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Max's election maps and assorted others

I'm making a new map of Latvia that's supposed to be to scale with the Estonian one - as so often happens with these things, the maps didn't align perfectly and so there's going to be a little bit of weirdness along the northern border, but I'm happy with it regardless. It's not quite done yet, but as a test, I did the 1922 election in the Riga and Vidzeme constituencies.

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Lithuania 1920
Speaking of the Baltics, I finally found something I've spent a long time looking for. Unfortunately it's not as detailed as what I have for Estonia and Latvia, but some enterprising Wikipedian has in fact dug up a statistical yearbook that has all the Lithuanian election results up to 1926 (i.e. all the ones that mattered) broken down to apskritis ("county") level.

Lithuania is quite different from the other Baltic states, and was even more so in the 1920s. Whereas Estonia and Latvia still carried the legacy of the Livonian Order, being largely Protestant countries dominated by a Baltic German landowning class, Lithuania had been in personal union with Poland until the partitions, and as a result was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and had a native (albeit heavily Polonised) nobility that owned most of the land. It also had a very large Jewish minority, which Latvia did as well to an extent, and a long and complicated history with Prussia meant there was some German influence as well, just not as heavy as it was in Estonia and Latvia.

Also, while Russia was generally content to let the Baltic Germans run free in Estonia and Latvia, Lithuania was subjected to some quite harsh Russification policies, including heavy restrictions on the Catholic Church and an outright ban on Lithuanian books written in the Latin script. These policies were intended to separate Lithuania from ever-rebellious Poland and tie it more closely to Russia, and Lithuanians very much saw them for what they were - Catholic priests and patriotic locals organised book smuggling rings which had books printed in East Prussia and taken across the border covertly, and were so successful that Lithuania got one of the highest literacy rates in the Russian Empire. In one sense, however, the printing ban was a success for Russia - the resistance to it did promote a sense of separate Lithuanian nationhood, and after 1905 the prevailing opinion even among the landowning class and the Catholic hierarchy was that Lithuania ought to be an independent state rather than part of a restored Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The views of these groups were most closely represented by the Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party, which had been founded in 1890 to safeguard the Catholic Church but became more and more openly nationalist after the 1905 Revolution. The LKDP was very similar in orientation to the Polish Endecja movement, supporting political Catholicism and a radical nationalism that tended to be directed against ethnic minorities within the country as much as outside forces. In the Lithuanian case, this especially meant Poles and Jews, both of which made up large parts of the population. When Lithuania became independent, the Catholic-nationalist movement established a number of side organisations, most prominent of which was the Federation of Labour, which was a network of Catholic trade unions not unlike what existed in Germany at the same time. This helped draw urban workers into the fold of the movement, and a Farmers' Association was set up to do the same for small farmers. The latter was even more closely tied to the LKDP, however, and the results I've found show them running a separate list only in the Kaunas and Raseiniai constituencies, winning seats only in the former. I noticed while writing this that parts of Wikipedia show them winning a total of 18 seats in this election, but I haven't found any information about where those were, so I've left the map as-is.

Very much like Poland, again, the opposition to the LKDP and its allies was heavily divided. The Lithuanian Peasants' Union was closer to the PSL in ideology than it was to the farmers' parties in Estonia and Latvia, being generally centre-left and drawing support mostly from small farmers and landless farmworkers. The Social Democratic Party had been a key part of the national revival, but found its electoral reach quite limited - especially compaed to its sister parties in the other Baltic states. There was also the Socialist People's Democratic Party, which was a more conservative social democratic group that had been founded out of the former Lithuanian Democratic Party (which was also the originator of the Peasants' Union). Finally, of course, the ethnic minorities had their own organisations - the most prominent of these was the Jewish Democratic Union (also called the Jewish National Union in some sources), founded for the 1920 election as an electoral alliance between the main Jewish groups operating in Lithuania.

The 1920 Constituent Assembly elections were the first democratic elections ever held in Lithuania, and were organised by the provisional government that had been formed under German occupation during World War I. The Assembly was intended to have 150 deputies elected from ten constituencies, but only six constituencies were actually able to hold elections. The remaining four - based in Vilnius, Lida, Grodno and Bialystok - were under the control of Józef Pilsudski's Polish army, which intended to restore the Commonwealth and rejected Lithuanian claims even to its historic capital as a result. Of course, Vilnius was overwhelmingly not ethnically Lithuanian (according to the 1897 census, its population was about equal parts Poles and Jews with Russians in third place and Lithuanians forming about 2-3% of the population), so we end up in the awkward position where the ethnic-nationalist Lithuanian government claimed it as a result of historic and cultural ties while the more pluralistic and expansionist Polish state cited its ethnic composition as a reason not to cede it. Poland would end up forming a "Republic of Central Lithuania" encompassing the city and its surroundings in late 1920, holding a pretty questionable election there in January 1922 and then annexing it into Poland directly.

