher income wards.
So, it seems to me that the evidence found thus far does not show that the influence of an individuals vote is significantly diluted by virtue of the fact that they happen to reside in a low income ward.
The problem might arise in the future however should some sort of change result in a larger percentage of low income ward residents becoming eligible voters.

So you don't see the fact that a larger portion of the population in these wards aren't legally allowed to vote as a sign that they see less political representation on a per-person basis?

Well, if someone is not eligible to vote then they are not represented but redrawing the ward boundaries is not going to make them eligible to vote.
They may be under 18, not citizens, or for whatever reason just not have their name on the voters list. None of these factors is dependent on ward size or location as far as I can see, or am I missing something?

The fact that wards with more voters:representatives also have larger proportions of the population ineligable to vote seems especially relevant here. It suggests that lower incomes correlate well with both. Either way it leads to less representation.

The registered voters in low-income wards see problems with larger amounts of ineligable voters for the same reason wealthy voters from poorer wards suffer. Having neighbours who are politically neglected will affect the neighbourhood as a whole

One is not going to get an exact match of data here because the information regarding voters is from the 2011 election results, and the other data are from the 2006 census, and obviously there will have been changes during that 5 year period. That said, in 2011 there were 353,317 eligible voters in the city. The census data, available here:
http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/92-591/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1=3525005&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=hamilton&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=35&B1=All&Custom=
shows the city had 105,750 residents who were Canadian citizens, but would have been ineligible to vote because they were under the age of 18, and a further 30,065 (all ages) who were ineligible because they were not citizens. Adding these to the eligible voters gives a total of 489,132 which accounts for 97% of the total population of 504,560.

This does leave 15,428 ineligible voters unaccounted for but the census shows that 12,664 residents had lived in Hamilton for less than 1 year. It often takes some time after moving to a new city before ones name finds it's way on to the voters list. I think an argument could be made that in advance of an election a media campaign reminding new residents to register and arranging things to make that process easy could be worthwhile.

Given that the data is from 2 data sets collected 5 years apart I think that's a pretty complete explanation of who the ineligible voters are.

If we accept the ideas that the right to vote is a prerogative of being a citizen, and that parents can be generally relied upon to reflect both their own interests and the interests of their children at election time, and that, as I have tried to show, there is not a significant correlation between average income in a ward and the number of eligible voters in that ward then it seems to me that the case for realigning ward bounderies based on income has still not been shown

No, but it may allow them to be better represented. A councillor represents ALL residents of their ward, whether they vote, are ineligible to vote, or choose not to vote at all.

What's missing from this analysis is the count of ineligible voters.

If I remember my Hamilton demography correctly, families tend to be more common the further you get from King and James, which might account for some of the residents-per-voter fluctuation. That and the trickle-out of residents in wards 1-5 since amalgamation will distort the picture somewhat.

Interesting that 7 and 8, which usually have the highest voter turnout, seem to be actually less civically engaged per elector than wards like 2 and 3, which usually take silver and gold for worst voter turnout relative to electorate population.

On balance, though, the push for more equitable distribution of ward power will probably impact the mid-mountain wards more than any others (eg. make four or five wards from wards 6-8). The old city had a polar 5:5 balance of upper-to-lower city that kept interests fairly balanced. Now, it's more like a 5:10 balance.

I never thought I would read such a remark on this website. Further marginalization of people is counter productive on all fronts.

how is this marginalization? If you do not contribute to the pot why should you get to decide how to spend it? It is way to easy to spend other peoples money. that's one of the biggest problems that we face in our society. It is very easy to say you should buy this or you need to do this with your property. if you want something bought or funded then come up with the money and do it. Don't like the fact that the church is being torn down then come up with the millions it takes to rehab the church because the congregation, the owners cannot. if you cannot fund it then shut up and let the owners do what they have to do to survive and keep on going. you want better transit then come up with the money and fund it. pretty easy isn't it? Detroit did just that. they wanted LRT and got funding from the private sector for most of the money. That is the way it should be. easy peasy.

The market will reach a natural equilibrium and everything will turn out fine!

Is this really a new way of looking at things? The rich already have more political power than the poor. And you think it's working so well that we should make it official?

Let me ask: Is Dr. John asking greater representation for people who vote the least in any election? Look at the stats, some of our poorest wards, turn out the least when they cast ballots. If that's the case, the few wealthier in the poorer areas are the ones who make the choices on who gets elected. Increase representation for these wards and the richest in the poorest areas will have the power to elect more people. How does that help the marginalized?

Those who are elected are still bound to represent their entire Ward, and the City as a whole. I think we also have some work to do on that front, and ward boundary reform is a good first step. We need to make sure all constituents have relatively equal access to their representative. 1:60:000 vs. 1:20,000 is just too much of a disparity.