It’s been an exciting year in Portland city politics. Three City Council seats were being on the ballot in May, and two of the most hotly contested were Seat 2, the replacement election for the late Nick Fish, and Seat 4, with current Commissioner Chloe Eudaly facing off with two high-profile challengers.
We’ll be releasing our analysis of the Seat 4 race later this week. In this posting, we are looking at the August 11th run-off special election between Loretta Smith and Dan Ryan.
Continue readingToday Resilient Elections’ Mike Alvarez speaks with Dr. Ines Levin of the University of California, Irvine. Addressing research on Elections Forensics, Mike and Ines demonstrate the utility of robust statistics and machine learning tools in Political Science methodology.
Today Resilient Elections is joined by Adona and Romero to discuss Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) in California. Alongside Director Paul Gronke, panelists debrief a recent study on AVR and highlight opportunities for academic-administrative partnerships in anticipation of November’s election.
Today Resilient Elections is joined by Ericka Haas and Steve Trout to continue their discussions on academic and administrative partnerships.
Watch Resilient Elections contributor R. Michael Alvarez’ crash course in working with Local Elections Officials. The elections data expert from Caltech goes over best practices for data gathering and analysis at the scope of local election administration. He invites investigators to conceptualize their research as a collaboration, allowing for stronger synergy across the academic-public alliance.
Today Resilient Elections, a collaboration addressing questions of election management, talks with Professor Lonna Atkeson of the University of New Mexico.
EVIC is happy to announce the launch of Resilient Elections, a video series addressing questions of elections management in increasingly uncertain times. The project is framed by the central question “How can scholars and community leaders work together to form an election system that centers equity and will endure an ever-dynamic America?”
Continue reading
By Canyon Foot ’20, Paul Manson ’01, Paul Gronke, and Jay Lee ’19
Motivation:
Canyon Foot and Paul Gronke have recently posted two analyses of the Portland City Council races. For these analyses, we hoped to understand the spatial and demographic variation of support for City Council and other contests defined by the geographic and political boundaries in Multnomah County.
What we are doing: Spatial joins between Census Tracts and precincts:
Continue reading →In order to answer these questions, researchers often rely on estimates produced by the US Census using the American Community Survey (ACS). Unlike the Decennial Census, the ACS samples a percentage of households each year to ask about detailed demographics including income, employment, housing, etc. These are then aggregated at various geographies from the block group up to counties, metropolitan areas and states. These smaller units have smaller samples, and thus more error. As such, researchers often must work with a larger area because of its greater sample size (and smaller error).