Saturday, May 9, 2015

More people didn't vote Conservative than voted for them in Tonbridge and Malling....

So our new MP, Tom Tugenhat, as expected, comfortably took the seat of Tonbridge and Malling which also, btw, includes Edenbridge, where, incidentally, I used to play golf when I first moved to this area. But that's by the by! His victory was pretty emphatic which sort of half rhymes with Tugenhatic, which is also by the by.
Enough of this nonsense and let's analyse those figures in a little more detail shall we. His party, The Conservatives, polled 31,887 which was 59.1% of the votes. The other parties, between them, polled less than that at 21,783 or 40.6% of the vote. So that's pretty emphatic isn't it? But what about the ones who didn't vote? These will be a mixture young people who didn't register to vote in time, people who couldn't make it to the polling station and, of course, people who just couldn't be bothered, a whole host of reasons. The turn out was 73.8% which is generally considered high. That said in the recent Scottish Independence referendum the turn out was about 95% so, you see, it is possible for more people to vote when they really feel it counts. Maybe Russell Brand had a point afterall! So, taking the ones eligible to vote who didn't bother into account the picture looks different again. The 24.2% of voters who didn't exercise their democratic right for whatever reason represent 12,988 people. Are you keeping up with me? So if we add those to the non-Tory voters that's actually 34,771 people. So, in fact, more people who were eligible to vote didn't vote for Mr. Tugenhat than voted for him and he needs to remember that.
I'm now off to munch, a cry into, my tripe and black pudding sandwiches again!...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I suspect that more people would think their vote counted if we got rid of the first past the post system in favour of some sort of proportional representation. That said, those who express no opinion at the ballot box (even if only to spoil their voting paper) cannot really feel entitled to complain about the outcome.

Anonymous said...

Well everyone had a chance to vote in a referendum, a couple of years back, to change the system from first past the post to the AV system, which is more proportional to people's preferences. Now, I understand why our MP at the time said "vote no, or there will never be another Tory government". But why did all the UKIP supporters (who would have benefited from AV) also vote no to PR?
It didn't exist in the fifties? Sounds foreign? It's different and I don't like change?
talk about cutting of your nose to spite your face....

Jeremy said...

Congratulations on finding a way to find some optimism in the stats (I was just depressed by how large the combined UKIP + Tory vote was as a percentage of the total :-(