With Election Day this Tuesday, November 8th (don’t forget to vote!), it is a good time to take a look back at the last time we had elections for state offices–in the 2018 elections.  We geocoded the statewide voterfile and matching to the voter history file, both from the Secretary of State. Then, we were able to calculate the percentage of “active voters”[1] who turned out in November, 2018 by Census tract. The map below presents the data for the 21-County Atlanta Regional Commission planning area. The green shading indicates higher turnout; the red shading, lower turnout.

As this map shows, there is a fair amount of variation both between and within counties. Nearly every county has at least some census tracts with low turnout, with the exception of Fayette County. But the highest concentrations of low-turnout tracts are in west central Gwinnett, central Fulton (a band stretching diagonally through the city of Atlanta NPU S to NPU Z), northwest Clayton County, and eastern Hall County.

If the pattern displayed in this map looks familiar, that may be because voter turnout at the Census tract level has a high negative correlation (r=-.78) with the percentage of the population below poverty. To boil it down: usually, where this was  poverty, there was lower turnout. This suggests that even with early voting and absentee voting, the reasonable ability (or “franchise”) to vote may be not be fully accessible to citizens with fewer resources.

[1] Per the Secretary of State’s Office, “You are considered an active voter if you are registered to vote in Georgia and have stayed in contact with the election system in the last five years by voting, requesting an absentee ballot, signing a petition, or updating your address either through the Department of Driver Services or directly with your local elections office.” See https://www.sos.ga.gov/voter-resources.