Tag Archives: european elections

European candidate selections: is that the time already?

By Mark Valladares | Published 3rd January 2012 - 7:25 pm

News has reached your reporter that, in a radical break with tradition, the English Candidates Committee is likely to meet later this month to address key questions relating to the selection of European Parliamentary candidates for elections due in May 2014, where Liberal Democrats will be defending seats held in each of the nine English Regions (two in South East England) and in Scotland.

Radical, because the Committee usually only meets four times a year, with the first meeting at the Spring Federal Conference, and the newly elected Chairs …

Posted in News, Selection news | Also tagged candidate selection rules | 1 Comment

Labour ups election spending by a third as Conservatives make big cuts

By Mark Pack | Published 5th January 2010 - 10:22 pm

Yup, you read that headline right. For those are the surprising figures from the 2009 European Election expense returns which have just been published.

In 2009 the Conservatives spent £2,482,536 on election expenses for the European elections, just ahead of Labour on £2,302,244 with the Liberal Democrats on £1,180,883.

However, while the Labour figure was up 35% on the 2004 European elections, the Conservatives had cut their spending by 21%. The Liberal Democrat spending was 1% lower.

UKIP spent £1,270,855, a cut of 46%.

In the elections the Conservatives, UKIP and Liberal Democrats each gained a seat while Labour lost five. (Seat change …

Posted in Election law, Europe / International | Leave a comment

Electoral fact of the day: turnout and age

By Mark Pack | Published 23rd November 2009 - 11:50 am

“Nearly three-quarters (74%) of people aged 65 or over said that they had voted in the European Parliamentary elections, compared with only 13% of those aged 18 to 24.”

(From the Electoral Commission’s report in to the June 2009 elections, p.26.)

Posted in News | Also tagged electoral commission, turnout | Leave a comment

Electoral fact of the day: turnout and postal voting

By Mark Pack | Published 21st November 2009 - 9:20 am

In June’s European elections, turnout amongst postal voters was 64% in Great Britain. Turnout amongst non-postal voters was 30% – a full 34 percentage points lower. There’s a lesson in there about campaigning…

The figures for the different regions were:

South East 68% (+34%)
South West 68% (+33%)
East Midlands 67% (+34%)
Eastern 67% (+33%)
West Midlands 66% (+35%)
Scotland 63% (+39%)
Yorkshire & The Humber 63% (+37%)
North West 63% (+37%)
Wales 62% (+36%)
London 61% (+31%)
North East 59% (+38%)

The Isles of Scilly were the only area where turnout amongst postal voters was lower than that amongst non-postal voters (by two percentage points).

Source: Calculated from Electoral Commission data

Posted in News | Also tagged electoral commission, postal voting | Leave a comment

Weekend voting: will this be the next trend in trying to raise turnout at elections?

By Mark Pack | Published 17th November 2009 - 2:10 pm

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

Over the last few years a wide range of attempts have been made to raise turnout at elections in the UK. The broad conclusion is very simple: all-postal ballots raise turnout significantly (albeit at the cost of various drawbacks) and nothing else that has been tried does so. E-voting, early voting, voting by text, and many others: all been tried, all flopped.

However, there are signs that moving to voting at the weekend may be coming back on the electoral administration agenda.

It is easy to see why weekend voting may appeal. Fewer people work at the weekend which could mean people are more likely to have time to go and vote, plus in turn candidates are more likely to be able to get volunteers out campaigning on polling day reminding people to vote.

The main drawbacks are also fairly straight-forward.

Posted in Election law, News | Also tagged electoral commission, turnout, weekend voting | 13 Comments

Did you see the reports about the public getting keener to vote in European elections?

By Mark Pack | Published 19th June 2009 - 10:50 am

No, I didn’t either. But the odd thing is, there’s plenty of evidence that the public were keener to vote in European electins than previously. The evidence is certainly patchy and incomplete, but the uniformity of the turnout gloom and doom stories seems to me to say rather more about the media’s fixed image (‘turnout? must be down’) than about the actual evidence.

