More Chapel Hill election turnout analysis

2013 Chapel Hill Election Turn Out

In spite of the efforts of candidates, college dems, league of women voters and many others turnout for last November’s Chapel Hill election was low. Here is an analysis of the 5313 people who voted in the Chapel Hill Orange County precincts. (Turnout was about 11%) (Total number of Durham County Chapel Hill voters was under 300. Including it would not change very much the analysis.)The data base from the Board of Elections can be sorted by many categories. I looked at age and race. (Latino is not an official category so I estimated it using voter names.) Several of us campaigned a lot in "minority" precincts but it looks like minority turnout was lower than average. Also note that very few college aged residents voted. For example, according to the data base: at Hinton James 5 people voted, 2 from Ehringhause, 12 from Baity Hill and 7 from Paul Hardin Dorm. Fifty percent of the voters are at least 60 years old and less than 10% are under 30 even though thousands of university students live in Chapel Hill.  The May 6 Primary will occur at the end of the semester for UNC. Most students who vote will probably do it via early voting or absentee. The Democratic primary election will determine the winners in Orange County for Commissioners and other county offices. I hope more people will vote this May than last November.

Race/Ethnic Group        # voters              Age  #voters

Asian

158 (3.0%)

18    27 (0.5%)

 

African American

201 (3.8%)

19   20  (0.4%)

American Indian

6

20   24

Other

109

21   25

2 or more races

28

22   44  (0.8%)

Undesignated

80

23   39

White

4731 (89.0%)

101   1

Latino

50  (1%)

Under 30 years old: 378 (7.1%) Median age of voters: 60 years

Issues: 

Comments

is in ethnic_code field -- HL is the value you're looking for.  I see 47 out of 5306 CH in OC voters in Nov. 

Thanks, The data set I received did not have that Hispanic/Latino HLfield. I counted 49 ( and rounded to 50) so I guess I matched pretty well the data base. Loren

I find it much easier to get this stuff online - ftp://www.app.sboe.state.nc.us/data/.  ncvhis68.zip is who has voted in OC.  ncvoter68.zip is who is registered (with their demo data) in OC.  Join them together with voter_reg_num

These numbers look no different than those you see in other non-presidential years.

Are you really surprised! Gary Kahn

Loren,Is that percentage turnout based on the total number of registered voters for Chapel Hill?  That would require ~48K registered voters which seems a bit high.

Current counts of CH voters in OC are 44k.  Only 37.5k are active, however (meaning they've actually voted semi-recently).

I was actually using the county turnout of 11.78% and typed it as 11%. If you use the numbers given to us from last June for each precinct in Chapel Hill and the voter turnout you don't get much better. Using just the town data for Chapel Hill 5313/43865= 12.11%. Durham precincts are about the same. Country Club, East Franklin, Lincoln, Mason Farm and Northside had the lowest turnout of less than 5%. This is problable due the large number of students who live there and don't vote.   Weaver Dairy Sat (Carol Woods) won the turnout prize at 77%. My home precinct Kings Mill came in 2nd at 30%. Coker Hills (23%), Estes Hills (20%), and Battle Park (18%) round up the list of top five precincts. Majority rules but plurality votes. Hope more vote in May.

 

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