On the Unlock Democracy Elections - West Constituency

[danieldwilliam]

Starting my brief electoral analysis with the West Constituency, of Wales, South West and the West Midlands.

 

This election looks to have been over pretty much as soon as the first preferences were counted.

 

Out of 1,615 voters 22.8 % cast a total of 366 votes, electing 4 members and a quota of 73.2 first preferences saw 3 of the 4 councillors elected.  Mary Southcott top billed with 99 first preferences followed by Eithne George on 83. Round 3 of the count saw the exclusion of Christine Herbert-Mosavie, who in an election with a  ban on active campaigning failed to submit a personal statement and gathered only 3 first preferences.  The final candidate elected on first preferences was Phil Starr, former Chair of Charter 88.

 

This left Alan Debenham and Philip Davis contesting the last seat.  Debenham had out polled Davis on first preferences by 39 to 23.  Out of a total of 43 redistributed votes he picked up 12.57 to move to 51.57 with Davis picking up 8.08 to move to 31.08.  With only a further 43 votes up for grads Davis would need to nearly ¾ of them to catch Debenham and this proved too much for him. Davis narrowed the gap but couldn’t overturn it. Davis finished on 49.91 votes. Debenham elected with 64.68.

Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this! I looked through the spreadsheet of votes which Unlock Democracy put up with great interest, but it's quite a different thing to see them represented visually in a graph. Watching how the non-transferable ballots gradually rise is particularly interesting, and I also like the way that the successful candidates all converge towards the quota. It conveys a nice feeling of consensus.

But, much more importantly, congratulations on your own election! I'm sure you'll be a real asset to the council.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much. I'll do my best.

I think there are a couple of elections that might have turned out differently if the non-transferable votes had all been transfered to one candidate.

What strikes me is the turn out. 22.8% is the highest turn out. And this is for a pro-democracy campaign group after a bruising referendum defeat.

I think the feeling of frustration at the how difficult it was to track the election results in the recent Scottish local council elections lead Lallands to develop the chart.

He did a full analysis of the Glasgow results.

http://lallandspeatworrier.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/those-glasgow-results-in-detail-vol-i.html

Now I've had a go wtih the UD results I might move on to the Edinburgh results.

[fearmeforiampink]

In terms of the turnout, I think there's several reasons behind that:

Firstly, as you've said, there was a bruising referendum defeat. Whilst the work we've been doing on Lords reform, lobbying reform and other stuff is hopefully enthusing people, there are a lot of people who've somewhat given up on reform for the moment.

Secondly, I think there are a fair number of people who support reform, but who give money (and may turn up to marches/write letters occasionally, etc), but aren't really that strongly involved in the reform movement, who therefore don't choose to vote, to read through all the information on the candidates, and so forth.

Possibly as a third thing, a fair chunk of UD's membership is getting fairly old, I'm not sure where that falls in terms of them becoming disengaged from it, versus the higher likelihood of voting from older people in governmental elections.

(Blah blah blah, these are my own thoughts and ponderings, not extensively researched, and not in any way official UD PoVs)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the interesting notes.

I wonder if there is an interesting difference in the effect of the referendum on the ERS council elections and the UD council elections. The ERS council elections seemed much more affected by the referendum result.

Good point on the difference between signing up to donate some money and being actively involved and one which leads to an interesting question of strategy for both UD and the ERS over the next few years.

Re the age demographic - does anyone do any post-election analysis on the voting segments?

[fearmeforiampink]

On the last point, I don't think we do. The problem is that we have rather less data available to us than there is at (say) general elections.

We don't have the age of our members specifically recorded, and when we have an election like this, the actual mechanics of it are run by an outside body (in this case, the commercial side of ERS), and are ballots sent to be counted — as far as I'm aware, the data on age voting and such in general elections comes from them crossing you off the list of voters when you get your voting slips, whereas we mail everyone theirs, and they vote that way.

Perhaps online voting would allow more useful data to be gathered, though I think there would be a lot of resistance to that.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I see the lack of demographic data.

Why do you think there would resistance to online voting?

[fearmeforiampink]

Essentially, my impression is that there are a substantial proportion of our membership who either do not use the internet, or who use it rarely and with difficulty. (Again, broad impression not specific knowledge)