Where are all my No-mates?

[HamletsSister]

In despair. Absolutely in despair. Do we have to go through this again? And with such a long lead up to the referendum? Really? What happened to the settled will of the Scottish people?

@statisticallychallenged Will you help me get through this again? (Was Roseformeplease then).

winnie I don't think anyone here is as stupid as you are trying to suggest. We all know it was local elections and there are different factors in play including the huge independent candidate vote. However to compare directly the 2012 figures to the 2017 doesn't necessarily give the state of play in the current independence support.

I don't know exactly how the BBC figures 2012 equivalent figures were calculated. Presumably they used some of the figures from the old 2012 wards and split them where there had been boundary changes and added them to the new ward. However those figures were already there and populated prior to any results being known so if you are suggesting that they deliberately manipulated them to make the SNP look bad, they must have had a crystal ball.

YOu I wondered that too, but I suppose you could argue that it split their vote? My head started to hurt when I tried to work it out so I gave up :)

Yes, I guess that does make it difficult to work out who was most popular on an individual level.

I see that Nicola Sturgeon has been insinuating that because the Tories ran on an anti-independence ticket, and because the SNP won more seats and votes, Scotland is open to the idea of independence. She's conveniently forgetting that she fielded many more candidates which almost certainly accounted for their greater number of seats/votes, and that if you add up the Labour and Tory votes they outnumber the SNPs by a considerable margin.

You in my council the Conservative candidate came 1st in 3 wards. They only fielded one candidate against 2 each of Labour and SNP. If they had run another candidate then I think it would have affected the SNP vote adversely. Also looks to be true in eg Edinburgh City.

In Glasgow Labour needed to keep all 43 of its candidates to keep control. The SNP fielded 55+ candidates and also advised strategic Green for later choices. Given that it looks like a good result for Labour and definitely down on 2015 / 16 levels of SNP support.

It's very complex isn't it. Britain elects are saying it'll take a good couple of days for them to pull together their analysis of the results.

What is clear though is that no voters have decided voting Tory is the way to send a message to the SNP that we don't want a second referendum.

if you add up the Labour and Tory votes they outnumber the SNPs by a considerable margin. and if you add the lib dems to that it's even bigger (even if you also add the greens to the SNP).

They can continue to spin it as a victory as much as they like, that doesn't make it true. Given their increase in support in other elections since 2012, they should have hammered the rest of the parties and increased their vote share a lot. they didn't

We need this kind of info re the %age vote share to see a clearer picture.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_local_elections,_2012

What is clear though is that no voters have decided voting Tory is the way to send a message to the SNP that we don't want a second referendum.

Agree totally. Many people I have spoken to have said that they were voting tactically in order to consolidate their vote as an anti independence/anti referendum/SNP vote.

I looked at The wings link.

Of most interest to me :

If you take a look at the comments there are a few interesting ones about the STV system: voters putting crosses and just not " getting " the system.

I'm interested in the impact that the SNP fielding many more candidates than the other parties had on the final count

Yes, I wondered about that as well.

I thought they counted a single x on the paper as a first preference?

My mum spoiled her ballot paper by putting an x. She has two degrees . Too late to get a new postal vote.

A single x was counted as 1st preference, yes.

It's where you put 2 or 3 crosses, maybe for your chosen party, that it would be invalid.

So, sorry if I'm being thick are you saying parties could field more than 1 candidate in the same ward? And it was primarily Nats who did this?

Basically then Nat voters were being allowed to have their vote count twice?

Also other one commenter who had been an observer at a count said that putting crosses AND numbers in sequence were accepted as being a clear show of intentions.

So it's not like they are trying to exclude a vote for failing to be done perfectly, the opposite in fact!

Lots of wards have multiple candidates from all big parties. We had two labour and 2 Nationalists on the ballot.

It's not party political - It's just too complicated imo!

Lass we had 2 SNP, 2 Labour, 1 Con, 1 Lib Dem, 1 green and 1 Independent all standing for 4 seats. I think most wards were the similar. However I know that SNP fielded 2 candidates in every ward in our council area and the rest of the parties had a mix of 1 or 2 candidates.

I see. I had 6 all different parties. That surely must artificially inflate the SNP result?

That's what we aren't sure Lass, or does it just split it?

I suppose you are really allocating them 2 votes if you vote for both candidates since the vote would be transferred from your first to 2nd choice? Or does it just give them more chances at seats without actually changing the %age vote as that should be based on 1st choice only?

It is really complicated. The advantage of only fielding one candidate is that you don't split the party vote. So that makes sense for the Conservatives if they were thinking they might only pick up a lucky one on late preferences. The issue is that they did much better than anticipated.

I think Labour got it wrong not running more candidates in Glasgow.

The other thing is that the number of candidates run will probably distort the analysis for the vote share and flatter the SNP, who ran most candidates.

Of 20 wards in my council area the SNP fielded 2 candidates in 17 of them, Labour fielded 2 candidates in 11 (I think they actually had three candidates in one of those), and the Tories fielded 2 candidates in 1 ward (and a single candidate in the other 19). This will obviously vary across Scotland, but overall the SNP fielded hundreds more candidates than the other parties. It makes claims of victory on the basis of seats won a bit ridiculous.

Having more candidates as a party with a bigger voter base would presumably mean fewer nontransferable surplus votes going to waste.

Iff you have a candidate early on who reaches the quota.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_City_Council_election,_2017

This is the Glasgow vote, split out by ward and by preferences. It gives a bit of an insight into the effect of transfers and fielding optimal numbers of candidates.

That link doesn't work, hopefully this one will:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_City_Council_election,_2017

It's interesting how many stages are needed to elect all councillors.

Probably wasting my time coming on to this board, but trixy is right. It has been hugely reported as a Tory win, a unionist vote in Paisley etc. However, that really hasn't happened. Paisley had 4 council seats available, and the conservatives didn't get their only seat until the 9th round. The system is fair, but the reporting hasn't been.

Fielding less candidates isn't about splitting the vote, there are 4 seats, if labour only supply 2 names, they can only get 2 of those seats.

And as it is a system where the preferences are numbered, the last person is dropped off and the second/third etc preferences redistributed until 4 people have broken the minimum vote line, then, as has happened in Paisley, it can take several rounds of redistribution before all seats are filled, and the seat can be taken by someone who was really low down in the preferences of the majority of voters.

I really don't understand how you can look at the candidates put forward, and the results, and come to the conclusion that the SNP were playing unfairly. Unless this is an echo chamber of bias!

IF the SNP or Labour had fielded more than 2 candidates per paper, then you might have a point. The conservatives, libs, greens etc did not have the people to put forward.