Word for the item that is containing other items that are being compared to each other

Question

I'm looking for a word to describe the 'thing' that is containing other 'things' which are being weighted against each other by some metric.

For example, if let's say I have 10 Parking Locations that all fall within a certain Area. People can upvote or downvote a Parking Location within an Area, and Parking Locations can then be ranked within an Area based on the total tally of their votes.

What would be a generic word to describe the Area? It's kind of like a "container" for all of the objects that are accumulating votes.

Here's a sample sentence:

"I would like to cast a vote for this Parking Location within this Area."

Now pretend that you don't know they are Parking Locations and Areas. So you want to cast a vote for this thing that accepts votes within this thing that acts as a container for things that accept votes.

UPDATE

I think a good example is the word district. In this case the district is the thing that contains other things (politicians), that are being weighted against each other by some metric (number of votes).

Another important detail is that a Parking Location can potentially belong to many Areas. So when you vote for a ParkingLocation, you need to specify in which Area you are voting.

If anyone has some other options that are similar I would be open to those.

Answer 1

Is precinct the word you're after?

precinct: any one of the sections that a town or city is divided into when people vote in an election M-W

Alternately, consider ward.

: a division of a city or town, especially an electoral district, for administrative and representative purposes. AHD

Answer 2

In politics the list of candidates is called a ballot. It fit's because it contains things that are being voted on. It also jives with the concept of areas since different areas have different ballots for their districts.

If it is meant to including the results try the word tally. It's the traditional word for the vote count.

Developers rip off words from other fields all the time. We call it leveraging a metaphor to make ourselves feel better when we tell people absurd things like: these little clickable pictures are a desktop.

Answer 3

A collection of things that are counted can be arguably described as a histogram:

: a representation of a frequency distribution by means of rectangles whose widths represent class intervals and whose areas are proportional to the corresponding frequencies
_{Merriam-Webster}

Assuming each element in your collection represents a single class, then each "rectangle" would be of equal width.

To construct a histogram, the first step is to "bin" the range of values—that is, divide the entire range of values into a series of intervals—and then count how many values fall into each interval. The bins are usually specified as consecutive, non-overlapping intervals of a variable. The bins (intervals) must be adjacent, and are usually equal size.
_Wikipedia

A histogram usually refers to graphical representation, but the tabular representation is also referred to as such. Below are illustrations from the Wikipedia article quoted above:

Bin   Count
----  -----
-3.5      9
-2.5     32
-1.5    109
-0.5    180
 0.5    132
 1.5     34
 2.5      4
 3.5      9

_{I believe the graph left off the bin representing 3.5.}