Max's election maps and assorted others

[Ares96]

Here's a new-old project, some of you may remember it. You can't really tell from this map, but the electoral system used here was in the finest Hungarian tradition, which is to say it was utterly, utterly mental. I'll provide more of an explanation when the writeup is done.

 

[Ares96]

I put another couple of maps on Wikimedia Commons too.

 

[Ares96]

The Japanese general election of 1947 is the one that brought the Socialists to power for the first time, just two years after the ban on all socialist organising was lifted by the American occupation government. The JSP were able to win a narrow plurality of seats despite coming second in the popular vote, because they were generally better at managing their candidacies to benefit from the SNTV electoral system than the bourgeois parties were. But it wasn't enough to govern alone - the JSP had to form a coalition with the more liberal-minded bourgeoisie of the Democratic Party (note: this is not the same Democratic Party that merged with the Liberals to form the LDP, I know it's confusing) and the National Cooperative Party. This coalition lasted about eighteen months in government, led first by the JSP's leader Katayama Tetsu and then by the Democrat Ashida Hitoshi. It succeeded in making quite a few social reforms, helped by the broadly sympathetic New Deal Democrats who ran the occupation authorities, but eventually fell owing to internal Democratic opposition to its plan to nationalise the coal industry. The Liberals returned to power under Yoshida Shigeru, who would govern Japan until 1954 and lay most of the groundwork for the post-war economic consensus that dominated Japan until the 1990s.

 

[Ares96]

Here we are.

 

[Ares96]

In 1984, the NSW Labor government was re-elected to its fourth term, although on a reduced majority - there was no third "Wranslide", and most of the ancestrally-Liberal seats on the North Shore returned to the fold. Wran himself would resign in 1986, by which point the wheels were well and truly coming off, and in 1988 the Coalition returned to government.

 

[Ares96]

The 1988 election followed two important changes: firstly, the parliamentary term was extended from three to four years, and secondly, to keep up with population growth and suburbanisation without having to make overly-disruptive changes to Sydney's electoral geography, the Assembly was expanded from 99 to 109 members.

Neville Wran retired in 1986, at just about the right time to protect his own reputation as the Labor government was consumed by corruption scandals. The new Premier, Barrie Unsworth, was nowhere near as charismatic, and when he was parachuted into the Assembly for the nominal safe seat of Rockdale, he only scraped through with a 54-vote margin. The simultaneous by-election to replace Wran as MLA for Bass Hill was won outright by the Liberals.

That set a pattern for the next two years, as Liberal leader Nick Greiner began to rebuild his party's fortunes by promising to fight the three evils of corruption, crime and excessive government spending. Labor were especially troubled outside Sydney, where the party was seen as paying too much attention to issues like gun control and conservation rather than addressing economic issues. But when the 1988 election came, it would herald bad news for Labor even within the state capital, as the Liberals regained all their old seats and began to make headway in the Labor strongholds in working-class Western Sydney (somewhat foreshadowing the 1996 federal election).

One of the first things Greiner did in government was revoke the seat increase, and order a redistribution for 99 seats to take effect at the next election. As a result, this is the only election held on these boundaries.

 

[Ares96]

For comparison, I have been able to find the full set of boundaries for 1991, although the map of rural NSW I found is useless, so there's been a fair amount of conjecture in the bush seats.

Greiner's first term in office saw a big slate of neoliberal and NPM reforms, as he'd promised during the campaign, as well as the institution of a standing Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) to investigate any current or future corruption claims and recommend legal action where necessary - basically a "corruption ombudsman". Some of these changes (like the ICAC) were popular, others (like the massive cuts to the state school system) much less so. The opposition, however, struggled to mount a response, or indeed find a capable and willing leader, most of their senior figures having either retired or lost their seats in 1988. In the end, the leadership fell into the lap of former Environment Minister Bob Carr, who absolutely did not want the job but agreed out of a sense of duty. He would go on to lead the party for almost twenty years and become the Premier with the longest continuous period of service in the state's history.

