BC Election Number Crunching and “Vote-Splitting”

May 13, 2009 · Posted in BC Election, News 

STV is dead for a century.

So, we are back to the same old, same old. We all vote for Gordon Campbell because we’re scared to death of the NDP. And Gordon Campbell takes it all as a personal endorsement of his great work, while voter turnout falls and falls, as voters just get fed up and give up.

Hooray! Ugh.

On “vote-splitting”, here’s some interesting numbers for those who think about such things.

BC Conservative Party

Upon analyzing the numbers from Elections BC, there is not a single campaign where the “BC Conservative Party” split the vote and caused the NDP to win. Take any of the ridings, add the BC Liberal vote to the BC Conservative vote, and the outcome is the same.

Green Party of BC

The same can absolutely NOT be said of the Green Party (if you presume, as I do not, that the natural home for Green voters is the NDP).

I count 11 ridings where a combined Green-NDP vote would have turned the tide in favour of the NDP (and 1 which would have been an automatic recount, Vancouver-Fraserview).

The seat count was 49 to 36 for the Liberals (with Wally Oppal winning by 2 votes, so far).

If you move 11 of those seats to the NDP from the BC Liberals, we would have had a majority NDP government, with 47 to 38 seats.

How does that make you feel today?

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Comments

  • lem rolyat
    ICBA and the mechanical contractors of british columbia
    thank you Gordon Campbell.

    Congratulations on you historic
    election to your third term as
    Premier of our great Province.

    Let the good times Roll.
  • It makes me think that the NDP needs to stop paying lip service to the environmental movement and start taking it seriously. The NDP should have been backing the carbon tax. The NDP should put public transit near the top of the agenda. The NDP should make sustainable growth a priority. If these dimwits ever want to be to come to power in BC again they need to start taking Green voters seriously.
  • JR
    Well, good riddance to STV. Not happy with having Campbell around for another 4 years - but the other possibilities were worse.
  • The math is not that simple, Greens will not automatically vote NDP. Many will not vote, others will vote Liberal. I think you have seen the largest possible poaching of the Greens by the NDP in this election.

    You need to look further and see that both the Liberals and NDP had large numbers of their supporters not come out and vote this time. People voted by not voting.

    They especially stayed home where their party looked like it was going to lose anyway.
  • I agree with all 3 points, Bernard.

    The media always presumes the Green vote would go automatically to the NDP, but I also disagree.

    For those who presume otherwise, here is the math.
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