Max's election maps and assorted others

[Thande]

This also makes me realise I don't know how many members there are on Chinese municipality congresses for cities like Beijing or Shanghai. Obviously those are mostly rubberstamps but it'd be interesting to compare. Can't find anything for Beijing, but Shanghai has a wiki article and it has an impressive membership of 868 - though in practice it looks like everything meaningful is done by a standing committee of 57, and (like old American state legislatures) in practice it only sits for a handful of days a year regardless.

Or what about India with its pleasingly RETVRN (to British eyes) Municipal Corporations - Bombay/Mumbai has 227 members (though that's a wider metropolitan area I think) and Calcutta/Kolkata has 144.

 

[Ares96]

Precisely 7 uncontested seats apiece. Was there at least a Republican in the only contested one?

Nope, it was just the two Democrats.

NYC council made me have that realisation as well. 51 single-member districts for one of the biggest cities in the world. I was thinking "well this is like the London Assembly and obviously there must be some lower-level councils for the boroughs or something", but nope.

It is worth noting that in LA’s case it’s actually controversial - there was a recent scandal where councillors were caught on tape making racist remarks about an impressive number of different groups while also plotting to gerrymander the districts, and as a result there’s an ongoing process to figure out how to expand the council and make it more representative. It’s still unclear what the result will be, but the likely outcome is somewhere between 25 and 31 seats, so still quite small.

 

[OHC]

Nope, it was just the two Democrats.

It is worth noting that in LA’s case it’s actually controversial - there was a recent scandal where councillors were caught on tape making racist remarks about an impressive number of different groups while also plotting to gerrymander the districts, and as a result there’s an ongoing process to figure out how to expand the council and make it more representative. It’s still unclear what the result will be, but the likely outcome is somewhere between 25 and 31 seats, so still quite small.

We're doing the same in Portland rn (going from four plus the mayor to 12 plus the mayor, amid a bunch of other changes) - I don't think the two efforts are linked, but maybe they will prompt folks in other cities to think about the idea.