Voter Power

Today’s political chatter is about a report from the new economics foundation called spoiled ballot, "why less than three per cent have a fair share of power in Britain." Actually very little of it is about the report, most of it is about the Voter Power Index which is a very web 2.0 friendly interface to the data including the compulsory video explaining what the site is about for those who don’t like to read.

In this methodology Sheffield South East turns out to be one of the most powerful in the country in marked contrast to the Electoral Reform Society data I reported Wednesday which makes me worry about the methodology and I’m thinking of emailing the authors to ask them about this. Their reports for the rest of our constituencies are Penistone & Stocksbridge, Sheffield Central Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough, Sheffield Hallam and Sheffield Heeley.

Following on from this I decided to have a play with the data from the last general election to see what would happen if Sheffield was a super constituency elected using the method used by the UK in the European Parliament elections called the d'Hondt method. You’ll note that the nef report doesn’t have this as an option they suggest using the same mega constituencies that we do currently use for the EU elections for party list elections. They do have a suggestion that could see Sheffield elect as one, but it is based on Single transferable vote which would be impossible to do the kind of back of a napkin maths for the table below involves as it would mean guessing at voter’s second, third, etc choice intentions.

In my fictional system instead of 5 labour MPs and 1 LibDem we would have 3 Labour, 2 LibDem and a Tory (the figures in red represent an elected person). Of course there are flaws with even this extrapolation such as Green supporters only being able to express their preference in half the old constituencies and voting method influences choice but I think the result is interesting none the less.

	Sheffield Central	Sheffield Attercliffe	Sheffield Brightside	Sheffield Heeley	Sheffield Hillsborough	Sheffield Hallam	Total	D'Hondt /2	D'Hondt /3	D'Hondt /4
Labour	14,950	22,250	16,876	18,405	23,477	5,110	101,068	50,534.0	33,689.33	25,267.00
Liberal Democrat	7,895	6,283	3,232	7,035	12,234	20,710	57,389	28,694.5	19,129.67	14,347.25
Conservative	3,094	5,329	2,205	4,987	6,890	12,028	34,533	17,266.5	11,511.00	8,633.25
Green	1,808	-	-	1,312	-	1,331	4,451	2,225.5	1,483.67	1,112.75
Respect	1,284		-	-	-	-	1,284	642.0	428.00	321.00
BNP	539	1,477	1,537	1,314	2,010	469	7,346	3,673.0	2,448.67	1,836.50
UKIP	415	1,680	779	775	1,273	438	5,360	2,680.0	1,786.67	1,340.00
Socialist Alternative		-	-	265	-	-	265	132.5	88.33	66.25
Christian Peoples	-	-	-	-	-	441	441	220.5	147.00	110.25