London Instant Runoff Breakdown

London (Ontario) just had its first election using instant-runoff balloting. As I've mentioned before, I'm very interested in different forms of electoral reform, so as a new resident of London I was intrigued as to how the vote would work out.

London's system is a bit unusual inasmuch as voters can only rank their first three choices, but otherwise follows a pretty classic Instant Runoff system. Many of the elections resulted in first round winners, and therefore don't have a lot of room for fun analysis, but some of them went deeper and I thought it might be fun to show how the progressed in a Sankey diagram!

First of all, here's Ward 5 (my ward!):

As with all of the following, the leader in the first round ultimately ended up winning. Due to the lack of ability of voters to rank more than three candidates, the number of exhausted votes tends to grow quite quickly after the third round. Interesting patterns include the large number of Clarke supporters moving to Cassidy, and the relatively large number of Knott supporters preferring Warden over Cassidy at the end.

Ward 8

This race ended closer than it began, and likely didn't see any change in leader throughout the race due to the lack of strong trends in down-ballot rankings. 

Ward 9

This race ended quite quickly, with Hopkins getting more than 50% of the vote by the third round after preferential support from Charlebois' supporters.

Ward 12

Similar to Ward 9 - disproportionate support from Mohamed's voters to Peloza secured a win in the fourth round.

Ward 13

One of the tighter races of the election. Kayabaga drew large support from Warren and Hughes supporters, whereas Fyfe-Millar drew more support from Wilbee and Lundquist voters.

Ward 14

Pretty straightforward - along with being the top first choice, Hillier was the preferred alternate for both Tipping and Swalwell's voters leading to a more secure finish than start.

Mayor

(Click to zoom and enhance!)

This one was far more lopsided than all the others. In the early rounds of voting, there was a small amount of jostling for positions 7-9 in the rankings, but apart from that no real changes occurred until Cheng's elimination. No abnormally strong trends in down-ticket voting occurred, though, so Holder held one throughout the end.

The city clerk has promised more detailed information to come out soon, so stay tuned for further analysis!

London City Council

Wow it's been a while since my last post. My apologies!

A principal reason for this is that I've moved - I'm no longer an Edmontonian, and am now a Londoner! London Ontario, that is. This almost definitely means I won't stop posts about Edmonton, but does mean that I'll be increasing my Ontario content.

London is currently in the midst of a civic election, so like any good new citizen to a city my first thought was to learn as much about the current council as I can so that I can make as informed a decision as possible. London's open data is pretty good, but their votes and proceedings aren't as organized quite as well as Edmonton's are.

Nonetheless, with the votes and proceedings that are available, I thought to take a look at council relationships in London in a similar way to how I did in Edmonton two years ago.

Unanimous votes aren't interesting, so I've focused this analysis on the 638 non-unanimous roll call votes as recorded in meeting minutes. First of all, let's take a look at how often each councillor agrees with each other:

Matt Brown is the mayor, and currently enjoys at least 70% agreement with 11 out of 15 councillors, which isn't too shabby. In general, there appears to be a mild bloc of six people (Brown through Park) who all agree quite strongly with each other, another similar block (Park through Hubert) who do the same, and then a handful of councillors who seem to go their own way.

Another sign of consensus-building on city council is the frequency that each member of council has the outcomes of votes in line with how they voted. Again, looking only at non-unanimous votes:

The mayor has been on the losing side of 51 votes out of 610 in which he's been present or not recused, which suggests a reasonable level of consensus building (though not quite as high as Iveson in Edmonton).

If we plot a graph of councillors, and connect them only if they agree at least 67% of the time, we get the following:


The cut-off here was chosen in order to include councillor Turner while still highlighting differences in agreement rates. Unsurprisingly, councillors Turner, Helmer, and Squire are relative outsiders, with a strong cluster of the six councillors mentioned before in the center. Also, this type of graph is incredibly satisfying to play with - enjoy at your own risk!

While showing relative outsiders, this plot doesn't really demonstrate any significant voting blocs. Another way to present the same data is to only connect members of council to whoever they agree with the most often. Doing that results in the following:




Here we get a more interesting structure. Nearly as many people agree more often with councillor Zaifman than Mayor Brown, though there are no separated islands of voting blocs. Only two members of council agreed with each other the most mutually, Matt Brown and Maureen Cassidy, an observation that is provided without further commentary.

The last way I'll look at voting patterns is to scale them using a variant of NOMINATE. This method was developed for analyzing US Congress voting patters, and can assign voting members to a political spectrum without needing to know what the bills being voted on were. For more information, this link is a fascinating read.

Obviously a city council is going to be less partisan than a parliamentary system, but the relative placement of councillors on the graph correlates with how often the agree or disagree with each other, as well as an approximate alignment on issues. I'll detail how this was developed in a subsequent post, but the short version is that each vote is also given a numerical position, and councillors who are closer to the "yes" vote than the "no" vote are assigned probabilities to vote either way. This is then trained against the actual vote data, and thousands of iterations of machine learning later we get this distribution.

Hopefully this has been an interesting glimpse into London city council. Have a fun election!

Ontario Election Wrap-up

The 2018 Ontario General Election is over, and if your team won then congratulations to you!

Over the last month or so I've been tracking the election polls and testing out a few different ideas in order to improve a general model that I'll end up using for the upcoming Alberta election. Of course, I wasn't the only person doing this, and I was able to find at least six other sites tracking and projecting alongside.

But who did the best? Can we learn anything specific about which models produce more reliable results?

