The voting results are out for each polling station for the 2018 Municipal Election in New Westminter, and I created a spreadsheet to take a look at how the different neighbourhoods voted. I calculated a “Votes Gained/Lost” value for each candidate for each polling station which compares the actual votes they got with the number they should have got had that polling station voted exactly how the city-wide numbers went. For example, Jonathan Cote was voted for on 71.56% of the ballots across the city, but in the Advance City Hall polling station he received 76.58%. Out of the 1059 total votes cast at Advance City Hall he “should have” received 758 votes but actually received 811, so he over-performed by 53 votes.
There are some interesting patterns to look at. The most obvious one is…
Queensborough
Team Cote got destroyed in Queensborough at both the Advance Voting and the Queen Elizabeth polling station. Maybe “destroyed” is too strong a word, so let’s just say they didn’t do well. If you group the Advance voting and the election day voting, the average Team Cote council candidate under-performed by 136 votes. Jonathan Cote underperformed by 158 votes. The New West Progressives over-performed by an average of 209 votes. If you took only the election-day Queensborough votes as representative for the whole city, council would have all four NWP candidates on it, along with Nadine Nakagawa and Chuck Puchmayr.
In the Mayor’s race, Jonathan Cote’s votes (-158) went largely to Jimmie Bell (+69) and Nikki Binns (+41). Harm Woldring only picked up 10 votes in Queensborough.
I have a theory about why this happened: Temporary Modular Housing. The New West Progressives were largely silent about how they would have voted for the controversial subject, and one of the people who spear-headed the anti-TMH movement was heavily involved in volunteering for the NWP in Queensborough. This leads me to believe that the NWP were pushing the “yes to the project but not in this location” (which was Bryn Ward’s answer when asked how she would have voted) which played well to the voters in that neighbourhood.
Also, the NWP campaigned heavily in Queensborough, even targeting the neighbourhood with a special part of their platform.
As for school trustee candidates, Gurveen Dhaliwal bucked the trend, over-performing in Queensborough by 169 votes. This isn’t surprising given Ms. Dhaliwal was born and raised in Queensborough, and has extensive ties to the community there. Anita Ansari also did well, over-performing by 9 votes. The NWP school trustees also rode the orange wave, especially Lisa Falbo, who over-performed by 231 votes.
Advance Voting
Team Cote really promoted advance voting, especially at the Lawn Bowling Club, and their efforts paid off (except at Queensborough), with an average over-performance of 46 votes, compared to the NWP under-performing by 19 votes. They also did well at City Hall, with every Team Cote candidate doing better than their city-wide performance.
Other Patterns
Century House was a bit of a puzzle for me. I was expecting Chinu Das to do better there, given her extensive volunteering and connections with seniors. She underperformed by 45 votes there, while fellow Team Cote council candidates Jaimie McEvoy (+34) and Chuck Puchmayr (+60) did well. It wasn’t an incumbent bump either, as Patrick Johnstone (-25) and Mary Trentadue (-21) did worse. And it wasn’t an NWP stronghold either, as every council candidate underperformed except for Bryn Ward, who got the expected number of votes.
Team Cote did well at Fraser River Middle School, overperforming by 31 votes for council candidates and 20 for school trustee candidates. Compare these numbers with the NWP’s: -51 for council candidates and -46 for school trustee candidates.
F.W.Howay looks a lot like Queensborough. NWP council candidates over-performed by 26 votes and school trustee candidates by 25 votes, while Team Cote had -30 and -25, respectively. F.W.Howay was Lisa Graham’s best result, where she over-performed by 71 votes. Mary Lalji also did well, picking up 50 votes.
At Herbert Spencer the New West Progressives did well, picking up 33 votes for council and 13 for school trustee candidates, despite Lisa Falbo under-performing by 18 votes. School trustee candidate Alejandro Diaz did best here, picking up a whopping 129 votes. Mary Lalji also over-performed by 98 votes.
Qayqayt Elementary and Riverbend Housing Co-op can be considered to be the two downtown polling stations, and in each location Team Cote over-performed and the New West Progressives underperformed.
Richard McBride was a mixed bag. NWP school trustee candidate Danielle Connelly and Team Cote school trustee candidate Maya Russell are both involved with that school, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that both candidates did better there than their city-wide vote. They both also over-performed at Sapperton Pensioners Hall just down the street. Also doing well at SPH was Team Cote school trustee candidate Dee Beattie, who lives in Sapperton and is very involved in that community.
Glenbrook Middle School is the polling station that most closely matches the city’s overall voting (although strictly speaking I didn’t do the calculation correctly, I should use the standard deviation in the percentage difference and not the standard deviation in the “votes changed/lost”, but it’s close enough for government work).
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