Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Help me help you

Like me, you have likely run across website after website, attacking Elections BC for not offering a vote redistribution of the 2005 election on 2009 ridings. The reality, from my experience, is that only Elections Canada, Ontario, and Quebec does this. No website (that I know of) has these results... but we do!... sort of. Here's what I mean, take a look at this.

On the Elections BC website, a nice conversion excel file is found here:
http://www.elections.bc.ca/docs/map/redis08/Conv/2005_to_2008_Voting_Area_Conversion_Tables.xls
showing how to convert polling stations from 2005 to 2008.
So?
Well, on this web-page, also from Elections BC:
http://www.elections.bc.ca/index.php/resource-centre/reports/2005-voting-results-by-voting-area/
You can find the voting results by poll!

Say what?

Click tab ABC in the excel file. Go to the website and open "Abbotsford-Clayburn". Note near the bottom, poll number 100. Go back to the excel file, and under 2005, note "ABC100" is now poll 100 and 101 in riding ABS. There will be some overlap, but this will give you a far better idea of real party strengths in each riding than any other method would. The problem is that to calculate this (you have to do this for every single poll in the entire province really, with some exceptions*) requires quite a bit of manpower. I, sadly, do not have the time right now to do this myself. If anyone here is willing to help me do this as a joint project, please contact me at nixtuff @t hotmail d.t com and we'll see if we cannot work out something.

I'm willing to share my findings with the public, and any other website that wants to use it. Other webmasters are free to contact me if they wish.


*In some cases, chunks of polls move from one riding to another, these polls can be calculated as a single piece.