Talk:2017 Seattle mayoral election

Likely to be reorganized

As noted on my talk page, the list of candidates and their background and campaign priorities/positions is likely to be reorganized in some way, such as a list with only name, party and occupation in one section, followed by a more detailed section adding positions. My expectation is that this is all we will have to say about the ~14 or so minor candidates, and will expand a bit on the 5-6 frontrunners in the primary, then go into greater detail on the top two for the general.

Most FAs about elections avoid lists and bullet points, and instead begin with a ==Background== section in all prose. That would be good to aim for, but with 21 candidates it's easier for now to stick with bulleted lists. I'm not certain what exactly is the standard format for these articles. You see a general outline layout at Seattle mayoral election, 2013 or Seattle mayoral election, 2009, but something much different at FAs Philadelphia municipal election, 1951, United States Senate election in California, 1950, United States Senate election in Ohio, 1898, etc. For now, it's a work in progress, and verifiability and WP:BLP issues are more important than perfection in layout and formatting. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:28, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Need archives

We should request archives be made of the campaign websites and anything else that might be taken down as the election continues. Wikipedia:Using WebCite has instructions. The Wayback Machine might archive some of it but you can't be sure. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 19:01, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

What is broken here?

What is the point of having a complete separate section for candidates positions? It takes a long list and makes it twice as long. I said if it would be better somewhere else, then move it don't delete it. But I had no idea where that somewhere else would be. If you're skeptical that there is any interest in the minor candidates, why would you devote twice as much space to them?

The interest I spoke of is evidenced by the long feature articles in the Seattle Times and the Weekly. The curiosity is, who would spend so much money and effort on a doomed campaign? You see from their agendas that the answer is they're quite eccentric, possibly fanatical. The tiny number of votes they got is illustrative of Seattle politics. Conservative and especially pro-Trump ideas are alien to Seattle, and the very narrow spectrum of positions of the viable candidates is helpful for the national and international reader. This isn't aimed at a local readership who already knows all about Seattle, and is just here for the outcome data. The version with only one list of primary candidates instead of two, with their positions right there, is much better layout.

These election articles seem to have been written as mere repositories of polling data and results tables. I refer you to WP:NOTSTATS. The tables are the least essential part. The encyclopedic part is the descriptions. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 02:48, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Expenditures and results

Here's a the vote counts up to Aug 3 and the financial data from the elections commision reports, with a column for $ spent per vote. It's kind of a big table to stuff into the article but I think something like this could be worked in, if not the whole table then a graph on the side. Oliver's campaign was notably efficient, while Brose, Hamilton, and Harris spent a surprising amount. Several are walking away with quite a bit of debt. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:07, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Candidate	Contributions	Expenditures	Cash on hand	Debt	Votes	Percent	Expenditure/vote
Jenny Durkan	$352,720.84	$216,191.78	$136,529.06	$73,963.96	42,281	30.19	$5.11
Cary Moon	$143,952.75	$88,499.74	$55,453.01	$50,846.58	23,417	16.72	$3.78
Jessyn Farrell	$91,773.71	$61,519.52	$30,254.19	$15,715.07	17,419	12.44	$3.53
Nikkita Oliver	$85,796.71	$35,815.49	$49,981.22	$0.00	20,839	14.88	$1.72
Gary E. Brose	$20,035.59	$16,628.00	$3,407.59	$6,300.00	3,202	2.29	$5.19
Mike McGinn	$36,469.70	$15,103.70	$21,366.00	$4,059.70	9,316	6.65	$1.62
Greg Hamilton	$13,792.24	$13,299.51	$492.73	$100.00	1,287	0.92	$10.33
Michael Harris	$10,548.96	$10,109.77	$439.19	$6,000.00	1,115	0.8	$9.07
Bob Hasegawa	$11,596.74	$9,206.30	$2,390.44	$12,738.64	12,011	8.58	$0.77
Harley Lever	$14,834.29	$7,276.32	$7,557.97	$29.29	2,558	1.83	$2.84
James W. Norton, Jr.	$6,569.83	$4,871.79	$1,698.04	$2,884.83	802	0.57	$6.07
Jason Roberts	$3,371.40	$3,554.70	$0.00	$2,799.70	324	0.23	$10.97
Casey Carlisle	$3,425.17	$3,030.94	$394.23	$0.00	1,042	0.74	$2.91
Alex Tsimerman	$1,951.86	$1,951.86	$0.00	$0.00	212	0.15	$9.21
Dave Kane	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	107	0.08	$0.00
Keith J. Whiteman	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	147	0.1	$0.00
Larry Oberto	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	2,464	1.76	$0.00
Lewis A. Jones	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	292	0.21	$0.00
Mary J. Martin	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	367	0.26	$0.00
Thom Gunn	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	376	0.27	$0.00
Tiniell Cato	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	132	0.09	$0.00
Write-in	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	356	0.25	$0.00

--Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:07, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Write-in warts

In case it's not clear enough, the current version as of August 15 of this article is a little inconsistent with the totals and percentages. King County Elections publishes some main vote counts excluding write-in votes. The write-ins are included in the more detailed tables served on the KC elections website, but it takes a bit of data wrangling to reconcile the small differences. The parts of this article that don't include write-ins (for now) should be marked. Later we can clean it up and make the numbers consistent, without having any write-in warts to worry about. In any case, the write-ins are few enough to have not made a meaningful difference. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:35, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Partisan vs nonpartisan offices

In the lead, this article seems to conflate the fact that the State of Washington has some nonpartisan offices (e.g. Judges and members of a board of education) with the mistaken impression that all elections are nonpartisan. See [[Washington State Constitution|http://leg.wa.gov/LawsAndAgencyRules/Pages/constitution.aspx].

While it is true that the state has adopted a top-two primary system, that is quite different from all offices being non-partisan. The top-two primary system can result in the general election being a contest between two candidates from the same party, but the candidates parties are generally well known, and partisan campaigning is still quite common.

The top-two primary system is sometimes described as nonpartisan primaries, but this is because independent voters (not associated with any party) can still cast votes in the primary. It is my understanding however that offices such as Mayor are still considered partisan offices. Burt Harris (talk) 21:30, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, the word 'nonpartisan' shouldn't be used here. It should be rewritten to more accurately describe how this election works, while leaving the details of Washington election to the linked article. You don't need a dubious tag, though. Just fix it and we're good. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 22:19, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Erasing of Republicans from this election. WTF?

It's getting out of hand erasing Republican candidates from the primary election. They didn't have much if any chance of winning, but they managed to get 10% of the vote. The idea that we are going to systematically delete information about anyone except a certain political point of view is a gross violation of Wikipedia's NPOV policy.

What is the deal here? I feel like this needs to be raised at the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard to bring in some fresh eyes from outside Seattle's bubble to look at this. Readers from other parts of the country, and other parts of the world, don't come to an article like this with all of your pre-existing information. An encyclopedia is there to introduce a whole topic to propel who aren't familiar with it. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:34, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

You're inventing motives where there are none. At least from my perspective, this has absolutely nothing to do with a candidate's partisan affiliation. It has to do with a lot of extraneous (read: useless) information. Read 1,000 election articles on Wikipedia. I guarantee in 0.00% of them will you find a detailed rundown of everything a candidate (of any party) believes in the candidate summary. Nevermore27 (talk) 20:43, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

The motives don't matter. The appearance matters. Violating NPOV without intending to violate it is still a violation. I don't understand what is "useless" about the information. What is so useful about the parts of the article you didn't delete? It seems obvious to me that if we're going to collect a bunch of statistics about these 15 candidates they ought to be more than just placeholder names. We can tell the reader a bare minimum to give the reader a hint as to who the hell they are. They aren't just names.