The key is to compare like-for-like data. For example, in several parts of England the last European election were run using an all-postal ballot, in which all possible voters were sent a ballot paper that they could then …

Posted in News | Also tagged turnout | 4 Comments

And the winners are…

By Stephen Tall | Published 14th June 2009 - 12:00 pm

Back on 2nd June, LDV launched our election prediction competition, inviting readers to put their reputations on the line and tell us what they thought would happen in the 4th June English local and European elections. Here are the questions with the actual results in bold:

1. Predict the Liberal Democrat share of the vote in the European elections. 14%
2. Predict the turnout in the European elections. 34.5%
3. Predict the Liberal Democrat lead over Labour in the local elections (if you think the results will be LD 25%, Lab 22%, your answer is +3%. If you think it will be the other way around, your answer is -3%). +5%
4. Predict how many local authorities the Liberal Democrats will have majority control of on 5th June. 1 (Bristol)
5. Predict the net loss/gain of Lib Dem councillors. -2 (BBC figures)

I’ve now had chance to mark the competition, summing the differences between readers’ answers and the results, resulting in the following league table:

Posted in Site news | Also tagged darren reynolds, ed randall, local elections | Leave a comment

My favourite piece of post-election spinning

By Mark Pack | Published 11th June 2009 - 10:33 pm

Can you spot the person and party in this local newspaper report who:

(a) Slipped back to fourth place for the first time
(b) Saw their vote fall
(c) But say they are “pleased” with the result? and hope to “ride the momentum” into next year’s local elections [Updated: as highlighted by a comment below, the newspaper's use of paragraph breaks looks to have presented the last part of the quote from someone else as if it were the start of Richard Merrin's comments.]

(Here’s a clue: his name is Richard Merrin; his political party is the Conservatives.)

And for a final …

Posted in Opposition watch | Also tagged richard merrin | 8 Comments

Official: the best (and worst) Lib Dem Euro results

By Stephen Tall | Published 9th June 2009 - 5:40 pm

As m’LDV clleague Alex has just mentioned, the Guardian has kindly uploaded a spreadsheet listing all the council results from the European elections – allowing us to sort the results whichever way we wish. So listed below are the best – and worst – Lib Dem European election results.

There are 41 areas which we’re defining as the best-performing – ie, the Lib Dem vote exceeded 20%. As you might expect, a number of familiar names crop up, pleasingly a mixture of held and target seats. (NB: council results do not necessarily match Westminster constituencies, so careful in extrapolating too precisely!)

Sadly, there are more results that we’re defining as worst-performing, 118 in total where the Lib Dem result failed to reach 10%. For comparison, the Tories were <10% in 10 areas, but there were an astonishing 157 areas where Labour was <10%. Ukip was <10% in 62 areas, and the Greens <10% in 307 areas.

Anyway, enough of such data-mining – here are the lists in full:

Posted in News | 17 Comments

Guardian publishes full list of Euro election results

By Alex Foster | Published 9th June 2009 - 4:41 pm

Kudos to the Guardian which has obtained council-level euro results and munged them together into one giant spreadsheet with click-sort columns, over on its datablog.

The hook the Guardian are using is that it allows you see just how well the BNP did in your area, but anyone with a political hat will want to play with the data and slice it in numerous different ways.

Congratulations, then, to South Lakeland, for the highest Lib Dem Euro score anywhere in the country; commiserations to Barking and Dagenham where we polled under 5%… and ooh – is that a weak correlation …

Posted in News | Also tagged barking and dagenham, bnp, lib dem, south alkeland, the guardian | 12 Comments

How the Euro results prove PR works

By The Voice | Published 8th June 2009 - 3:10 pm

The good folk at Make Votes Count have been rapidly number-crunching, and come up with the following analysis of the UK’s European election results…

1) MOST VOTES ELECTED AN MEP

At least 3 out of every 4 votes counted and elected an MEP. Because of the proportional system used for the European elections, a large majority of voters will be represented by an MEP whom they voted for. In most regions, that is the case for at least 75% of voters. In the South East, it is almost 9 in every 10 voters. However, there were some losers; in particular Green voters missed out narrowly in several regions from electing a Green MEP.

2) VOTERS EMBRACE CHOICE

Across Great Britain, 8 different parties have won seats in the European Parliament. This shows that voters respond positively when offered choice at the ballot box. With differences emerging between results at local and European level, it is also clear that voters can make sophisticated choices about who they best want representing them and how they can most effectively make their vote count.