The Constituent Assembly convened at the city theatre in Kaunas, the "temporary capital" designated in Vilnius' absence, in May 1920, and of the 112 deputies who were actually able to take their seats, 58 were affiliated with the Catholic movement - 10 with the Federation of Labour, either 3 or 18 with the Farmers' Association, and the remainder with the LKDP. This was enough to form a majority government, but the LKDP leadership still decided it was best to form a grand coalition, and invited LVS leader Kazys Grinius to form a government. LKDP stalwart Aleksandras Stulginskis was elected to chair the Assembly, however, which made him the de facto head of state until a constitution could be written.

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I'm assuming the ZDS plurality is on the map in Ponevezh/Ponevitch (not sure the proper Lithuanian spelling, so going with the Yiddish here)? Given its role in Litvish/Litvak identity it wouldn't surprise me, especially since without Vilna it would have been one of the larger centers of Jewish life in the country.
 
I'm assuming the ZDS plurality is on the map in Ponevezh/Ponevitch (not sure the proper Lithuanian spelling, so going with the Yiddish here)? Given its role in Litvish/Litvak identity it wouldn't surprise me, especially since without Vilna it would have been one of the larger centers of Jewish life in the country.
Yes.
 
Riga 1920 (rough map) New
I'm working on mapping the 1920 Constituent Assembly election, and while the pre-reform Latvian orthography means it's somewhat slow going, I am most likely going to be able to do it. The report includes results by polling station for Riga, which unfortunately don't map to any known administrative divisions, but since the report does list the addresses of the polling stations themselves, we can draw up a rough map of the results nonetheless.

Riga's political geography in this era sort of reminds me of Budapest - well, specifically the Pest half, there's not really much of a Buda equivalent. You've got the relatively contained old-town area (they're even shaped about the same, although obviously Riga has much more of a medieval town core than Pest does since all that stuff would be in Buda Castle) with the surrounding ring of boulevards, then a series of suburbs radiating out from that along the main roads. Of those, the ones north of the old town are the flashiest, displaying a large amount of Jugendstil architecture and being home to a lot of the city's German-speaking elite. The suburb along the river to the south is the poorest, notably being home to the city's Jewish (and in Riga's case, also Russian) minority, while the ones in between the two are working-class and largely ethnically homogenous.

Of course, the German minority was much bigger in Riga, and made up much of the city's elite. They lived largely in the old town and surrounding areas, but also spread out into the suburbs north and west of town in particular - other than that, the west bank appears to have been mostly Latvian and working-class. So, too, the outer suburbs on the east bank, which were (and are) home to much of Riga's heavy industry and recorded some of the highest Social Democratic voteshares in the city.

The party names should be self-explanatory, with the possible exception of the Nonpartisan Citizens' Group (Bezpartejiskā pilsoņu grupa), which I assume was a list made up of small business owners and other centre-right types - it's a bit hard to tell as they only stood in this election and Latvian Wikipedia doesn't even have an article on them. But they seem to fill broadly that kind of niche.

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Latvia 1920 (redux) New
Okay, so here's the 1920 Constituent Assembly election in all its confusing glory. I'll copy-paste the description I wrote for the old map I made of it:
This election was called pretty much immediately after the armistice between the Latvian national forces and the Red Army in February 1920, and held in April, before there was even a formal peace treaty in place. So the Russian Civil War was very much still raging at this point, even if it wasn't raging within Latvia anymore, and the Bolsheviks, who had some measure of support among the Latvian workers, boycotted the elections. This meant there was effectively only one left-wing force available to vote for - the Social Democratic Workers' Party, organisationally descended from the Latvian Mensheviks, who consequently cleaned up and won nearly 40% of the vote. This wasn't enough for a majority, however, and between the two different Agrarian parties (Latgale had its own one, because they're kind of weird even now and were extremely weird before that part of the country was swamped by Russian migration during the Soviet era), the small bourgeois parties and the various ethnic minorities, the Assembly was essentially centre-right in temperament. The Constitution they wrote, the Satversme (a neologism intended to sound more Latvian than the usual "konstitūcija"), created a parliamentary republic with broad judicial and popular oversight over public power, avoiding most of the social rights that were becoming popular to put in constitutions around this time as well as any notion of abridging the right to private property. A bill of rights was intended to be passed along with the Satversme, but this was voted down by the assembly and not added to the constitution until 1998.

