...not me. The full results for Eastville are as follows:
Mahmadur Rahman Khan (Labour Party) 2245 (30.75%)
Mhairi Louise Threlfall (Labour Party) 1991 (27.27%)
Gabrielle Tslotta Lobb (Green Party ) 725 (9.93%)
Roy Towler (Conservative Party Candidate) 645 (8.83%)
Christopher John Harris (Liberal Democrat) 627 (8.59%)
Justyna Kinga Papciak (Conservative Party Candidate ) 419 (5.74%)
Amy Caitlin Skrobanska Stuart (Liberal Democrat) 305 (4.18%)
Mark Ian Baker (Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition) - 282 (3.86%)
Nick Xylas (Wessex Regionalists) 62 (0.85%)
While I won't insult your intelligence by pretending that this was a hugely impressive result, it was about 50 more votes than I expected, given the limited amount of campaigning I was able to do. 0.85% is a bigger proportion of votes than the 0.2% that our president, Colin Bex, got when standing against David Cameron in the last general election. Whilst I can't vouch for the reliability of this figure, as maths was never exactly my strongest subject, I calculate that when the number of voters is scaled up to that of Witney in 2015, it translates to around 500 votes. This compares to Colin's 110, placing it at the higher end of the Wessex Regionalists' vote range.
A couple of things I learned from the count today:-
Mahmadur Rahman Khan (Labour Party) 2245 (30.75%)
Mhairi Louise Threlfall (Labour Party) 1991 (27.27%)
Gabrielle Tslotta Lobb (Green Party ) 725 (9.93%)
Roy Towler (Conservative Party Candidate) 645 (8.83%)
Christopher John Harris (Liberal Democrat) 627 (8.59%)
Justyna Kinga Papciak (Conservative Party Candidate ) 419 (5.74%)
Amy Caitlin Skrobanska Stuart (Liberal Democrat) 305 (4.18%)
Mark Ian Baker (Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition) - 282 (3.86%)
Nick Xylas (Wessex Regionalists) 62 (0.85%)
While I won't insult your intelligence by pretending that this was a hugely impressive result, it was about 50 more votes than I expected, given the limited amount of campaigning I was able to do. 0.85% is a bigger proportion of votes than the 0.2% that our president, Colin Bex, got when standing against David Cameron in the last general election. Whilst I can't vouch for the reliability of this figure, as maths was never exactly my strongest subject, I calculate that when the number of voters is scaled up to that of Witney in 2015, it translates to around 500 votes. This compares to Colin's 110, placing it at the higher end of the Wessex Regionalists' vote range.
A couple of things I learned from the count today:-
- With Eastville being such a multi-ethnic ward, provision of materials in a range of languages is vital for securing votes. Even the victorious Labour Party struggled with this. They were lucky enough to have people on hand to translate into Somali and Bengali. Unless we are somehow able to recruit members/volunteers from those communities, we may be placed at a disadvantage.
- Eastville voters are an eclectic bunch. Normally, block votes, where candidates vote for two or three candidates from the same party, make up around 75% of the vote, in Eastville, it was only 30%. This made the count much longer and more complicated. Whilst I would have expected that my votes would be either single votes of split with one of the other single-candidate parties (TUSC and the Greens), many of them were split with the major parties: WR and Labour or WR and Tory. There were even a couple of TUSC/Tory ballot papers, which is taking a desire for Zen-like balance to something of an extreme! But if we hammer home the point that people have two votes (which, given the number of single-vote ballot papers, seems to be insufficiently understood by the electorate), we may be able to pick up more second-preference votes in future elections.