3) INCREASE IN WOMEN MEPs

As things stand exactly one-third of MEPs elected in Great Britain are women. This figure will likely go down very slightly, to around 32%, when the Scottish result is announced. Even so, this would still be a marked improvement on the one-in-four elected in 2004.

4) TURNOUT PATTERNS

Overall (including the Scottish result still to come in), turnout is probably going to be just under 35% – so around 4% less than last time. The biggest drops in turnout were in Wales and in those regions which had all-postal ballots in 2004. Turnout actually went up slightly in 3 regions (South East, South West and Eastern), with Thursday’s county council elections in those areas probably boosting things a bit.

5) BNP ONLY NARROWLY GAINED REPRESENTATION

Posted in Europe / International, News | Also tagged make votes count, proportional representation | 25 Comments

Euro elections ’09: the LDV verdict

By Stephen Tall | Published 8th June 2009 - 10:07 am

Hmm, so what to make of all that, then? Here’s the headline results (comparison with 2004 results in brackets):

Conservatives: 27.7 % (+1.0%), 25 MEPs (+1)
UK Independence Party: 16.5% (+0.3%), 13 MEPs (+1)
Labour: 15.7% (-6.9%), 13 MEPs (-5)
Liberal Democrats: 13.7% (-1.2%), 11 MEPs (+1)
Greens: 8.6% (+2.4%), 2 MEPs (0)
British National Party 6.2% (+1.3%), 2 MEPs (+2)
SNP: 2.1% (+0.7%), 2 MEPs (n/c)
Plaid Cymru: 0.8% (-0.1%), 1 MEP (n/c)
Others: 8.2%

In a sense, the Euro results show the reverse for the Lib Dems of what happened in the English local elections held on the same day: while in the locals, the …

Posted in Europe / International, Op-eds | 35 Comments

Daily View 2×2: 8 June 2009

By Helen Duffett | Published 8th June 2009 - 8:15 am

2 Big Stories

This morning’s two big stories are being combined by most of the newspapers: the European election results and what they mean for Gordon Brown’s leadership of the Labour party.
From the Guardian:
European elections: Brown faces leadership battle amid Labour meltdown and BNP success

Gordon Brown today faces a make-or-break challenge to his leadership after Labour looked set to slump to just 16% of the national vote in the European elections and the far-right British National party won two new seats.

In a devastating result for the prime minister, Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was elected to the

…

Posted in Daily View | Also tagged costigan quist, gordon brown, paul walter | 3 Comments

European elections: rolling results news

By The Voice | Published 7th June 2009 - 7:42 pm

National vote share projections (BBC): Con 27% (n/c), UKIP 17% (+1), Lab 16% (-7), Lib Dem 14% (-1). Although not all regions yet in, looks extremely likely that the party will get the same number of MEPs elected as it had going in to the election.

South East: Sharon Bowles re-elected and joined by Catherine Bearder. (Emma Nicholson retired at this election.)

East Midlands: Bill Newton-Dunn also set to be re-elected.

London: Sarah Ludford re-elected.

Wales: Conservatives do indeed top the poll. Lib Dems miss out on our first ever Welsh MEP by just 2%.

Scotland: awaiting figures from Western Isles, but Lib Dems set …

Posted in Europe / International, Events, News | 84 Comments

Euro election results ’09: Sunday night open thread

By Stephen Tall | Published 7th June 2009 - 6:20 pm

A mere 72 hours after polls closed on 4th June, the parties and candidates contesting the 72 UK seats available for the European Parliament will know their fate later this evening. Let’s remind ourselves what happened five years ago, in 2004, when these seats were last up for grabs:

Conservatives: 27% (27 MEPs)
Labour: 23% (19)
Ukip: 16% (12)
Lib Dems: 15% (12)
Greens: 6% (2)
BNP: 5% (0)
SNP: 1% (2)
Plaid: 1% (1)
N. Ireland: 3 MEPs (1 each for DUP, Sinn Fein, Ulster Unionists)

What will happen this time? Will the Tories do better under David Cameron than they did under Michael Howard? Will Labour retain second …

Posted in Europe / International, News | 3 Comments

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