MDFS::Docs.Sheffield.Election.AVVotes

Great Britain 2010 General Election results under AV

The 2010 hung Parliament has brought electoral reform to the front again. Whilst the Liberal Democrats policy if for Single Transferable Vote, which is a proportional system that uses multi-member seats, Labour policy and the option offered by the Conservative senior partner in Government is for the Alternative Vote.

Alternative Vote

Alternative Vote (AV) looks very similar to the existing First Past The Post (FPTP). It keeps single-member constituencies, the only difference is that the winning candidate has to poll more than 50% of the entire vote instead of just getting the greatest number of votes. (In the 2010 Parliament there are some MPs who were elected with less than a third of the total vote - Diane Lucas in Brighton Pavilion polled 31.3%.)

Instead of marking a single candidate on the ballot paper, the voter ranks the candidates using 1, 2, 3, etc. They can use as many numbers as they wish, and may vote for just a single candidate. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the candidate with the least votes is elimiated and their votes distributed to their second, third, etc. choice candidates. This continues until either one candidate gets more then 50% of the vote, or only one candidate remains.

I have processed the 2010 General Election results for Great Britain constituencies (ie, ignoring Northern Ireland) using some modelling based on actual canvass data to see what likely results could have arisen. This data is here:

AVVotes.csv - 2010 AV General Election Modelling
AVCalc (L) - Program used to calculate the results
GEVotes.csv - 2010 Election Results

The table shows the elimination and transfer process, and the resultant winner. Where the winner is different from the actual 2010 result, that is also marked.

Summary results

Party	Con	Lab	LD	SNP	PC	Grn	BNP	UKIP
FPTP Total: 631	305	259	57	6	3	1	0	0
AV Total: 631	313	241	67	6	3	1	0	0
Changes: seats won	11	0	11	0	0	0	0	0
Changes: seats lost	3	18	1	0	0	0	0	0
Net Change:	+8	-18	+10	0	0	0	0	0

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Authored by J.G.Harston - Last update: 26-Jun-2010