Register to VOTE!!...then...Sign In to your Democratic Precinct Caucus!

After you have made sure you are a registered voter at myvote.wa.gov, you can fill out, print and sign your *DEMOCRATIC PRECINCT CAUCUS SIGN IN* : https://www.demcaucus.com/register. I found on Win7/Chromium that I could save to it to PDF if I couldn't print it immediately. That put me in the system, gave me my primary location, my precinct ID, my VAN ID and let the Democrats know I was coming! You eventually need to print it out and sign it and bring it with you to your caucus location!

Whatcom County Voter History Database as of 1/27/2016

Editor's note: Are you a WA candidate that needs information like the data and analysis below for your campaign? I am considering marketing my data analytic services this year. If you are interested, you can find me from my blogger profile. -RMF

The data above is from a 1/27/2016 voterdb history.  On the left, the rainbow background and the fading shadows in front of it show the per precinct difference between registered voters and participation in the GE 2014 and GE 2015 balloting. (The most recent voter birth years are not included.) Curiously, despite heavy registration of those under 65, voter turnout has collapsed as it heads toward the youngest birth years in Whatcom County. Click on the graphs to enlarge.

The dense band of mean birth years of registered voters between years 1960 and 1970 is a statistical mirage brought about by heavy registration of both boomers and millenials on either side. GenXrs are the bluish trough (far top left chart) between prewars  + boomers and millenials, + perhaps Gen "Z". At right, a relatively high SD per precinct helps hide an accurate assessment of voter age in Whatcom County. More age statistics are below. Click on the graphs to enlarge.

All school and fire Levies pass. A look back at November 2015

Updated 2/10/2016: All School and Fire levies pass. 32% turnout with 40K voting.
Today (February 9th) there is a special election for school  and fire district financing throughout the county ... Remember to Vote. Drop Boxes are placed throughout the county. If you mail your ballot, it must be postmarked (with stamp) by February 9th. If you are around downtown Bellingham, there will be a drive through drop box near the court house open until 8 p.m.  You can check your voter status, update your address, or register to vote online in WA at MyVote.wa.gov .  Some Charts from the 2015 Election are below the break.

The Death of LaVoy Finicum

Defense Indexes vs Mass Shooting Database >= 14 'Dead + Injured'

In my last post, I established that the FBI will complete the three year period (2013 - 2015) with ~64M NICS background checks for firearms purchase.  In this post, I look at the relationship between two Defense  index/exchanges traded over the same period. Specifically, I am interested in the whether there is a relationship  between high volume "spree shootings" and equity increases for defense companies. If widespread publicity of spree shootings encourages Americans to purchase extraordinary volumes of weapons, does this in turn equal greater purchase of defense stock? R code here.

Here are the eleven events with (Dead + Injured) >=  14 mass shooting incidents according to Mass Shooting Tracker. I have left out shooter names. Some of these events will be recognizable by location:

AR-15s, Shopping Carts and Gun Ownership in America

Update: December 2015 and 2015 the year broke records which rendered my 2.3M projection for December short. 3.3M NICS  checks were completed for December 2015 bring the yearly totally 23M. Both numbers are records. I will update my projected  December data at some point. - RMF

Last week's cover for the "New Yorker" shows a happy, clean cut, young couple picking up their AR-15 (?) with their milk and hand grenades in their shopping cart at a local super mart.  2.2M NICS FBI  firearm checks were completed in Novermber 2015. After the December totals come in, it looks like we will have over 23M NICS checks for 2015, an all time annual record. Ironically, the day of the San Bernardino shooting (12/2), the NYT announced we broke a record for single day guns sales on the last Black Friday. If we don't already, we probably now have more firearms in America than cars. This would make sense because more people now die from firearms than car accidents in America.  I made a quick projection of the 221M NICS gun checks in America for the last 17 years. Between 2013 - 2015, 29% of all gun checks for the last 17 years will have been processed. I projected December 2015 at 2.3M.:

 (21093273 + 20968547 + (19827376 + 2300000)) / (222363898 - 892840)

2013 + 2014 + projected(2015)  / (eighteen year total  - first incomplete year)

[1] 0.2898311

For the three years 2013 - 2015, there will be (projected) 64,189,196 (~64M) NICS FBI gun checks processed. If all of those checks were approved, that three year total would be equivalent to 20% of our 315M population.  More data on NICS Operations can be found here

This is a (table) matrix from the data found here.  December 2015 data projected. Click to enlarge tables and charts.

