Which Brooklyn Neighborhoods Have the Lowest Voter Turnout?
Some Black Communities, But Not All
A recent study showed that rich people were twice as likely to vote as poor people, which helps explain why politicians seem to worry more about the former than the latter. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing: do officials not care about the poor because they don’t vote, or do poor people not vote because officials don’t care about the issues that affect them? Either way, you can see it play out on the voter-turnout map: Coney Island, especially its eastern end, had turnout as low as 5 percent; in East New York, some of the neighborhood’s turnout falls in the 9-15 percent range. Though, interestingly, not in all of it; other parts of East New York are in the low-20 percent range, which isn’t bad, comparatively. This might be explained by the strong traditions of voting that exist in many black communities, where civic groups, unions and others have worked for decades to mobilize voters. Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Flatbush and parts of Brownsville have relatively strong turnout numbers.