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
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.

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