Framingham Charter Election Results
by Sharon Machlis Gartenberg
APRIL 6, 2017 – Framingham voters decided to radically restructure their government Tuesday, adopting a new city charter that will end the community’s reign as the largest town in Massachusetts. Pending a recount, the final tally was 5,690 in favor and 5,582 against, according to official results posted on the Town Clerk’s Web site. (Note: It took some work to get this data from a PDF into a format for analysis. If you see any errors, let me know. You can leave a comment on my GitHub election site).
The charter won in 10 precincts and lost in 8. In the graph below, you can see that Precinct 11 gave the charter its biggest margin of support in terms of raw votes, while Precinct 3 voted no by the largest number. Most other precincts were within a 50-vote difference. Eight were within 20 votes.
Percent support
Precinct 18 gave the charter its highest percent win, at almost 60%; Precinct 17 voted no at the highest level. Below is a map by percent support (click on an area of the map to get its voting details).
Turnout map
This is what turnout looked like by precinct.
Precinct 4 had the highest turnout at 40%.
Another fun fact: In two precincts (5 and 13), the number of blanks was higher than the difference between Yes and No votes.
Results table
Finally, here’s a sortable table of the results: