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

[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)