The Labour Leadership

So the hottest topic has finally been decided and to be honest I still forget exactly which of the brothers actually won; was it David or Ed?

The major outcome of this election has been a demonstration of how a new voting system works and the full voting results posted to the Labour Party website. From this we can see that using the old first past the post system the winner would have been David with 37.78% of the vote. And through each round David is in the lead and creeping towards the required 50% until the final elimination of Ed Balls from the contest where it seems his supporters threw their backing towards Ed and let him pip his brother to the post.

Moreover the full details as posted allow us to see exactly which groupings voted for whom. For the MPs and MEPS this is listed by name so we can check the results ourselves. And doing this produces something odd.

For the first round the votes were

ABBOTT, Diane	BALLS, Ed	BURNHAM, Andy	MILIBAND, David	MILIBAND, Ed
7	40	24	111	84

Dropping Abbott we take her 1st preference voters and assign their second preferences

ABBOTT, Diane	BALLS, Ed	BURNHAM, Andy	MILIBAND, David	MILIBAND, Ed
	1			4

Dropping Burnam and doing the same

ABBOTT, Diane	BALLS, Ed	BURNHAM, Andy	MILIBAND, David	MILIBAND, Ed
	2		14	8

And finally dropping Ed Balls

ABBOTT, Diane	BALLS, Ed	BURNHAM, Andy	MILIBAND, David	MILIBAND, Ed
			15	22

Total everything for each round and you get

ABBOTT, Diane	BALLS, Ed	BURNHAM, Andy	MILIBAND, David	MILIBAND, Ed
7	40	24	111	84
	41	24	111	88
	43		125	96
			140	118

So what? Well the official results for the fourth round are.

ABBOTT, Diane	BALLS, Ed	BURNHAM, Andy	MILIBAND, David	MILIBAND, Ed
			140	122

Oops. Now it could be bad counting on my part but I've used the full listing for my tally, every other round adds up neatly, and I've done it manually as well as automatically. Unfortunately the other vote lists only show the first preferences so I can't add those up.

Anyway the big story is the number of spoilt ballots for the affiliates. There were no spoilt MP/MEP papers and of the local parties the figures appeared to be around the 1% mark. For the affiliates though the mean average was 13%. The 'worst' offender was the "Black Asian Minority Ethnic Labour" with 392 cast ballots, 137 were unable to be counted. However in terms of pure numbers nearly 16,000 "Unite the Union" were declared as spoilt.

As a total for the whole there were 338,374 votes counted and 36,562 votes not counted that's roughly 10% of all ballots cast. That's quite a lot particularly given how close this race was.