This other argument, that you can't say that because it's not like other election articles is the main one I've heard. It's an argument without an argument. What exactly is so great about these other 1,000 articles? There is a detailed explanation of this at WP:Editing policy. Wikipedia's policy is to favor incremental improvements of one article at a time, one edit at a time. It is a policy violation to demand that I make the same improvement to 1,000 articles all at once for the sake of consistency. I'm trying to improve *this* article, and editing policy supports precisely that. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:00, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

• This makes no sense. You complain that too much space is given to the minor candidates. So instead of listing all 21 candidates and short descriptions of them once, you double that? Now we have twice as many lists of 21 names. First we run through names 1 to 21, but only to say their job and party. Where the positions once where, now we have a big, white, void. What are we using the big white void to the right of the name list for? Scroll down, and then we have a whole other section that has names 1 to 21, again. But now different! It's got their agenda and positions. Same information. But twice as long. Why? What does that do? How does stretching the exact same content out to twice as much space, wasting most of it, fix anything? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 02:30, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Notice of Neutral point of view noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. The thread is Any mention in article Seattle mayoral election, 2017 of Republican candidates' positions. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:47, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Photos

I have another photo of Jenny Durkan (right) but it's not much better than the File:Jenny Durkan at KEXP mayoral forum 02.jpg. I thought we had several quality photos of Durkan so I was mostly trying to get one of Moon. I didn't realize how out of date and small the one mug shot was. Anyway, whith all the resizing you might see stretched images. See WP:Purge to clear caching issues, and check your browser cache.

File:Cary Moon at KEXP mayoral forum 04.jpg could be added later down in the article for some more general illustrations. There's also no reason we can't fill in some of the white space on the right with photos of Hasegawa, Farrell, McGinn and Oliver. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:30, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Finally, found the image scaling flag. I was just going to use the image_upright = 0.9 as SounderBruce just did. The default thumb width is 220px for IPs or new users, and you can set yours to whatever fits your display at Special:Preferences. But why do we want 0.5 for the lead images? This makes them smaller than the 220 x 0.8 that we have for the normal images down below, those set to the standard |thumb|upright|? I would think we'd want the lead images to be at least as large, if not slightly larger. What is the harm if we stretch the infobox wider? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 00:56, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Since the infobox images are displayed side by side, they need to be smaller. On lower resolution monitors, the infobox is stretched and takes up too much space (more than a third). SounderBruce 00:59, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

But that's the point of the scaling instead of hard coding. If your resolution really is that small, you go to Special:Preferences and change the default 220 px to 150 or 120 px. Wikipedia has gone to the current 220 default width based on their belief that this is where most users are nowadays. I assume they know what they're doing. If there were really that many people using such small monitors, we wouldn't be using 220 as our baseline. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 01:10, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

I have to admit that a half dozen Featured Articles that use this template (New York's 20th congressional district special election, 2009, Kentucky gubernatorial election, 1899, Canadian federal election, 1957, etc) almost all have these images hard coded at either 125 or 150 px, so this is the size that seems to be considered best. So upright=0.5 is a good number here. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 01:21, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

WikiVoice, and Wikipedia is not a crystal ball

Do we normally put final results in the election box just because a newspaper and a TV station called it? Does this not violate WP:CRYSTAL, Wikipedia is not a crystal ball? I think it would be fine to have prose in the body of the article saying that after the first ballot drop the Times and KIRO predicted Durkan would win. You can describe the reasoning they're applying in their prediction. I don't see it in any citations but I assume they are making a calculation based on King County Elections estimate for what typical voter turnout is? And by assuming that number they can predict that it's improbable that the lead could change? If it is mathematically impossible for Durkan to lose, can someone cite a source for that calculation? From what I can see, it is probably a sound argument and their forecast is probably correct. But it's still a forecast. When you say in the infobox that Durkan is the winner of the election then you're saying that is a fact. That's what WikiVoice is: you're not attributing this opinion or prediction to anyone, but saying it's known. Or as it says: "Avoid stating opinions as facts." We don't state things in Wikipedia's voice that are probably true, or that probably will happen. Wikipedia's voice is when things have happens. or definitely will happen.