As mentioned, one of the many, many things Greiner did was bring the size of the Legislative Assembly back down to 99 seats, which he and his supporters saw as undoing the pro-Labor gerrymander of 1988. In any event, the redistribution brought massive changes to inner Sydney in particular, where several safe Labor seats were abolished. Hoping this would benefit the Coalition, and noting an uptick in polling numbers, Greiner had the Assembly dissolved a year ahead of schedule in May 1991. This wasn't his only institutional reform - on the ballot alongside the legislative elections was a referendum question on whether to reform the Legislative Council to be elected in halves rather than thirds, shortening the terms of individual councillors from twelve to eight years. The rules on how to mark ballot papers were also tightened considerably, with the result that over nine percent of all votes cast in the election were marked informal and discarded - there was a particularly high rate of informals in Labor-held marginal seats, which likely changed the outcome of the election in The Entrance (yes, there's a town in NSW called "The Entrance"). After the election, Labor would petition the result there and successfully force a by-election, which they won on a substantially lower informal vote.

Despite this, and despite being led by a deeply reluctant man, Labor had a fairly good election. They didn't return to power, but they won back a lot of the seats they lost in 1988, and were able to force a hung parliament. The balance of power was held by four independents, most of whom were right-of-centre and backed Greiner for a second term in power. Among their terms for supporting the Coalition was a fixed-term law, which was approved overwhelmingly alongside the 1995 election and ensured that the 1991 schedule is the one still in use.

 

[Ares96]

 

[Ares96]

A byproduct of my Brazilian stuff - I discovered that the Portuguese Wikipedia has a list of senators for the last term of the General Assembly of the Brazilian Empire.



Now, the Imperial Senate was kind of a microcosm of the Brazilian Empire itself, in that it represented kind of an odd mix of "traditional" European limited monarchy and Enlightenment-era liberal idealism. On the face of it, its function was similar to the British House of Lords - it was supposed to be a chamber of sober reflection where the nation's most respectable men could gather and put the lid on the more radical instincts of the lower house. Whereas the Chamber of Deputies was elected directly (starting in 1881) with quite a low wage threshold for suffrage, the Senate followed an unusual mixed election-appointment system, where the richest property holders in each province chose a shortlist of candidates, from which the Emperor chose a senator to be invested for a life term. As such, the Senate was not a hereditary chamber (except insofar as adult members of the Imperial House held seats in it by right - in 1889, the sole beneficiary of this was the Princess Imperial, who was also the only female senator), but being named to it functioned sort of like a British life peerage, except that there was a limit on the number of senators from each province - they were supposed to be equal to half the number of deputies elected there, rounded down. This meant the Senate of the 1886-89 legislature had 60 seats, with Minas Gerais making up the largest number (ten) and several of the outlying provinces having only one seat. Notably, southern Brazil was substantially less represented than it would be later on, as its industrial growth wouldn't quite take hold until the 20th century.

Unlike most of the republics that followed it (the military dictatorship is the exception to this), the Empire was mostly a strict two-party system. You had the Conservative Party (Partido Conservador), which represented the wealthy landowners, staunchly supporting the monarchy, the traditional social hierarchy, the supremacy of Catholicism, and, of course, the institution of slavery. While the Conservatives mostly supported parliamentary government, they also tended to favour centralised rule from Rio de Janeiro. On the other hand, there was the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal), whose supporters were largely smallholders and urban people, and who wanted to institute reforms to turn Brazil into a proper parliamentary democracy, including the election of senators and restrictions on imperial authority. Traditionally, the main dividing line between the parties had been the question of decentralisation, which the Liberals tended to favour while the Conservatives opposed it, but after the political earthquake that was the Paraguayan War, the Liberals started to drift leftward, and starting in 1878, the Liberal government instituted a slew of reforms including direct elections to the Chamber of Deputies, public education, clampdowns on election fraud and the gradual abolition of slavery.

That Liberal government lost power in 1885, but this didn't necessarily stop the pace of reform - in 1888, while the Emperor was travelling in Europe, the Princess Imperial and her sympathisers in the Conservative government pushed through a law that immediately emancipated all slaves in Brazil. By this point, the institution was close to a natural death anyway - Brazilian slavery was incredibly nasty, with enslaved people tending to die faster than they could be replaced, and the end of the Atlantic slave trade meant that it was never going to sustain itself. Still, the traditional elites out in the provinces took this as an attack, and when it became known that the Liberals might form another government the following year, Conservative Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca staged a coup d'état to prevent this. Now, he probably didn't actually intend for it to go further than restoring the Conservatives to power, but junior officers (a constant of Brazilian army politics is that the junior officers always tend to fuck things up for their superiors) who had spent the past few years getting high on republicanism and positivism decided they were probably not going to get another chance to realise their ambitions, and so they pressured Fonseca into declaring the end of the monarchy and the birth of a Brazilian republic. That republic would end up totally dominated by a) the army and b) provincial landowners, who each made sure that democracy didn't stray too far from their ideas of good government.

