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Meath 2002 - Condorcet pairwise analysis by candidate and party

This page contains an analysis of the votes cast in the Meath constituency in 2002. An electronic voting system was used and a file containing all the ballots was made available on the internet. This page contains tables showing the Condorcet pairwise preferences both by candidate and by party.

Note: the electronic voting system used did not contain an audit trail. It is not possible to verify that the results in the ballot file are in fact an accurate representation of the votes cast. Future elections or referendums should not be held with the electronic voting system as it now stands.

The tables are generated as follows:-

for the candidates, a separate table is generated for each candidate using the votes where the first preferences was for the candidate concerned. For example, Johnny Brady (FF) polled 8493 first preferences. The first table contains a Condorcet matrix based generated from these 8493 votes. The table shows, for example, that 85.19% of Johnny Brady's votes contained a preference for either Noel Dempsey or Mary Wallace, the two other Fiann Fáil candidates, and that those who gave Johnny Brady their first preference preferred Noel Dempsey by 57.15% to 27.94%. The leftmost column shows the number of voters who gave any preference to the candidate concerned. This shows that 78.37% of Johnny Brady's voters cast a subsequent preference for Noel Dempsey and 71.39% cast a subsequent preference for Mary Wallace.

for the party tables, a separate table is generated for each party using the votes where the first preferences was for a candidate from the party concerned. The Non-Party candidates were included together. Where a party had a number of candidates, the highest preference for that party is used. The table generated for Fianna Fáil shows that 49.12% of those who gave their first preference to Fianna Fáil cast a subsequent preference for either Fine Gael or Labour and that these voters preferred Fine Gael to Labour by 39.77% to 9.35%.

Some comments

The candidates or parties are listed in descending sequence of "any preference". In most, but not all, cases, a candidate or party in a higher position in this sequence is favouredb over a candidate or party in a lower position.

Fine Gael supporters narrowly preferred Fianna Fáil to Labour, in contrast to Dublin North and Dublin West where Fine Gael transfers overwhelmingly preferred Labour to Fianna Fáil. The reason for this appears to be that the 3 Fine Gael candidates individually transferred to Labour candidate Ward ahead of any of the 3 Fianna Fáil candidates. However, when the 3 FF candidates are considered together on the party analysis, their accumulated preferences are slightly ahead of those of the single Labour candidate. 43.28% of Fine Gael suppporters gave a preference to Labour as against only 20.25% of Fianna Fáil supporters.

A curious statistic is that 43.83% of Fianna Fáil supporters gave a preference to Fine Gael. Exactly the same percentage, 43.83%, of Fine Gael supporters gave a preference to Fianna Fáil.

Labour party supporters preferred Fine Gael by 3 to 1 and Green party supporters preferred Fine Gael to Fianna Fáil by 3 to 2 - a pointer to a possible future Rainbow coalition?

An analysis of "committed" Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael supporters would be interesting. This would analyse the preferences of those who voted 1,2,3 FF or FG respectively

It is surprising that there has been very little analysis published of the information contained in the ballot files. Personally, until the true, unauditable nature of the electronic voting system used in 2002 was publicly understood, I felt that to publish any analysis of the ballot files would be to give an undeserved credibility to the system. While it would be extremely interesting to analyse ballot files generated from every constituency by an electronic voting system, it would be better to revert to the manual system than to use the unauditable Nedap/Powervote system foolishly purchased by the government.

Quick index:
Candidates:- Brady FF Bruton FG Colwell Ind Dempsey FF English FG Farrelly FG Fitzgerald Ind Kelly Ind O'Brien Ind O'Byrne GP Redmond CSP Reilly SF Wallace FF Ward Lab
Parties:- Fianna Fáil Fine Gael Labour Sinn Féin Green CSP Non-Party