A couple of finer points that I didn't deal with at the time, because the old map wasn't detailed enough to show them: the Latvian state defined its borders, at least provisionally, based on the uyezds (districts; apriņķi in Latvian) of the Russian Empire, simply because those were the administrative units that already existed. Those borders would end up changing, sometimes in Latvia's favour and sometimes against it, following border agreements conducted in 1920-21 with all neighbouring countries, but even in April 1920 they didn't perfectly match what the government in Riga actually controlled. In particular, most of Ilukste district was under Polish occupation following their counteroffensive in the Polish-Soviet War - there was a substantial Polish population in the region, as we can see from the fact that the Polish list was the biggest in both Daugavpils and Kraslava, but Poland was not successful in pressing this claim and eventually handed the area back to Latvia.

There were also a number of parishes along the northern border that were under Estonian control, and a couple would eventually get handed to Estonia - the most notable dispute here concerned the town of Walk (its German name - Valka in Latvian, Valga in Estonian), a rail junction that sat right on the border and had a mixed population. Both countries wanted it, Estonia because of its rail junction and slight Estonian majority and Latvia because it was the seat of a district that was otherwise pretty much all Latvian. In the end, the British civil servant Stephen Tallents was invited to arbitrate the issue, and drew a new border that split the town in half. Estonia got the railway station and most of the town centre, Latvia got the western suburbs and approaches to the station. Two separate town councils were set up, and this situation was only really undone when the two countries joined the Schengen Area in 2007.

The border with Lithuania, meanwhile, did not see any such caveats in this election, which is sort of interesting because it means Palanga got to vote in its first and only Latvian election. Like the rest of Courland, it was extremely left-wing - the rural municipality was almost entirely red, while the town was divided between the socialists and a Jewish unity list. To my surprise, Akniste also voted in 1920 even though it had been part of Kovno province, but the other two parishes ceded by Lithuania in exchange for Palanga did not seem to have participated in this election.

Also, I had to use 13 out of 16 sets of shades for this, so I'm sorry if parts of it are hard to read. I was particularly hoping I'd be able to avoid the grey shades, but at the end of the day, I think distinguishing the LgLP from Ceire Cion is more important than distinguishing them from occupied areas.

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Latvia 1922 (redux) New
And 1922. There's less to add to this, in part because I described it more thoroughly at the time and in part because I actually mapped it by parish at the time.
The Constituent Assembly lasted about two years, during which time it managed to pass a number of significant laws beside the Satversme - it set up key cultural institutions for the new republic, established universal public education, reformed marriage and property laws (including a massive land reform intended to increase the number of self-owning farmers, a measure that probably had a bigger impact on Latvian society than the new constitution itself), and reformed the local government system to make town and parish councils directly elected under universal suffrage (under the Russian system, the richest landowners sat on the council by right while the other landowners got to elect representatives and the landless had no say whatsoever).

The centre-right "unity coalition" that had governed Latvia through the independence struggle fell in June 1921 for reasons unknown to me, and was replaced with a new coalition between the agrarian parties, the centrist Workers' Party (now fading into irrelevance everywhere but Latgale) and a breakaway right faction of the LSDSP, who dubbed themselves the Mensheviks (mazinieki, a word that I've also seen translated as "minimalists"). The new government was led by Zigfrīds Anna Meierovics, previously the Foreign Minister under Ulmanis, who was half-Jewish (as the surname hints) but grew up in rural Courland and considered himself Latvian through and through, leading as he did the first Latvian cabinet with no national minorities represented. His government's activities were concerned largely with further statebuilding, including the establishment of the lats as a new national currency and the standardisation of Latvian spelling, replacing the old orthography based on German with a new one that closely represented the language as spoken (hence all the diacritics in modern Latvian writing).

With the Satversme passed and set to go into effect in November 1922, the Assembly dissolved itself and called for a new Saeima, or parliament (the Latvian word is almost certainly related to the Polish sejm, both meaning "meeting" or "assembly", but there was a fun controversy in the 19th century where a Latvian nationalist claimed to have "coined" the term independently and strenuously denied it had any connection whatsoever to any other language), to be elected in early October. The electoral law used for the Constituent Assembly was essentially carried over to this new body, with two slight modifications - firstly, the number of seats up for election decreased from 150 to 100, which was deemed enough for a country the size of Latvia, and secondly, the voter would now be allowed to strike out names from party lists and replace them with candidates from other lists - a form of panachage, basically. The Constituent Assembly spent a lot of time discussing Switzerland as a model for republican government, and no doubt this innovation came from there.