 

[Ares96]

Well, I found a constituency map for the Chamber of Deputies. Still no actual results in sight though, and based on the Senate composition, I strongly suspect this would've been out of date by 1889, so we can't place them next to each other with any certainty. Still.

The Chamber was a far more straightforward body than the Senate - seats were apportioned to the provinces by population and elected for a maximum of five years by the eligible voters of the province. Two big caveats here, of course. Firstly, the body of eligible voters was quite small - not only did you have to be a male citizen over 25 to vote, you had to have a taxable income of over a hundred milréis (thousand réis). Secondly, until the Lei Saraiva of 1881 (part of the Liberal reform package mentioned in the last post), suffrage was indirect. Voters elected an electoral assembly, which in turn chose deputies and senatorial shortlists (in subdivided provinces these may have been separate assemblies). To serve as an elector you had to have an income of 200 milréis, and to serve as a deputy you had to make 400.

This sounds like a lot, but in fact, the real was very, very inflated, so by 1872 there were about a million eligible voters in the country, or about ten percent of the population. Which was obviously a problem the Liberals made sure to correct when they passed the Lei Saraiva - the property qualifications weren't actually moved AFAICT, but they did introduce a provision requiring voters to be able to write the names of their chosen candidates in their own hand and sign their name and the date of election. This was a bit of a problem in a country with no functioning education system and an adult literacy rate of, generously, maybe 20%. So the enlightened liberal reforms actually shrunk the electorate from around a million in 1872 to some 145,000 in 1881 - of course, those 145,000 did vote directly for all elective offices.

Nor did the positivist, elitist Republicans think to challenge it. Of course, open ballots and a restricted franchise was very useful for the sort of social control the Old Republic depended on, and so the Old Republic only tightened the franchise as the decades went on. It took Getúlio Vargas to introduce universal manhood suffrage, and it took until the 1988 Constitution before the literacy requirement was officially lifted.

 

[Ares96]

I absolutely, categorically refuse to do a writeup for this. At least quite yet.

 

[Ares96]

In 1949, the Peronists rewrote the Argentine Constitution. Prior to then, the Chamber of Deputies had been elected (in halves, as ever) by limited voting, with voters given two-thirds as many votes as the province had seats to be filled. This meant Perón's supporters could handily win two thirds of the seats, but apparently (?) this wasn't enough, because they called a constitutional convention alongside the 1948 legislative elections, which, being two-thirds Peronist, immediately set about ratfucking their opponents.

On the face of it, the new constitution was more democratic than its predecessor - women could vote, for one, and the Senate would now be directly elected for the first time. But for the Chamber, the rules were significantly changed. Instead of being elected by province, deputies would now be elected in single-member constituencies, which were drawn by the national government and designed to suppress opposition voters. In the Federal District and Córdoba, both UCR strongholds, this resulted in what became known as circunscripciones chorizo (not translating that), long, narrow constituencies that paired a small UCR-voting suburb with a larger Peronist one. There was a minor voice provided for the opposition, in that two seats in each of the five largest provinces (Buenos Aires, Federal District, Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos) were reserved for the best-performing losers in the constituencies. Although it is worth noting that these didn't take proportionality into account at all, so two of them (one in the Federal District and one in Córdoba) actually went to the Peronist candidates in constituencies won by the UCR.

Another thing that's worth noting is that the Peronists, at least on the face of it, tried to make sure that women were actually able to use their newly-won right to vote and be elected. Spurred on by Eva Perón, the President's young, energetic and popular wife, they created the Partido Peronista Femenino (Women's Peronist Party), which functioned as a women's section of the main Peronist Party and was given twenty-six seats in the elections. All of their candidates were elected, which probably (I don't have data for this) gave Argentina one of the largest cohorts of women parliamentarians in the world. Of course, it's debatable how feminist it truly was to fence women off into their own little section of politics, and obviously none of the elected candidates outside the PPF were women.