Can we take this out of the infobox and move it into the body of the article, and attribute it to the source making the prediction? The election result is not known until it is certified on November 28. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 05:29, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Just about every other U.S. election article, presidential or otherwise, has used initial returns and the forecasting (or calling) by major local and national media outlets to determine that the infobox should host results as soon as possible. SounderBruce 01:45, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

I can't find any evidence of this. Is it somewhere at Wikipedia:WikiProject Elections and Referendums? As I mentioned, WP:CRYSTAL and WP:WikiVoice take a pretty firm stand against this. The policy on future predictions allows saying the NBA finals will begin on May 31. But it says no, you do not say the Warriors have already won because the Times or CNN believes it's a sure thing. It says "Certain scientific extrapolations are considered to be encyclopedic, such as chemical elements documented by IUPAC before isolation in the laboratory, provided that scientists have made significant non-trivial predictions of their properties." Is anyone arguing that this is anything close to that level of certainty? Is it scientific in any sense? As far as I can tell, neither The Seattle Times or KING5 has even shown their work. Has anyone asserted that it's mathematically impossible for Moon to win? Do we declare teh winner of the Super Bowl in at the end of the third quarter if it's a 53-3 blowout?

I personally don't believe Moon has any chance, but that's not the point. We put undisputed facts in infoboxes. We put prognostications in prose with attribution and justifications.

Can you show me where this has happened before? Has consensus for this practice been established? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 01:57, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

It's pointless to debate this, since Moon has conceded an hour ago. As for the sports analogy, we do mark when teams are mathematically eliminated or mathematically set to win their placement far in advance of the official date (e.g. 2018 FIFA World Cup qualification). SounderBruce 02:28, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Concessions don’t mean anything. Hillary Clinton conceded yet sought a recount. The fact that Moon agrees with me and others that the Times prediction is correct doesn’t change the fact that nobody is Mayor Elect until the Elections office says so. One is a fact, one is an opinion. We distinguish facts from opinions. Do we agree there is no evidence that this is the accepted practice? —Dennis Bratland (talk) 02:40, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

RfC on calling results at WikiProject Elections

Please participate in an RfC at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums#RfC Should articles say elections are decided based on preliminary returns?. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 05:14, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Final results maps

I made a map of the precinct level canvass from the November 29 final results, File:Seattle mayoral election 2017, final result by precinct, square marks with percent difference.png. File:Seattle mayoral election 2017 by precinct, candidae by color, votes cast by size.png is an alternative graph of the same data, just showing the votes in small pies rather than a color gradient showing separation between candidates. Since there are so many precincts on this map I think the squares are easier to take in. There is also the ever popular filled or chloropleth map, but I have always hated those because they create a misleading visual impression. You can see how misleading it is by looking at the large precincts representing Boeing Field, Discovery Park, or around Harbor Island. The paltry number of votes there is inflated by the land area represented, while densely populated areas are visually de-emphasized. In the maps using squares and pies, the large number of voters in the downtown area is visually represented, and the unpopulated areas look unpopulated.

I'll try to make some council district-level maps as well, in case we want to use those. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 05:15, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Photo of Nikkita Oliver

I think File:Nikkita Oliver 03 (cropped).jpg (at right), which I took a couple of days ago, is a much more complimentary photo of Nikkita Oliver than the one we have in the article, but I figure that since it's not a clear-cut case (the one in the article is from the 2017 campaign, and my photo is the next year), I should check here before substituting it. Any objections to my substituting this? - Jmabel | Talk 23:46, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

No objection. Yours is better and her face is less obscured. —Dennis Bratland (talk) 01:13, 23 March 2018 (UTC)