SovietCanuckistan

I recently ran across some nice data on how BC voting form the last election would look like with the new riding boundaries that will be used in this year's election. If you munge the data a bit ( with a few lines of Python included in the attached zip file ) you get some interesting conclusions IMO about the effect of vote splitting on who gets to form the government in BC:

Vote-split ridings: 15
Close call ridings ( within 3% ): 5
Normal results: Lib: 48, NDP: 37
Split vote results: Lib: 33, NDP: 52
Swing results: Lib: 28, NDP: 57 ( votes swings +3 % )

The obvious read of this data I am sure most people notice is that, if all non-liberal votes went to the NDP instead of being split with the Greens, the NDP would cruise to an easy victory under the current first-past-the-post system. It is the existence of the Green vote that the Liberals gleefully exploit to maintain a hold on power. It also assumes falsely that this majority of voters who vote for non-Liberal candidates actually all agree on who should run the province, or that they would all be satisfied with an NDP regime.

This is clearly not true, as people continue to vote Green despite no real hope under the current system for a significant number of Green MLAs. I tend to think of Green votes as protest votes by people against our current political system in a very specific way. I think Green voters are saying that the Environment and Climate Change are important issues and that neither a pro-business nor a pro-labor party is adequately convincing in the attempts to tackle this issue.

My own interest in looking at ridings where NDP / Green vote-splitting shifts the balance of power, but instead to look at how 15 ridings in BC are, at best, mis-represented by Liberal MLAs when in fact the majority of voters in those ridings voted for someone else.

Apologists for the current electoral system might say that a Liberal MLA is the best representative for the riding because more people voted Liberal than for any other single party ( for example ). Given the current system, that seems like a reasonable compromise, one that also leans our legislature in favor of majorities, and therefore more stable governments.

Where I disagree with this is that this all assumes we can't do better. We can, in fact, and a lot of people in BC have thought long and hard on a better way to run our electoral system to prevent. If the STV referendum passes we may very well see this in action in 2013.

According to my quick analysis, here's a list of ridings the NDP shuld concentrate on based on this data alone ( and not recent polling, which might be more instructive as to where they stand ). Based on my data at least, these ridings hold the balance of power:

Split ridings:
Saanich South
Burnaby-Lougheed
Kootenay East
Stikine
Oak Bay-Gordon Head
Comox Valley
Vancouver-Fraserview
Port Moody-Coquitlam
Boundary-Similkameen
Burnaby-Deer Lake
North Vancouver-Lonsdale
Vancouver-Point Grey
Vancouver-False Creek
Saanich North and the Islands
West Vancouver-Sea to Sky

Ridings within 3%:
Surrey-Tynehead
Surrey-Panorama
Penticton
Prince George-Valemount
Vernon-Monashee

Download: Archive.zip