Fairly complex question about grouping and counting rows in different tables

Okay, so the end goal here is to list items and change their size based on the number of "votes" for/against the item.

ie. item1 item2 item3 item4

In the case above, item4 has the most votes for it and item1 has the least.

From a previous post about something like this, I was able to get a block of code that pulls from one table and then counts the number of times a tag is in that table...so if the tag is in there 100 times it'd be larger than a tag only in there 4 times. My situation now is a bit different as I'm pulling from 2 tables and the site of the item is based on the votes.

Here's the previous block of code:

// Font size 
$maxfontsize = 1.8; 
$minfontsize = 0.6; 


$query = mysql_query('SELECT itemName, COUNT(itemName) AS count FROM item GROUP BY itemName');
$max = $low = 0; 
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) 
{ 
    $max = ($row['count'] > $max) ? $row['count'] : $max; 
    $low = ($row['count'] < $low) ? $row['count'] : $low; 

    $counts[$row['itemName']] = $row['count']; 
	
	$totalCount += $row['count'];
} 

// Calculate our range. 
$staticrange = $maxfontsize - $minfontsize; 
$dynamicrange = $max - $low; 

// Figure out what 1 dynamicrange increment will affect the $staticrange 
$inc = $staticrange / $dynamicrange; // static = 10, dynamic = 4, inc = 2.5. Each dynamic increment requires 2.5 increments on the scale. 

// Output 
foreach($counts AS $tagname=>$count) 
{ 
	$percent = ($count / $totalCount) * 100;
		$percent *= 10;
        if ($percent < 5)
        {
            $backgroundColor = 'level1';
        }
        elseif ($percent < 15)
        {
            $backgroundColor = 'level2';
        }
        elseif ($percent < 100)
        {
            $backgroundColor = 'level3';
        }
		
    $size = $minfontsize + $count * $inc; 
    echo '<span style="font-size: '.$size.'em;" class="'.$backgroundColor.'"><a title="'.$tagname.'" href="/tag/'.$tagname.'/">'.$tagname.'</a></span> '; 
}

PHP:

That code above successfully pulls all the items from the "items" table, but doesn't resize them because there aren't duplicate items.

Now, I need to pull from a separate database which is setup like this:

bansId | bansItemId | bansUserId | bansForAgainst
---------------------------------------------------------
1          1                 3                 1
2          2                 3                 1
12        8                 4                 0
13        8                 6                 1
14        8                 9                 1

Code (markup):

This table is used to record people who are for/against an item. The more people for an item (a "1"), the larger the text needs to be.

In the case above, rows 12-14 would have a total of "1" to go towards making the item larger as a "0" here means "against" the item. Sort of like saying 1+1-1...which would equal 1.

Soooo...not sure what other info is needed here, but some help would be much appreciated.

 

You can do it in 1 query by doing a LEFT JOIN. Can you provide the table structure for the 2 tables. I'm assuming that bansItemId is the same ID that is in the item table?