First of all, we can look at seat projections. As far as I could tell by mid-day June 7th, this was the seat projection distribution between the seven of us:

	CBC	Too Close to Call	QC125	Lispop	Teddy on Politics	Calculated Politics	Extreme Enginerding	Average	Actual
PC	78	74	70	69	60	71	70	70.3	76
NDP	45	46	47	50	55	44	45	47.4	40
LIB	1	3	6	4	8	8	9	5.6	7
GRN	0	1	1	1	1	1	0	0.7	1
OTH	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Ranking these by the root sum of squares difference from the actual results, we get:

1. Calculated Politics (diff: 6.48). Their method involved seat-by-seat projections, suggesting a regional breakdown that seemed to work pretty well for them!
2. Too Close to Call (diff: 7.48). They also provided seat-by-seat projections, and had regional factors involved to project those. Also, most handily, their simulator was interactive, but putting the correct values into it actually made their predictions slightly worse (still second place at 7.87 though).
3. (Tie: CBC and Me) (diff: 8.12). We ended up with the same predictions for the NDP, but CBC was way under for the Liberals and I was quite a bit under for the PCs. My model didn't involve individual seat projections and instead just approximated historical trends for seat ranges based on party vote share, so that's a win for simplicity I suppose.
4. QC125 (diff: 9.27). Another site with seat-by-seat projections. The actual seats fell well within their expected ranges, but were all off by a little bit. I'm unsure how they came up with the seat vote projections.
5. Average (diff: 9.48). In this case, the wisdom of the crowds didn't pan out. 
6. Lispop (diff: 12.57). Hypothetically they used a regional swing model similar to mine, so I'm not quite sure where the difference comes from here. It looks like they anticipated a much higher NDP voter base than actually happened.
7. Teddy on Politics (diff: 21.95). It seems like Teddy paid more attention to leader favorability numbers than most of the rest of us, and that seems to have tilted the seat distribution against him. His was the only model to predict a minority government.

For most of the models, the seat projections came directly from the popular vote estimates. If we take a look at those, we get:

	CBC	Too Close to Call	QC125	Lispop	Teddy on Politics	Calculated Politics	Extreme Enginerding	Average	Actual
PC	38.7	37.9	37.8	38	37.9	38.4	39.8	38.4	40.5
NDP	35.5	36	36.1	37	36.8	36.1	35.9	35.9	33.6
LIB	19.6	19.8	19.7	19	20.9	19.5	19.6	19.7	19.6
GRN	4.9	4.6	5	?	4.5	4.6	5.2	4.8	4.6
OTH	1.3	1.7	1.4	?	0	1.5	1.3	1.4	1.8

Ranking these again by the same criteria we get:

1. Me! (diff: 1.15) 
2. CBC (diff: 2.69)
3. Average (diff: 3.21) This is a better example of the group as a whole performing better than most individual members. This also probably makes sense as these numbers would have come mostly from the same pool of publicly available polls with a small amount of interpretation for trends and recency, as opposed to a large amount of interpretation as in the case with seat projections.
4. Calculated Politics (diff: 3.29)
5. Too Close to Call (diff: 3.56)
6. QC125 (diff: 3.73)
7. Lispop (diff: ~4.3) Note that Lispop didn't list their prediction for the green party vote total, despite projecting them to win a seat.
8. Teddy on Politics (diff: 4.37)

Overall I'm really pleased with how I did, and I've learned a few tricks to use in upcoming elections. Next up will probably be Québec, hopefully with the same group of people, and we can see if this was a fluke for me or not!

Finally, here's my seat model with the actual results input as though they were one final gigantic poll at the end. Using these correct values would have resulted in the model being the most accurate seat projection of them all (diff: 4.24), which is an encouraging sign that the model itself was sound!

See you next election!

Alberta Electoral Districts

A few months ago, the Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission released its report with recommendations on how to redistrict the province for the 2019 election. As I discussed before, this is an important process that occurs every eight to ten years, and is necessary for keeping the provincial electoral boundaries up to date with current population distributions.

As a quick aside, I'd like to thank everyone who, after reading my post on redistributing using the shortest splitline algorithm, actually wrote in to the commission to tell them to do that. Thanks guys!

Redistricting is always a hot topic, as it can lead to accusations of tampering or gerrymandering by those in power. In Alberta the process is ostensibly done by an arms-length body, and as such when the results were unveiled in October the complaints were pretty tame from the parties not in power. The major effect of the redistricting was to merge rural ridings in such a way that three more urban ridings were created.

In 2015, the poll by poll results for Alberta looked like this:

Here, each poll is shaded a darker colour if the party won by 50% of the vote or more. It's pretty fun to zoom around in it!

These polls were fitted to the 2015 riding boundaries, and if we break them out then add the votes back together according to the new 2019 boundaries, we can get a sense of what the outcome for future elections might look like. The process isn't perfect, as not all polls fit precisely into each new riding, but ultimately this is how the 2015 election is likely to have looked under the 2019 redistricting:




This map is coloured the same way as the poll map above.

The impact this would have had on each party is:

• The total seats won by the NDP wouldn't have changed at 54
• The total seats won by the Wildrose would have decreased from 21 to 20
• The total seats won by the PCs would have increased from 10* to 12
• The Alberta Party would have stayed at 1 seat
• The Liberals wouldn't have won any

The next election is a little over a year away, and these will be the ridings to be determined in that election. Stay tuned as I work to better develop my seat projection model and poll tracker over the next year!