Checking on past electoral results in your precinct

In my previous post, I was able to locate the precinct number in my county in Oregon where I vote. My next exploration was to see the results for the 2022 and 2020 elections for races that I voted on. There is a site called OpenElections which works to collect raw data from elections across the United States. This data is stored on Github. The data is organized by state, so I was quickly able to find the folder/repo with results for Oregon. Next, I found the 2022 general election results and the 2020 general election results (both results were saved as CSV files). Here were the results for my precinct for both of those years for the major (Dem/Rep) candidates:

2022

  • State House Rep: Tracy Cramer (Rep) 523, Anthony Medina (Dem) 542
  • State Senate: Richard Walsh (Dem) 533, Kim Thatcher (Rep) 528
  • US House Rep: Andrea Salinas (Dem) 517, Mike Erickson (Rep) 511
  • US Senate: Jo Rae Perkins (Rep) 466, Ron Wyden (Dem) 564
  • Governor: Tina Kotek (Dem) 486, Betsy Johnson (Ind) 71, Christine Drazan (Rep) 508

2020

  • State House Rep: Teresa Alonso Leon (Dem) 660, Anna Kasachev (Rep) 525
  • State Senate: Not up for re-election
  • US House Rep: Amy Ryan Courser (Rep) 508, Kurt Schrader (Dem) 649
  • US Senate: Jo Rae Perkins (Rep) 503, Jeff Merkley (Dem) 669
  • US President: Donald Trump (Rep) 507, Joe Biden (Dem) 678

Overall, this precinct is pretty evenly split between Democratic and Republican voters, even though statewide Democrats hold majorities in the Oregon House and Senate, and all 5 statewide offices. In my opinion, based on the results of the 2022 governor’s race (Tina Kotek beat Christine Drazan by 67,000 votes out of 1,935,852 votes cast), Oregon is becoming more of a “purple” state than remaining a “blue” state.

Who represents you? (2024 edition)

Back in 2022, I wrote a post about looking for my electoral precinct and who represents me in Oregon. The original tool for “finding your legislator” has now moved to this URL. It allows the user to type in their address, then the tool displays the the Oregon House and Senate districts that cover this address. The other piece of information to find out is my voting precinct. Since Oregon votes by mail only, there are no physical precinct voting locations that could help guide this. I checked my voter registration online, but the web app did not display my voting precinct within my county (grrr!). I then checked the Marion County website and found a link to a GIS map of voting districts. I then scrolled around until I could see my address, and found the precinct via color coding (mine is 835). The state of Oregon also provides a dataset of all precincts in Oregon (downloaded the spreadsheet to take a look). My next post will try to use some of this information to look at past election results.

I use Emacs on Windows, with generally ok performance. Today, it took several minutes for Emacs to start, and I could not use the mouse to position the cursor (had to use all keyboard commands). Lazyweb – anyone else seen this before?

I have been following the Gaza student protests across the US, starting at Columbia University (AP timeline, FOX5NY TV timeline). As a graduate of the University of Texas, I have been saddened to see its students being harrassed and intimidated by local and state police, with the blessing of UT president Jay Hartzell and Texas governor Greg Abbott. More often than not, law enforcement is being used to stifle legitimate nonviolent protests. More coverage: Texas Monthly magazine, Texas Tribune, Daily Texan.

Book report: A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump

This book was published in the spring of 2020 and written by David Plouffe, campaign manager for Barack Obama, with the intent of helping to give ideas to individuals about what they could do to help beat Donald Trump in the 2020 election. The actual suggestions are pretty succinct, most of the book is anecdotes and examples from the Obama campaigns and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The following is a chapter by chapter summary.

Offense/Defense: Paint the contrast between Trump and the Democratic nominee focus on “gettable votes” (offense), combat lies, attacks and smears using social media (defense)

Create: Your video/song/paper/sign can help convince others, organize your own events, use your social media to get the word out

Register: Get more people registered to vote

Hosting: Organize house parties, have events for volunteers

Battlegrounds: Go help in the battleground states if you possibly can, work phone banks, write letters

Money: Give money, let others know you gave money (to encourage/motivate them), hold fundraising events

The Campaign: Get out and work as a volunteer, and campaigns need to support their volunteers

Voting: Take people to the pools, support early voting, make sure everyone you know votes

Election Night: Be with friends

Okay people – now get to work!

Once again, it is up to us

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the presidential immunity appeal from Donald Trump this week (coverage from Election Law Blog, Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse, CNN takeaways, CNN live coverage, and The Bulwark). The outcome is uncertain, but appears to be headed for delaying the January 6th trial past the 2024 election. In 2022, I wrote a post on the theme of “it is up to us”, and this post can be considered a refrain. Several weeks ago, I wrote that our hopes for the courts to stop Donald Trump have been dashed. It is time for us to stand up to fight for our country. I just got a copy of “A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump” from the library today, looking to take some action soon. It is time to get started.

Can worker’s cooperatives be successful?

Hamilton Nolan/How Things Work: Interview with Erik Forman, labor activist, and creator of The Drivers Cooperative (via Tracy Durnell). Three points I found interesting were Erik’s comments about (1) businesses could be capitalized (started) for $200K-$300K in loans, (2) “… could we just start companies that are owned by workers from the start, and are therefore run by workers in their own interests, and return wealth to the community instead of extracting it?”, and (3) “The main barrier is access to capital. We can build businesses that generate profit, but because the business is worker-owned, it doesn’t fit in the normative forms that venture capital prefers, and there really isn’t a large supply of risk capital for initiatives that serve a social purpose. It’s kind of the entire problem of capitalism, right? Workers don’t have capital. Definitionally. Otherwise we would not be workers.”. I enjoyed the article, and thought about myself as a career worker. I think that most people want a job, not a business, that starting and running a business is too much work, they would rather be paid for their labor and not deal with the other aspects of business ownership. For people working in the tech industry (computers, aviation, whatever tech you want to look at), it seems to me that there may be opportunities at the low end (small businesses), but few examples of cooperative business with a large number of employees. Certainly something to think about….

Gregory Alvarez: “Living Like It’s 99: No Social Media, No Smartphone” (via Tracy Durnell) – A personal story about stopping use of a smartphone and social media and still not using it 3 years later. Good example to use to examine our own habits….

Crooks and Liars.com: Four years ago yesterday, Donald Trump announced that “injecting bleach and shining light into the body would cure COVID-19” – it’s amazing we survived Trump, much less COVID-19!