At the same time as this, Perón was re-elected to the presidency with 63% of the vote, which was another new element in the 1949 Constitution. The bid to have Eva Perón nominated to the vice-presidency failed, owing to her own poor health, and she died eight months after the election. This happened to coincide with a recession, and the result was a period of repression that ended up alienating both the left, the right, the Church and the Army. Finally, in September 1955, the Army rose up and overthrew Perón, banned the Peronist Party and forbade the press from mentioning Perón's name (they were required to call him the "Deposed Tyrant"). They also famously stole Eva Perón's remains and had them buried in Italy under a fake name, cancelling the mausoleum Perón had planned to build for her.

 

[Ares96]

There might be a Thing coming to link all of these up, along the lines of the Brazil Thing, once that's done.

Argentina 1994 (constituent)

 

[Ares96]

Trying out a new kind of map.

When the City of Växjö amalgamated with the surrounding rural municipality in 1940, the new city was initially divided into four wards (which I haven't been able to find descriptions of anywhere - they might be available in the magistrates' records, which would be in Vadstena Castle, but we don't seem to have them in the archive here), which represented no change in the total number of polling districts from before. However, after the end of the war the city began to grow rapidly, and the City Council decided to replace the original four wards with eight new ones.



Only one of these (ward 2) was confined to the old city grid, which shows the extent to which the population had moved out of it. Wards 3 and 4 were drawn smaller than the others on purpose, in anticipation of the suburbs planned there - even so, ward 4 had to be split in half after only two election cycles. The new ward 9 covered a narrow strip of land between the old and new highways going north of town, which left ward 4 much more centred around the eastern suburb of Högstorp.



This, too, would only last two cycles, before the truly massive northern suburban expansion started and forced a comprehensive rewarding ahead of the 1964 general elections.

 

[Ares96]

And here's the 1964 rewarding, which takes us through to the 1971 amalgamation and the end of the City of Växjö as a purely urban municipality. Again, it was the northern suburbs that forced a partial rewarding, the details of which I've been unable to track down. Another minor change was carried out before the 1973 election (the wards having been carried over into the amalgamated Växjö Municipality), and in 1974 there was another complete rewarding that I do have a map of, which brought the total number of wards up to 22. A fairly impressive rate of growth, I'd say, considering there were just four of them thirty years prior.

 

[Ares96]

Fast-forward ten years, and the city's just kept growing. What you see on this map is actually the built-up area as of 1970 - there likely would've been even further growth by 1974, especially in Teleborg, which the city was rapidly developing as a new satellite town, destroying some of the best farmland in south Småland in the process. In 1967, Lund University had set up a satellite campus on the grounds of Teleborg Castle, which became the independent Växjö University College ten years later. This was to have massive ramifications on the development of Växjö as a whole, and speed up its growth even more as it transitioned from a city of soldiers and bureaucrats into a spearhead of the modern high-tech service economy.

Anyway, to deal with all this growth, the wards were redrawn once again. The Åseda narrow-gauge railway, which was now threatened with closure (it would finally shut down in 1984, the last narrow-gauge line to be operated by SJ), disappeared as a ward boundary, being replaced with the planned Northern Bypass and creating a new ward (ward 3) covering the nascent suburb of Hovshaga. The Million Programme estates in Araby and Nydala received three wards all to themselves (wards 4, 5 and 6), while Teleborg was divided into two wards (wards 21 and 22).



Of course, there had also been a municipal reform in those ten years since 1964. In Växjö's case, it was carried out with surprising ease, and after the 1970 elections, a unified council was created covering a large swathe of central Värend. In the pre-reform municipality, the Social Democrats tended to scrape through by the skin of their teeth, and given that it was now being combined with several municipalities with strong Centre majorities, that wasn't a great sign of things to come for the broad left. Indeed, it took until 1988 before there was a left-of-centre majority on the council. The 1976 elections, the first ones I have ward-level data for, were no exception - although the Social Democrats won the most seats, the Centre, Moderates and Liberals won a healthy majority of 35 seats between them, and were able to govern the council.

