Getting a count of objects in a queryset in django

To get the number of votes for a specific item, you would use:

vote_count = Item.objects.filter(votes__contest=contestA).count()

If you wanted a break down of the distribution of votes in a particular contest, I would do something like the following:

contest = Contest.objects.get(pk=contest_id)
votes   = contest.votes_set.select_related()

vote_counts = {}

for vote in votes:
  if not vote_counts.has_key(vote.item.id):
    vote_counts[vote.item.id] = {
      'item': vote.item,
      'count': 0
    }

  vote_counts[vote.item.id]['count'] += 1

This will create dictionary that maps items to number of votes. Not the only way to do this, but it's pretty light on database hits, so will run pretty quickly.

Another way of doing this would be using Aggregation. You should be able to achieve a similar result using a single query. Such as this:

from django.db.models import Count

Item.objects.values("contest").annotate(Count("id"))

I did not test this specific query, but this should output a count of the items for each value in contests as a dictionary.