Comment 76129

By Bean counter (anonymous) | Posted April 23, 2012 at 02:48:29 in reply to Comment 76127

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

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