Euro election 2009: transfer breakdown

Jeff Dudgeon kindly forwarded his statistical analysis of the recent poll. It's the first time I've examined the results in quite such minute detail and it's fascinating to see exactly how votes transferred as the count progressed.


Distribution of Agnew and Parsley’s votes of 42,463

Alban Maginness SDLP 16,325
38% of total New total: 94,814


Jim Nicholson UCUNF 11,392
27% of total New total: 94,285


Diane Dodds DUP 2,914
7% of total New total: 91,260


Jim Allister TUV 4,284
10% of total total: 70,481 Eliminated

Non- transferable votes from Alliance/Green: 44% went to Unionists, 38% to SDLP
7,548, 18% of total

(No longer an option to transfer to de Brun or Parsley/Agnew)


Clearly, as one might expect, the SDLP and UCUNF were the parties to which Alliance and Green voters were most inclined to transfer. The pro-European bias of Maginness' campaign may have given him the edge in this particular election. From anecdotal evidence I believe a substantial number of 'soft' pro Union voters found Maginness an amenable home for their transfer because his campaign focussed on European issues and touched, barely at all, on the constitutional question. Dodds' figures demonstrate that her transfer-friendliness cost her a quota.


STAGE 3

Distribution of Allister’s TUV transfers of 66,197

Jim Nicholson UCUNF 37,942
57% of total New total: 132,227 Elected 11,083 over quota

Diane Dodds DUP 24,462
37% of total New total: 115,722 Elected under quota


Alban Maginness SDLP 2,614
4% of total New total: 97,428 Not elected


Allister’s non-transferable votes 1,179
2% of total

No longer an option to transfer to de Brun, Parsley or Agnew (elected or eliminated)



The preference of Allister's supporters to transfer to the Conservatives and Unionists candidate, rather than Dodds has been discussed ad nauseum. The phenomenon proved by no means as universal as might be supposed. 37% of TUV voters were prepared to transfer to the DUP, which indicates either, that whilst registering a protest against that party, they still felt it reflected their politics more accurately than a Conservative candidate, or that a proportion of the TUV vote were voting positively FOR Allister, rather than against Dodds, per sé.

Thanks Jeff.

Comments

Timothy Belmont said…
Rightly or wrongly, I didn't play their little PR game and placed a "1" beside Nicholson. How artful, or not, this practice is I know not.

Tim
20 June 2009 at 12:54
Owen Polley said…
If you had no great inclination to transfer to anyone else, I'd say it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Particularly since none of Nicholson's no. 1 votes would have been transferred. In all honesty the only likelihood of transfers from Nicholson would have been had he been eliminated.
20 June 2009 at 17:29
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more