<p>On primary night here in NYC I was doing dome back of the envelope cost per vote calculations. Well, with the help of Esther Greenbaum, I finally got down to business and ran the numbers. I am attaching my preliminary analysis. Feel free to tinker. My cost per vote is crude, net expenditures divided by number of votes. </p>
<p>The big problem here is that all campaigns have certain fixed costs, like rent. So the camapaign that gets few votes looks like it spent the most per vote, because, well, it did. However that is not exactly what I wanted to show. It gives the appearance that there is a inverse correlation to spending per vote and number of votes received. This does not account for fixed costs.</p>
<p>This is more a measure of efficiency. I have to come up with some other ways of looking at the data, and also dig into the detailed expenditure reports, then I would be able to isolate rent and other fixed costs (or come up with a reasonable average rent cost) and look at expenditures related to voter contact. The [l:http://www.nyccfb.info|CFB] should really do this for all matching funds participants because it is tax payer money, and we should demand accountability.</p>
<p>I also tinkered with the idea of creating a ratio of contributors to votes. But again, the campaign that gets very few votes looks like it has a nice low ratio (because it does) but that doesn't mean the same thing as a campaign with lots of contributors, and lots of votes. What i would like to show is that campaign with lots of contributors get more votes, the number of contributors representing the campaign's grassroots or something.</p>
<p>So what is this spreadsheet? A starting point, it brings as much data as is easily available right now into one place so you can see for yourself that Giff Miller spent $141 per vote, and Rasiej spent something like $57 a vote (compared with Gotbaum's $14 and Siegel's $8)</p>
<p>Scott Stringer spent $43 for his winning BP bid, which was less that Eva Moskowitz.</p>
<p>Perhaps my second favorite statistic is Mike Beyes (CCM 2) who spent $159 per vote, compared with the winner, [lk:rosiemendez.com|Rosie Mendez]'s $33. Before the election I predicted the number of voters would be around 18k (it was 14k) and I that the winner would win with around 5k votes (which in my scenario was 27%) Rosie took 5k for 36%. The field had 7 candidates so it was a bit tough to figure out how it would cut. Rosie blew away her competition.</p>
<p>Most winner's were in the range of $25 to $45 per vote.<br />
The most inefficient campaigner was Robby Mahadeo who spent $287 per vote (recieving only 404 votes or 6.4% of the vote in his district)</p>
<p>So numbers don't tell the whole story. If you have any ideas on good ways of presenting this data, please share them!</p>
<p><a href="/files/nycpri05_costpervote_prelim.xls">nycpri05_costpervote_prelim.xls</a></p>
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<tr class="odd"><td><a href="http://home.gregoryheller.com/sites/gregoryheller.com/files/nycpri05_costpervote_prelim.xls">nycpri05_costpervote_prelim.xls</a></td><td>65.5 KB</td> </tr>
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