The elections resulted in some losses for both the LSDSP and the agrarians, who did especially badly in Latgale - the Latgalian Farmers' Party was reduced to a single seat, its place as the main voice of rural Latgale taken over by the Christian Farmers' and Catholic Party, which was an overtly Christian democratic organisation modelled on the German Centre Party and directly supported by the Catholic hierarchy. The liberal Democratic Centre also gained slightly, while the minority bloc essentially stayed put (as one might expect). The Mensheviks, who had hoped to seriously compete with the "rump" LSDSP for the working-class vote, suffered what can only be described as a fiasco - with some 6% of the vote and seven seats, they did place third, but it was a poor third, and not enough to save their coalition with the agrarians in government. When the First Saeima met, it elected an LSDSP member to chair it, and President Čakste called on the LSDSP to attempt to form a government. The overall left-right balance hadn't really shifted, however, and they would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to support them.
I may at some point go over the results in detail to see if I can untangle the "other" category used for the percentage section of the report, but that will have to be when I'm even more unemployed than currently.

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So for 1922, all those 'other' victories in the east are due to all the minor party votes being summed together in your source, right? And presumably this would affect majority shades in some of the other parishes?
That's right, yes. Imagine the Catholics in particular would've won a few more places otherwise.
 
Los Angeles 1949 New
So I've been getting into two different areas lately: the Baltics, and Los Angeles. Why these two at the same time, you may ask? I don't know, but here's the other one.

Since 1925, the Los Angeles City Council has used pretty much the same electoral system: fifteen members are elected from fifteen single-member districts, with no party affiliations shown on ballots and elections every two years. Today, half the council is up for election each time, providing four-year terms, but this only came about in the 1950s, prior to that councillors served two-year terms and all fifteen seats were up in every election.

In theory, at least. This being the US, and in spite of the nonpartisan ballots being meant as a way to prevent party machines from forming, most incumbents tended to run unopposed. In 1949, the election I looked at first (because it's the first one I could easily find district boundaries for), only one (1) seat had a contested election, with District 9 incumbent Parley P. Christensen losing to fellow Democrat Edward R. Roybal. 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).

(It is worth noting that "how many council seats are contested" isn't quite as secure an indicator of local democracy in the US, and particularly in California, as it is in countries like the UK - LA had a fiercely-contested mayoral election in the same year, and of course there were constant referendum campaigns. Still, always worth remembering the downsides of the "golden age of bipartisanship")

With all that in mind, I think the district map is more interesting to look at than the actual election map. The fact that the districts got redrawn frequently but never changed in number means you can follow LA's urban sprawl very effectively, and well, what we see in 1949 is certainly a more concentrated urban area than what exists today, but it's still not that dense. LA was never a very dense city, it was advertised as the sort of place where people could have the amenities of a city without becoming city people - at this point it was still one of the most productive agricultural regions in the US, and car ownership had been the norm for most (white) households even before the war. Even so, as we can see, settlement was largely concentrated around downtown and the few miles surrounding it. South Central ended around Watts and Inglewood, the Westside wasn't quite fully built-up all the way to Santa Monica, and the San Fernando Valley was rural enough that only one of the fifteen seats (District 1) was contained entirely within it. District 2 would likely have had a large part of its population in the Valley as well, but it also included much of Hollywood, so it's hard to say. Of course, most of the southward and eastward sprawl happened outside the city limits, so will be hard to discern from this - it's really mostly going to be the Valley's growth that will make an impact.

Of course, LA County has its own legislative body, the Board of Supervisors, elected using much the same system, but trying to map those districts would likely be a lot of work for limited returns considering there are five (5) of them for the entire county.

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Since 1925, the Los Angeles City Council has used pretty much the same electoral system: fifteen members are elected from fifteen single-member districts, with no party affiliations shown on ballots and elections every two years. Today, half the council is up for election each time, providing four-year terms, but this only came about in the 1950s, prior to that councillors served two-year terms and all fifteen seats were up in every election.
It's surreal to me to remember how tiny the city councils of major American cities are, given how many British and Swedish council maps I've seen on these forums that elect about twice to four times as many members as LA for a population that's closer to that of Burbank.

I think LA might actually elect more members than this to the State Assembly, even though that's also famously tiny.
 
It's surreal to me to remember how tiny the city councils of major American cities are, given how many British and Swedish council maps I've seen on these forums that elect about twice to four times as many members as LA for a population that's closer to that of Burbank.

I think LA might actually elect more members than this to the State Assembly, even though that's also famously tiny.
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's surreal to me to remember how tiny the city councils of major American cities are, given how many British and Swedish council maps I've seen on these forums that elect about twice to four times as many members as LA for a population that's closer to that of Burbank.

I think LA might actually elect more members than this to the State Assembly, even though that's also famously tiny.

The cube root law would indicate 155 seats for LA.
 
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