The Georgetown Electorate

As part of filing to run for ANC, the Board of Elections gives candidates the complete voter rolls. I thought it would be interesting to aggregate the data and see what it says about the make up of the Georgetown (and Burleith) electorate. Here are the results!

Total Numbers

Our ANC is broken up into eight individual single member districts (“SMDs”). The SMDs are as follow:

• 2e01 – Burleith and Hillandale
• 2e02 – The best part of Georgetown full of beautiful and smart people (i.e. northwest Georgetown)
• 2e03 – Western Georgetown above M St.
• 2e04 – Half of the Georgetown University’s campus
• 2e05 – Lower Georgetown
• 2e06 – Eastern Georgetown above M St.
• 2e07 – Northeast Georgetown
• 2e08 – The other half of Georgetown University’s campus plus some blocks just outside the gates

The map is drawn in a way to have approximately 2,000 residents in each SMD. But that doesn’t mean that they have 2,000 registered voters. It’s 2,000 residents, including those who are too young to register, non-citizens, and those that either choose not to register or keep a registration in another state. That’s just how apportionment works in this country.

So it should not come as a surprise that each SMD has fewer than 2,000 registered voters. But some of them have way less than 2,000 registered voters. You’ll not be shocked to hear that 2e04 and 2e08 (the two student SMDs) have very few registered voters. Students rarely change their registration when they attend Georgetown. SMD 2e08, which has several blocks that include non-students, clocks in at 158 registered voters, or just about 8% of the residents. But that’s huge compared with 2e04, which has just nine registered voters. That rounds down to 0% of the 2,000 resident total.

Of the other SMDs, the voter totals vary a decent amount. East Georgetown (2e06) leads the pack with 71% registration rate, with northeast Georgetown (2e07) close behind at 65%. The rest fall back a bit further with Burleith (2e01) at 61%, western Georgetown (2e03) at 57%, northwestern Georgetown at 49%, and lower Georgetown (2e05) at 46%.

The overall registration rate for all of ANC2E is about 45%. But if you take out the student SMDs it’s at about 58%. That’s pretty low compared with the rest of the city, which has a registration rate closer to 75%. I’d like to think that is mostly due to how many international residents we have here. But I fear it also reflects a level of apathy that many residents have towards voting in DC.

Registration Date

The rolls also list when each voter first registered in DC (with a big caveat I’ll get to below). This is not necessarily the date when you first registered to vote anywhere. Just when you first registered to vote in DC. (I’m not sure what date it would list if you registered in DC, Moved away and registered there, and then registered back in DC. I assume it’s the more recent date, but it’s probably not a hugely common situation.)

Aggregating the data together, you can see what the median registration date is for the whole ANC and each of the respective SMDs. While the registration rates varied quite a bit across the SMDs, the median registration date is fairly close, at least among the non-student SMDs. They are as follow:

• 2e01 – 1/8/2016
• 2e02 – 9/15/2016
• 2e03 – 4/13/2016
• 2e04 – 2/25/2022
• 2e05 – 11/8/2016
• 2e06 – 2/12/2016
• 2e07 – 1/3/2017
• 2e08 – 7/19/2022

Not surprisingly, the median date that voters in the student districts registered is fairly recently, both coming just before the last election. But for the rest of the SMDs, the dates all fall within the twelve months starting on January 2016.

I was going to list the approximate date of the voter with the oldest registration in the ANC, but then I ran square into DC’s unfortunate history with democracy. You see, I noticed that the oldest dates I was finding were all in early 1968. That didn’t seem right, but then I remembered that after the end of Home Rule in the late 19th century, there would be no reason to register in DC before the passage of the 23rd Amendment in 1961.

This amendment gave DC residents the right to vote in presidential elections, but other than the presidential election, they still had no other elections to vote in. So the earliest a (still living) District resident would have registered in DC would be sometime ahead of the 1964 election. Perhaps the data from that election is no longer available. But 1968 was a big year for DC voters. This was obviously the second presidential election they could take part in, but it also was the first year of the elected school board. This was the first local election that District residents could vote in since 1874. (As argued in the book Dream City, a great deal of DC dysfunction in the late 20th century can probably be blamed on the fact that the city was denied democracy for 100 years).

So some of the voters with 1968 registrations probably voted in the 1964 elections, but regardless of age, no one, regardless of age, registered in DC prior to 1961.

Party

Each voter’s party identification is also listed. If you suspect that Georgetown is more Republican than the rest of DC, you’re not wrong.

Approximately 5% of District voters is registered as a Republican. But in our ANC it’s 13%.

And the Democratic portion is reflectively lower. For DC-wide it’s about 77%. In our ANC it’s 62%.

Independents are also more common here. For DC the total is 16%, but in our ANC it’s 24%.

There are fewer than 100 voters here registered with the Statehood Greens, the Libertarian party, or “other”.

The party breakout for each SMD (except the student ones) is largely similar to the overall numbers. West Georgetown (2e03) has the highest Republican percentage (15%) but northeast Georgetown (2e07) has the highest number of Republicans, with 184. But it also has the highest percentage of Democrats, at 66%.

Lower Georgetown (2e05) has the highest percentage of independent voters, at 27%.