 

[Ares96]

I found a newspaper clipping of the 1966 results, so here those are. As mentioned previously, 1966 was a terrible election for the Social Democrats, and Växjö was no exception to that. The combined right won 22 out of 40 seats on the council, but the S-led administration carried on as before. In the case of the council presidency I can understand that - Georg Lücklig had been in local politics since the 1930s and led the local party for almost as long, so he enjoyed widespread respect and was quite old anyway. He did end up retiring in 1968, at which point the Conservatives put in one of their own, the master optician and deputy council president Ingvar Dominique, who would chair the council until 1982. Political careers tend to be quite long in Växjö. As for the executive, I don't know why that didn't change leadership, but if I had to guess I'd say they didn't want to rock the boat while preparing for the big merger. The right-wing parties were represented on the executive anyway.



Oh, and a note that's important: unlike in Malmö and Helsingborg, the right did not have an electoral alliance in Växjö. I have nonetheless mapped the election by bloc rather than by party, because well, I just think it looks better that way. Red maps are nice, but they're not terribly informative when the red party, in fact, lost the election.

 

[Ares96]

So I've now been able to trace the boundaries of the city back to the municipal reform in 1863, which created two municipalities to cover what had formerly been the Växjö cathedral parish: the City of Växjö (Växjö stad), which covered the city itself and its land possessions within the parish, and the Växjö Rural Municipality (Växjö landskommun), which covered the rest of the parish, including the lands of the episcopal see as well as the seven villages of Kronoberg, Araby, Hov, Östregård, Hollstorp, Skir and Telestad.



As you can tell, this created some slightly odd borders, as the city owned significant tracts of land along the highways west and north of it, enough in fact to split the rural municipality in half. Borders were complicated even further when the Royal Kronoberg Regiment (I 11) established a cantonment in the western rural part of the city in 1919, which detached a large area from the city council's ownership and moved it into state control. This didn't formally change the municipal boundaries, but it did have a significant effect on the history of Växjö as a city.

Despite being a cathedral city and the only city for dozens of miles in any direction, Växjö in the 19th century was a profoundly sleepy place, with only a couple of thousand inhabitants. The only things it had to recommend it were its grammar school and its role as a county town, and teachers and bureaucrats came to dominate local government in the early years. As urbanisation began to take hold all around the country, and as the cantonment was established, it began to slowly grow, and before too long it was spilling over into the rural municipality. East of the city centre, the city's jurisdiction ended immediately behind the cathedral, but a large suburb began to grow up in Östregård in the first years of the 20th century. In order to implement a city plan and various public safety laws, which normally weren't possible to apply in rural municipalities, Östregård decided in 1919 to form a municipalsamhälle, a small ad-hoc council set up specifically to administer those laws. The borders of this council were set up to hug the edges of the settlement, leaving the episcopal estate as a near-exclave of the rural municipality in what was fast becoming the middle of the city. Remnants of this can still be seen today, as the bishop's pastures remain largely undeveloped. There's some allotments, and the northern half of it would be taken over by the new grammar school built in the 1950s, but there are in fact still significant areas of pasture in the middle of Växjö.



Until this point, elections in Växjö had been simple affairs. The voters, of whom there were only a few hundred at most, gathered in the city hall and elected their representatives. But in 1919, the Edén coalition government brought in universal suffrage in local elections, which (along with the aforementioned growth) meant that the body of voters ballooned to several thousand. To better serve these new voters, it was decided to split the city into two electoral wards, of which the southern one would still hold polls at the town hall, while the northern one would vote in the IOGT chapter hall. The split line was simple and understandable, following the high street through the city centre and then the highway west.



The growth continued, and in 1937 the time came to add a third ward, this time in the west of the city. Somewhere in between here, the city also switched from bloc vote to proportional representation, and aligned its election days with those for the county council, for which Växjö made up a constituency by itself as the only city in Kronoberg County. Despite universal suffrage, it remained a Conservative bastion for most of this period, and only as part of their nationwide landslide in 1938 did the Social Democrats manage to break through.



