SU Elections Aftermath: Part 2

If you've actually bothered to read this, I must applaud you. I wouldn't have. Trust me. This is going to be more stats about the SU, but less interesting than last time. Yippee.

With that lovely disclaimer aside, check this out:

This first graphs I've lovingly whipped up is for SU elections turnout. RIVETING. These are the results of the voter turnout by year for the last three years:


Ooh. Aah. Exciting! What's REALLY interesting, though, is how similar the 2010 and 2012 results were. I mean, they're almost identical. That prompted me to take a look at the hour-by-hour results for 2011 in a more normalized capacity, and this is what I got:


This is way cooler, because it turns out that all three years follow a very similar pattern, regardless of final voter turnout or campaigning restrictions on voting days. An R2 value of 0.994 suggests that if you were to know the turnout by the afternoon of the first day of voting, you could be fairly confident in a final prediction for voter turnout. Nifty!

What do these graphs say? You'd think that I'd be sitting on at least two thousand words of awesome explanations and analyses (two pictures at 1,000 each, right?). I guess one thing that's easily noted is that two-thirds to three-quarters of students vote within the first day, and (surprisingly?) almost nobody votes between 2 and 5 am on the second day. What *is* surprisingly is that the rate of voters per hour stays fairly constant leading up to the close of voting on the second day, and that it isn't significantly lower than the voting rate on the afternoon of the first day. I would have anticipated that it would plateau before the end of voting as everyone who wanted to would have already voted, but instead we have ~150-200 people voting each hour leading right up until the end of the election. In fact, I would suggest that up to another couple hundred votes could be obtained simply by keeping the election open a bit longer.

Interesting indeed.