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!