Oddities in NYC Election Results

I notices a few oddities in the election results for mayor of New York. First, the results seemed almost unanimous in some districts, even in districts in Queens that had been carried by Bloomberg in 2005 and were less than unanimous in 2009. On the other hand, that might be explained by a general 2009–2013 shift in the election results. (Districts inhabited by the “1%” went from 90% down to 70% Republican.)

The really odd thing is that there were very few districts that were exactly unanimous. Considering the large number of districts with 1, 2, or 3 non-Democratic votes, you would expect (according to the Poisson distribution) for there to be a noticeable number of zero districts. It's as though somebody were fooling around with the votes but decided to have a token enemy vote to avoid suspicion. (This did not apply to Brooklyn.)

One problem with the above analysis is that it's based in clicking on a map instead of on complete data. More complete data might disprove the speculation.

Of course, back in the days of Tammany Hall, a precinct captain faced with a 177 to 1 vote would say “Who's the traitor?”