The Social Democrats, led by the energetic young councillor and former grammar school teacher Georg Lücklig, immediately decided to set about merging the two municipalities, in large part to secure the votes in Östregård, which was by now a heavily lower-middle-class suburb. Aided by the generally favourable attitude of Stockholm to urban boundary reform, they were able to get an order in council confirming this as early as autumn 1939, and on New Year's Day 1940, Växjö Rural Municipality and Östregård council both ceased to exist. As a result, Växjö again saw a big population increase, putting it over the 10,000 mark for the first time ever and requiring it to elect its council in two different constituencies rather than by citywide vote. To implement this, the city's wards were again redrawn, creating a north and a south constituency with equal populations (electing twenty councillors each) and a west and an east ward within each constituency. This was the division that would exist until 1949, when population growth again forced a rewarding, and the constituencies would exist until it was made possible to voluntarily abolish them in the early 60s, at which point Växjö immediately did so.

 

[Ares96]

And here's all the elections going back to the amalgamation of 1940.

There was no off-cycle election held for the unified council, so the 36 councillors representing the original city carried on until the scheduled local elections in 1942 (I dare say Sweden is probably one of few countries in Europe to hold elections in 1942...). As with the 1940 general elections, these saw a mass surge of voters coming out in support of Per Albin Hansson and his wartime leadership, and in Växjö this came to benefit the governing Social Democrats under Georg Lücklig, who won an overall majority of seats - albeit reduced from 1938. The Conservatives did about as well as could be expected under the circumstances, and the amalgamation also had the slightly less expected effect of making Växjö one of very few city municipalities in the country where the Agrarians won representation.



Four years later, the Red Army had stormed across Europe and destroyed the fascist menace, and many in the western European labour movements took this as a sign that maybe Communism was the future after all. In Sweden this tendency was tempered a bit by general Russophobia as well as the phenomenally strong position of the Social Democrats in the movement, but there was still a surge in Communist support and a concurrent drop for the Social Democrats all across the country in the 1946 local elections. The Conservatives were losing ground too, tainted by their association with the pro-German strands of the right before and during the war. Instead, the Liberals began a surge that would last about a decade. Both of these factors were on display in Växjö, as the two big parties each lost several seats and the Communists and Liberals gained ground to compensate. The result was a 20-20 deadlock on the council - the right were able to get their man into the council chairmanship, but Lücklig stayed on as head of the all-powerful Finance Committee.



1950 saw the Communist wave recede decisively as the Cold War began to set in. The Social Democrats regained all four of the seats they'd lost to the Communists in 1946, but the council remained deadlocked and no change in leadership occurred. The Liberals, for their part, continued to win seats off the Conservatives and knocked the Agrarians off the council altogether.



1954 was reported in the local newspapers as another deadlock election, but in fact, the final count revealed that a seat in the southern constituency initially assigned to the Communists was in fact won by the Conservatives, who were thus able to secure 21 seats taken alongside the Liberals (who were now almost as big as them). The two right-wing parties struck a deal whereby the Conservatives kept the council chairmanship while the Liberal MP Erik Strandh took over the Finance Committee.



The right won another victory in 1958, with the now-renamed Centre Party returning to the council and the Conservatives regaining some ground from the Liberals. Strandh retired from politics after being defeated in the 1958 snap general election, and was replaced by a fellow Liberal of whom I know nothing whatsoever. A year into the term of this council, Carl Petri retired as council chairman, and was replaced by none other than Georg Lücklig in an upset result, perhaps a sign of things to come.



1962 saw a significant change in the electoral map, as the constituencies were becoming unbalanced. Rather than redraw them, the council decided to reapportion them so that 25 councillors were elected in the north and 15 in the south. This had the unexpected result of seeing a Communist elected to the council once again, even as the Social Democrats regained their majority and were able to elect their man to head the Finance Committee. The Liberals, meanwhile, continued to take a drubbing, and the Agrarians began to make inroads beyond the tiny rural population that remained in the city.

 

[Ares96]

I've been playing a fair amount of LA Noire lately, which got me back into their insane local history, and after some googling I found a very good newspaper archive (https://cdnc.ucr.edu/) which included old election precinct maps and results. So with that in hand, I've now drawn up a couple of maps for some of the most dramatic mayoral elections in the city's history, which will hopefully themselves be mapped soon.

1909 (not showing the harbour area, because I can't get the borders down there quite right and also it would make the map too big):



1911, after annexing Hollywood and redrawing and renumbering all the precincts:



Oh, and the threadmark title "wards" is purely for internal consistency - like a lot of other cities in the American West, LA abolished its council wards a few years before this as an anti-corruption measure, instead requiring all council candidates to campaign across the entire city and thereby theoretically making vote-buying harder.