No Votes for You
Readers will know that I have an abiding interest in elections, stemming partly from my academic career, but also from my ongoing interest in how they work in contemporary democracies. This interest has become very local, as the City of London will hold a municipal election in October of this year, and a number of candidates have already declared themselves for the offices of mayor and city councillor.
I am of the view that London is currently being terribly run, and so will not vote for the incumbent mayor, Josh Morgan, who is indeed standing for office again. One Susan Stevenson, who is a councillor in the current city council, is also running again, but this time for mayor, and unless something drastic changes over the next few months, I expect she will get my vote. She is not my councilwoman, but she is, so far as I can see, the only councillor who tries to stand up for the interests of her working constituents against the utterly misguided policies of Josh and the other councillors. Her ward is one of those most harmed by homelessness and crime, and she spoke out against the current view that lawbreakers should not be incarcerated no matter how often they offend, and that it was evil to remove drug-addled street people from the sidewalks in front of businesses.
I don’t think she has a hope in hell of winning, and the reason for my belief is one of the reasons for this post.
I start with this fact. Turnout in the 2022 London municipal election was 25% of registered voters. That means it was somewhat less than 25% of those eligible to vote, because not everyone registers, even though it is an incredibly easy thing to do in Canada. There is every reason to expect that percentage will be similar in this 2026 election.
Hold that thought, and let us travel now to the Great State of New York, in the US of A. They just had a primary election for positions in the US House. House members are elected for only a two-year term, and the next such election will happen this coming November. The primary elections are held to determine who will be the candidate in that November election from each of the Republican and Democratic parties. House members are each elected to represent a particular geographical district, just like MPs in our Parliament.
There has been a lot of hoopla in the US press about the fact that in districts that include NYC, Democratic candidates supported by mayor Mamdani of NYC won.
Let us then look at one of those candidates, a woman who has won the right to be the Democratic nominee for the 13th New York State congressional district, which comprises Upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx in NYC. Note that as the Democratic nominee in that particular district, the probability that she loses the general election in November is effectively zero.
I here quote from The Free Press:
Her name is Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old who has spent the last seven (!) years studying for a PhD in sociology at the City University of New York.
You read that right. She has been studying for her Soc PhD since she was 25, which necessarily means she spent (at least) the 4 years prior to that getting an undergraduate degree. In other words, Ms Chevalier has never had a job, and has spent most of her adult life in the warm cocoon of academia. She is, however, quite photogenic:
A social media post from 2020 has surfaced in which she called Joe Biden a rapist (not a senile rapist, apparently) along with another from 2021 in which she wrote ‘Fuck Kamala Harris’. (Ms Harris has not, so far as I know, replied to that.)
Ah, but we all say intemperate things in our youth, eh?
Ms Chevalier was interviewed by a team of NYC journalists in mid-June, just before the primary election. You can read the whole interview here if you like. She is on record as wishing to abolish prisons, so one of the reporters asked her what should happen to a guy who kills another guy. Apparently this reporter had been sitting in on a trial about exactly that event. Ms Chevalier gave a three paragraph answer that out-word-saladed anything Kamala ever put on the record. The reporter, noting that she had not actually answered the question, put it to her a second time, and here is what she said:
Well, this is what I’m saying is that when that happens, and as someone who has sat in so many courtrooms, to me, all of that is tragic. The fact that the murder happened is tragic. The fact that there was a circumstance in which that could even come to pass is tragic, and all of that is a reflection of systems that allowed that circumstance to be possible. And so, you know, I have always focused my attention on how do we create systems where that’s not even the possibility.
So, I guess she is going to go to Congress to work on building a system in which murders simply do not happen. Welcome to government, Ms. Chevalier.
How did this person get nominated?
The short answer to that question is that she got 32,790 votes, which was 49.4% of the votes cast, while the incumbent Democratic congressman, Adriano Espaillat, got 30,464, or 45.9%. A third candidate got another 2,340 votes, meaning the total votes cast in this district Democratic primary were 65,594.
News organizations in the 21st century are little interested in digging up and reporting facts, so I did some digging and some ciphering on my own, and came up with the following facts. The numbers are solid, and I think my calculations make sense. Judge for yourself.
The population of that Congressional district, according to the US census bureau, was 747,000 in 2024, of which some 20% were too young to vote, leaving a voting-age population of about 597,000. Now, not all of those people are eligible to vote, as some will be non-citizens, and some will be disqualified by virtue of a criminal record or not having lived in the district until very recently. So, at a guess, some 450-500 thousand people in the district were eligible to vote, and since this is a highly Democratic district, let’s say 60% of those could be registered as Democrats, if they bothered to register at all. Registering to vote in the US is rather more work than it is in Canada, so many do not bother. None the less, that leaves some 270-300 thousand people who could have, if they’d made the effort, voted in that 13th district Congressional Democratic primary. Only 65,000 did, at best 25% of that potential number.
So, 25% of the possible Democratic primary voters in NY’s 13th Congressional district have decided, by a 49/46 percent margin, that Darializa Avila WordSalad, Sociology PhD student extraordinaire, should also be their party’s candidate for Congress – a seat she is almost certain to win.
Back to Canada. I had electricians in my house for much too long last month, but when tradesmen are in your home making your life miserable you end up talking to them, largely in self-defense. One, named Gerald, let out that he never votes, because all politicians are the same, and your vote does not matter.
I admit ruefully that I essentially agree with him. Your vote does not matter, not because all politicians are the same, but because whether or not you show up at the polling booth will have no effect on the outcome of any election, whether in London, Ontario or NY’s 13th district. And, we all have other important things we want to do with the time it takes to vote.
So, we get 25% or less turnout in elections, and we get Josh Morgan as Mayor of London and Ms WordSalad as a member of the US House of Representatives.
Back to Ms Stevenson for mayor of London. In adulthood she not only had a job, she was an accountant. I am confident that this means that she is not intimidated by arithmetic, nor does she think that it is an instrument of oppression. I think familiarity with arithmetic should be a basic requirement for holding any elected office.
Although I think she has no hope of victory, I will support her in the small ways that I can. I will donate to her campaign, although there are strict limits on how much I can give her. I will put one of her signs on my lawn, but I looked at the City by-law regarding campaign signage (actually I looked at the pdf summary, which was itself 24 pages long) and learned I will be allowed to put up only one sign, and only a rather small one at that.
However, the reason she has no hope of winning is that no matter what I do, the usual 25% will turn out to vote, and in London that will mean that the actual set of voters will see over-representation by the woke, the university types, the teachers union faithful, and those who do not live downtown or in neighborhoods full of the homeless and drug-addled. (In case I failed to mention it, current mayor Josh Morgan has never had a real job, either: university student council president, then some hard-to-describe job at UWO, then elected to city council.)
This is The Paradox of Democracy. Average Gerald is absolutely right in believing that his/her vote does not count, so the electorate is made up of those who get a personal charge out of voting and politics. Those people are not at all representative of the population at large. Hence, we see ourselves governed by those who think that getting rid of prisons, letting people shit on the sidewalk and refusing to incarcerate lawbreakers are all noble, progressive ideas.
The Revenge of the Lanyard Class, I guess.
And….I have no idea of how to change this.