## A New DPL…

In a couple of days, DPL-elect Steve McIntyre takes over as DPL, after being elected by around four hundred of his peers… Because I can’t help myself, I thought I might poke at election numbers and see if anything interesting fell out.

First the basics: I get the same results as the official ones when recounting the vote. Using first-past-the-post, Steve wins with 147 first preference votes against Raphael’s 124, Marc’s 90 and NOTA’s 19 (with votes that specify a tie for first dropped). Using instant-runoff / single transferable vote, the winner is also Steve, with NOTA elimited first and Marc collecting collecting 5 votes, Steve 4 and Raphael 2, followed by Marc getting eliminated with Steve collecting 50 votes, against Raphael’s 26.

So, as usual, different voting systems would have given the same result, presuming people voted in basically the same way.

NOTA really didn’t fare well at all in this election, with a majority of voters ranking it beneath all candidates (268 of 401, 53.5%). For comparison, only 18 voters ranked all candidates beneath NOTA, with 9 of those voters then ranking all candidates equally. (For comparison, in 2007, 312 of 482 voters (about 65%) ranked some candidate below NOTA, though that drops to 225 voters (47%) if you ignore voters that just left some candidates unranked. Only 98 voters (20%) voted every candidate above NOTA)

With NOTA excluded from consideration, things simplify considerably, with only 13 possible different votes remaining. Those come in four categories: ranking everyone equal (17 votes, 9 below NOTA as mentioned above, and 8 above NOTA), ranking one candidate below the others (13 votes total, 7 ranking Raphael last, 3 each for Steve and Marc), ranking one candidate above the others (66 votes; 30 ranking Steve first, 18 each ranking Raphael and Marc first), and the remainder with full preferences between the candidates:

     70 V: 213
63 V: 123
56 V: 132
52 V: 231
38 V: 312
26 V: 321


The most interesting aspect of that I can see is that of the people who ranked Raphael first, there was a 1.8:1 split in preferring Steve to Marc, and for those who preferred Marc first, there was a 2:1 split preferring Steve to Raphael. For those who preferred Steve, there was only a 1.1:1 split favouring Raphael over Marc.

I think it’s fair to infer from that that not only was Steve the preferred candidate overall, but that he’s considered a good compromise canidate for supporters of both the alternative candidates (though if all the people who ended up supporting Steve hadn’t been voting, Raphael would have won by something like 26 votes (129:103) with a 1.25:1 majority; if they had been voting, but Steve hadn’t been a candidate, Raphael’s margin would’ve increased absolutely to 33 votes (192:159) but decreased in ratio to a 1:1.2 majority.