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Max's election maps and assorted others

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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.
 
Alex Richards said:
Precisely 7 uncontested seats apiece. Was there at least a Republican in the only contested one?
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Nope, it was just the two Democrats.
Thande said:
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.
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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.
 
Ares96 said:
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.
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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.
 
Great work as always, Ares! Worth considering that as under-representative of the population as LA's city council is, it actually gets worse when you go one level up. Los Angeles County, America's largest by some distance, has a budget larger than the GDP of Iceland (hardly a developing nation) that is decided upon by a whopping five (5) elected Commissioners.

Actually all counties in CA are similar, which is why you occasionally see members of the US House retire to seek a board seat (and in at least one case, a sitting federal Cabinet Secretary), because you go from one of 435 to one of 5 and get a lot more immediate power.
Ares96 said:
Roybal is historically significant because he was descended from an old New Mexican Hispanic family and is usually considered LA's first Latino councillor (although you do have to add "in modern times" to that, because of course there were a number of Californios elected to the council in its early days).
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Since you bring up Roybal, he was one of those folks in politics who ended up with a mini-dynasty. He ended up running for and winning a seat in the House in 1963, which he essentially passed on to his daughter Lucille when he retired 30 years later. She just retired herself in the 2022 midterms, matching her father's longevity.
 
msmp said:
Great work as always, Ares! Worth considering that as under-representative of the population as LA's city council is, it actually gets worse when you go one level up. Los Angeles County, America's largest by some distance, has a budget larger than the GDP of Iceland (hardly a developing nation) that is decided upon by a whopping five (5) elected Commissioners.
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I did mention this, yes.
 
Okay, so on reflection I don't think all those elections actually were unopposed. Having looked through all elections up to 1955, ourcampaigns.com shows every single race as unopposed, and the only source they cite is Wikipedia, which simply lists the dates each member was elected. The city clerk's office has a searchable database of elected officials going back very far, which is nice, but also doesn't show actual results. It's possible they may exist in newspaper archives somewhere, but unfortunately, not being a student anymore means I don't have access to many of those.
 
Anyway, with that in mind, here's the district maps for 1951 and 1953.

1951 saw only very minor changes compared to 1949, with boundaries changing around downtown and the Pico-Robertson area, but no districts moving significantly one way or another.

la-dist-1951.png

In 1953, on the other hand, things were rather more dramatic. District 3 was moved across the mountains to become the second district entirely contained inside the San Fernando Valley, while districts 5 and 11 took over its Westside portion. This caused a general westward shift affecting nearly every other district, with 6, 7 and 10 shifting particularly dramatically.

la-dist-1953.png
 
Ares96 said:
Okay, so on reflection I don't think all those elections actually were unopposed. Having looked through all elections up to 1955, ourcampaigns.com shows every single race as unopposed, and the only source they cite is Wikipedia, which simply lists the dates each member was elected. The city clerk's office has a searchable database of elected officials going back very far, which is nice, but also doesn't show actual results. It's possible they may exist in newspaper archives somewhere, but unfortunately, not being a student anymore means I don't have access to many of those.
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Have a look at the California Digital Newspaper Collection, it's digitised, open access and has the LA Daily News back to literally 1860.

[/researchlibrarian]

Edit: yes, just checked the Daily News for 1 June 1949 and the front page confirms that only one City Council race was contested, along with the votes for each candidate.

The election figures are given slightly less front page space than the horse racing results of the same day.
 
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