Gun Deaths in America: Suicides, Homicides, "Mass Shooting Tracker" Data

Introduction

Important note: RMF:12/24/2015 Shooting Tracker data  is now maintained by Gun Violence Archive at http://www.shootingtracker.com/wiki/Main_Page

This is an attempt to parse some of the data from Shooting Tracker and talk about death by firearms in America. The project took me a bit longer than I wanted because that data needed normalization and corrections and because the subject is somewhat poorly researched due to Congressional limitations on research. See my R code here.  I bound together Shooting Tracker data from three years of  mass shootings which those publishers define as any shooting that injures and/or kills four or more combined. This definition gives us 1,347 dead and 3,817  injured  from "mass shootings" for the three year period 2013 - 2015 (to date).  Before we talk about this comparatively small number of deaths and injury, some background statistics are in order on gun violence in America. I assume the data is accurate and analyze it as I find it for all my sources including Mass Shooting Tracker, CDC and the FBI.

GIS based precinct maps: Ballots Good, Jack and Joy.

These are 2015 precinct election maps. GIS code in R is time consuming and complex. Click to enlarge these maps. The equal frequency (quartile) class intervals are expressed as: (min,max) for good ballots for the 2014 and 2015 general elections. The Jack Louws, Joy Gilifilen, and  precinct differences (Jack - Joy) totals for 2015 are expressed in color driven scales which have separate ranges (indexes) per map. Both precincts 182 and 183 have part of their data hidden in the totals by the state of WA to protect privacy. The shape files  and precinct maps can be found here. My R code (which is very derivative - see 1,2) can be found here (3,4).  If you are a friend and you need code and data, email me.

2015 Voting Analysis Under Construction: Joy vs. Jack, Jail_yes vs. Jail_no

 By precinct diffs. Those points above the horizontal blue 0 line are precincts that sided with Jack Luows. Those points left of the vertical red 0 line are precincts that voted against the jail.   (Vertical Axis: (Louws - Gilfilen) ~ Horizontal Axis ( Jail_Yes - Jail_No)) . Strong relationships are revealed between those precincts voting  more for Jack and the Jail  (far right) and those voting more for Joy and not for the Jail (bottom left).  The dense 'crook' in the middle of the graph represents those precincts still mostly totaling for Jack  Luows but very split in voting for or against the jail.  Click to enlarge.

Race and WWU

Belina Seare, president of WWU’s Associated Students,  discussed racial threats made against her and others on WWU campus. King5 has additional reporting:

http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/2015/11/24/western-wash-cancels-classes-due-online-hate-speech/76303356/

http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/bellingham/2015/11/25/threatened-wwu-student-know-my-safety-not-priority/76381562/


http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article46488630.html

Still Counting Ballots, 11/16/2015 Matchback Report, We are the sixth highest in total ballots in WA.

Top ten WA Counties by ballots counted in table below. Note that Whatcom County outvoted three counties more populous than than itself this year, making us the county with the sixth largest vote in WA. 2014 population figures (1000s): Whatcom = 208K, Yakima = 247K, Kitsap = 254K, Thurston = 265K . High turnouts are very useful and advantageous. Politicians and other pundits notice when your county can "bring it"!

Matchbacks for 11/12/2015

11/06/2015 Matchback Report

Hoping there won't be too many more of these...

Curing your Ballot: A look at Signature Issues

So these numbers below might help those reclaiming challenged ballots or "curing ballots". If we look at the results to date, we see there are 656 Challenged Ballots.

Matchback Report 11/04/2015

Matchback Report 11/03/2015

Ralph Schwartz is reporting from the Auditor that our ballots will roll in heavy through Thursday because of  "the move of our mail processing facility from Everett to Redmond."  Heaven help us. Our ballots have to ship four counties away and come back? What kind of secure "chain of custody" is that?!!

Carbon, Snow and Ice: How I voted and why...

Three PDF based snapshots from the Whatcom County Sample Ballot are at the end fo this post.   Here's a rundown on how I voted:

Matchbacks for 11/02/2014

Tonight's Whatcom County matchbacks counted 10,560 votes from this last Friday evening until Monday evening. The voter roll now stands at 129,857 registered voters. It has not been frozen. I asked the election staff tonight to update that figure, but they will not update it until after the election. 93,862 ballots remain out. Currently, there are 34,752 Good ballots (e.g 'ready for tabulation'), 245 Challenged Ballots, 504 Undeliverable, 904 ballots have been marked Void. You should receive notice if your ballot has been challenged. If you would like to check, go to myvote.wa.gov to see the status of your ballot. If you have not received a ballot and believed you were registered but did not change your address at myvote.wa.gov, you may still be able to contact the Elections office and work that out.

Matchback Report 10/30/2015

Matchback data 10.28.2015