Albany County Board Of Elections

ChatGPT

The Albany County Board of Elections serves as a vital entity responsible for overseeing electoral processes in Albany County, New York. Committed to ensuring fair and transparent elections, it plays a pivotal role in voter registration, candidate nominations, and ballot administration. The board’s responsibilities encompass various aspects of the democratic process, including voter education and poll worker training. By maintaining accurate voter records, managing polling locations, and upholding election regulations, the Albany County Board of Elections safeguards the integrity of the electoral system. With a focus on facilitating citizen participation and upholding democratic principles, the board contributes significantly to the smooth functioning of elections within Albany County.

Quick everybody fear aspartame 🍚

|

Aspartame is now as cancerous as drinking beer and wine. It’s big news, especially in natural health circles. Of course, alcohol is terribly unhealthy even in moderation – a lot of the people who defend drinking alcohol are a lot like those who defend eating dark chocolate and bacon. All good things, but be honest they are not healthy and should be considered an unhealthy treat only engaged in very sparingly.

Americans have long had this fear of science and technology. Some of it is justified – the history books are full of stories about advances like DDT, asbestos, leaded products whose uses seemed like a good idea at the time but ended up with tragic long term consequences. But those are mostly unknown risks.

People have been suspicious of artificial sweeteners since the 1960s. Cyclamate was banned in 1970 in the United States based on dubious science and lobbying by the sugar beets growing farmers in the Midwest which didn’t like the competition, despite the rest of the world viewing it as largely safe. Aspartame has been viewed with suspicion ever since. A lot of money and time has gone into studying the safety of aspartame and the results are mixed at best though it seems that in general the risks of aspartame consumption are relatively low.

A bigger concern with artificial sweeteners and food additives like MSG isn’t their health concerns but what they are masking underneath. Artificial sweeteners and food additives are often added to junk food loaded with calories, salt, sugar and fat – and have very little nutrient value or stomach filling protein and fiber which encourages overeating. There is this desire by Americans to blame the chemicals they are eating and not the underlying crappy food that the chemicals are masking.

If you mix aspartame at home with non fat unflavored Greek yogurt and frozen strawberries, what you are still eating is quite healthy. If you put MSG on kale and brown rice, you are eating good healthy food. But the same aspartame used in sugar free ice cream or MSG used on Dorritos is junk food. Chemistry can be good or bad depending on how it’s used – to enhance flavor or mask flavors of junk foods.

Proposed County Legislative Districts (12/9) – 2019 County Coroner Race VAP-PW Interpolated

|

A few weeks back, the Albany County Redistricting Commission submitted another plan after many city legislators and advocates for the minority community had concerns with the proposed plan — and the legislature voted it down. While most of changes didn’t drastically effect the Democratic Performance of the districts, I hadn’t run this data based on a like-year turnout model, which would be the 2019 elections.

The only competitive, county-wide two-way race that year was the County Coroner’s race, which actually is likely a good race to use as a model as most voters don’t have much of an opinion on the County Coroner besides their partisan leanings. To calculate these numbers, I took the 2019 Election District results using old 2019 EDs Shapefile that I had previously saved, then used population-weighted interpolation using the Voter Age Population (VAP) and created block level estimates. This is sometimes called the ESRI-method of interpolation, it is widely used for redistricting analysis. The block level estimate were joined against the block list provided by Albany County Redistricting Commission.

You can get the code here: https://github.com/AndyArthur/r_maps_and_graphs/blob/main/2019-county-coroner-interpolated-to-new-ld.R

Proposed County Legislative Districts (12/9)
2019 County Coroner Race PW-VAP Interpolated
Proposed LD Antonio Sturges (DEM) William B. Keal (REP) Dem Margin Dem. Percent
1 659 63 595 91%
2 471 43 427 92%
3 535 88 447 86%
4 320 52 268 86%
5 775 84 691 90%
6 466 38 429 93%
7 406 65 342 86%
8 924 145 779 86%
9 1,457 461 996 76%
10 1,506 288 1,218 84%
11 1,406 327 1,078 81%
12 341 96 245 78%
13 846 147 699 85%
14 892 661 230 57%
15 799 246 553 76%
16 825 294 531 74%
17 647 282 365 70%
18 984 410 573 71%
19 908 846 63 52%
20 853 737 116 54%
21 808 696 112 54%
22 875 791 84 53%
23 1,232 1,077 155 53%
24 1,075 894 181 55%
25 1,219 986 233 55%
26 988 904 84 52%
27 849 1,003 −155 46%
28 891 746 146 54%
29 970 643 327 60%
30 917 460 457 67%
31 1,129 977 152 54%
32 966 442 524 69%
33 1,318 678 640 66%
34 1,712 659 1,053 72%
35 1,573 814 759 66%
36 1,025 840 185 55%
37 961 979 −18 50%
38 1,059 821 239 56%
39 1,041 1,222 −181 46%
Andy Arthur, 12/26/22. Estimates created in R using block-level voting-age population interpolation (ERSI method) of 2019 Election Results/Districts.

Basically all of the proposed Colonie LDs, 19 through 28 are competitive but lean Democratic, except for LD 27 which is solidly Republican. A popular Republican incumbent or well-known personality could win those districts or at least make for a tight race in 2023, especially in the current political climate. But Albany County remains quite blue, even if Colonie has a GOP supervisor currently.

One thing of note is the Coeymans district, Legislative District 37 remains largely the same as was from the most of the 2010s. It will be a swing-district, based on the likely turn-out in 2019. It leans Republican in the Presidential and Gubernatoral Elections, and by enrollment, but a lot of independent voters who show up on off-years are Democratic leaning.

The Southern Hilltowns Legislative District 39 (Westerlo-Rensselearville-part of Berne) is nominally a Republican district, but Christopher H. Smith (D) holds it. He is a military-veteran and owns a popular restaurant, but he could certainly loose re-election, depending on who shows up and the climate in 2023. Things are more Republican leaning then four years ago.

I re-crunched, well my computer with 100 lines of Python, re-crunched the now-official Albany County 2022 Election results which now includes blanks and drop-off numbers

|

I re-crunched, well my computer with 100 lines of Python, re-crunched the now-official Albany County 2022 Election results which now includes blanks and drop-off numbers.

2022: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RoLoGmEel-AVopvbxBHDT0jtvONHCm-h/edit#gid=1831870489

2021: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SBbYvtYgEwTZ6fKMraqc_aqohM_-9oJl1Jliw9lb27g/edit#gid=832211149

2020: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dXaBj9lNA3kkpVO72pTEjSqqU55IPRNMpfK9JPBNsM4/edit#gid=2072536779

2019: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMuTgKrwAi5mSK2lwaRW0m9HdhYhdBCvY0Xib_tjMkc/edit?usp=sharing

At some point I might crunch 2018 and earlier back to 2011, but the problem I run into is the Board of Elections Enrollments are in PDF format which are slightly more difficult to process compared to Excel files they’ve used since 2019.

Here is the code I use for crunching these numbers: https://github.com/AndyArthur/Albany-County-Election-Result-Cruncher