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Q&A
Analysis of voter turnout data and determination of priority communities
3:19:35
·
6 min
Council Member Farías inquires about the process of determining priority communities for voter engagement, citing data from the CFB's voter analysis report. Melillo provides a detailed explanation of how CFB selects priority geographic areas and audiences for focused outreach efforts.
- CFB uses a data-driven approach, considering factors such as voter turnout history and language proficiency.
- The selection process involves both quantitative analysis and qualitative assessment of community needs.
- Priority is given to areas with consistently low voter turnout and high concentrations of limited English proficiency voters.
- CFB aims to support existing civic infrastructure rather than duplicate efforts in communities.
Amanda Farías
3:19:35
Yeah that would be helpful.
3:19:35
I'd be interested to even see how many are in my either community board districts or my districts depending on how you break it down.
3:19:43
I have one last question, chairs.
3:19:45
I appreciate your reference to the voter analysis report.
3:19:50
In 2024, I don't have it in front of me with me today and I don't know if you have it in front of you, but there's a couple on on page 41, I was I was looking to the report on page 41, there's a figure that highlights the areas across the city that are considered priority communities, are the areas that have the lowest voter turnout due to lack of education or resources.
3:20:15
But according to page three of that same report, the Bronx Borough experienced the lowest voter turnout in the April primary and the November general election across the city.
3:20:27
Furthermore, when looking at the same figure on the same report titled voter turnout by community district general election, my district fell into the same section as all the other priority communities in the Bronx, Bronx 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, And 6, and seven, and that range is from 43% to 50.6%, yet Bronx Community Board nine is not considered a priority community.
3:20:52
So just generally around you know Bronx 9 not being pushed into becoming a priority district for voting, if we can discuss that, if we can discuss the algorithm that defines what priority communities are labeled for CFB, and any of the strategies initiatives that you folks are looking towards on this election cycle with just maybe fifty days away at this point to get more people either in my district to turn out to vote to participate in their own local governance and particularly around how we are engaging RCB.
Amanda Melillo
3:21:29
Yeah absolutely.
3:21:31
So let me talk first about how we selected our priority geography areas.
3:21:36
So we talk about two types of priorities.
3:21:39
One is priority audiences.
3:21:40
So these are broad groups of voters that we can see through the data have lower turnout, or they have specific barriers to participation.
3:21:49
The other is we have priority neighborhoods or geographic areas of the city where we focus.
3:21:55
And since I helped determine where those are, I'll just walk you through what that process looked like.
3:22:01
As a first pass, we worked with very big spreadsheets and looked at voter turnout across the city.
3:22:08
And not just voter turnout in any one election, what our data team has done is they've created what's called participation score for every voter in New York City that looks at like a ten year voting history.
3:22:21
And that allowed us through some statistical models to find out what are the factors that would impact whether someone might have a lower voter participation score versus a higher one, what are the geographic patterns of turnout over time?
3:22:35
So some neighborhoods have very clear patterns and I would say that the community districts you name one through seven in The Bronx consistently have some of the lowest voter turnout in the city.
3:22:47
And there are a couple other areas of the city where that is true as well.
3:22:51
But we also did a second pass.
3:22:55
Know just because somewhere isn't the lowest doesn't mean their turnout is great.
3:23:01
Let me start by saying that.
3:23:02
We sort of have our lowest turnout neighborhoods, I'd say some middling neighborhoods, then your persistently high turnout neighborhoods relative to the rest of the city.
3:23:13
So as a second pass we took a look at in the data, specifically voters with limited English proficiency and what are the languages that are being spoken and where are the areas of the city with the most limited English proficiency.
3:23:30
And that allowed us to pull in some other parts of the city that might be considered like more closer to the middle.
3:23:38
I would say our, this is not a great name, we call it North Central Queens, but it's really think of like the Corona Jackson Heights Flushing Corridor, where you have a lot of different language communities and those languages are the ones that are primarily spoken.
3:23:55
So on that second pass, that was how we pulled in some of the other geographies.
3:23:59
Geographies, and that was our quantitative look at it.
3:24:02
Then we did a qualitative pass, and our partnerships and outreach team did an assessment of the communities that we were identifying, and then from there estimated what are the areas where we already have civic infrastructure in place and groups that are already doing work.
3:24:19
I think it's fair to say one thing we would never want to do as a government agency, we want to support groups that are already doing the work.
3:24:25
We don't want to come in and supplant those groups or big foot them in any way.
3:24:29
We don't want to duplicate work that's happening.
3:24:32
So there were some neighborhoods that we actually dropped out of the process because we were like there are groups there doing great work and we don't need to come in and do the same work.
3:24:41
Maybe we add some additional resources to those areas through our advertising campaign and through additional mailings but we feel really good about the organizations that are already there.
3:24:53
So that was how we sort of arrived on these geographic areas.
3:24:57
What I would also say is while we want to stick to them for a pretty like, for maybe like one to two cycles, we also continually assess.
3:25:05
Did we look at the right things?
3:25:06
And we're always open to feedback about whether or not we actually did that.
3:25:11
So while we are focused in those specific geographic areas, and that's where we prioritize trying to host events and things like that, we're still in every area of the city more or less.
3:25:22
So we partner with different organizations and council member offices all the time.
3:25:26
We tend to show up when people invite us places and say yes, we will come talk about whatever topic you would like us to like ranked choice voting of course being top of mind for this election.
3:25:38
So we're always looking at ways to do better.