Vancouver Election 2011 - Turnout and the Center-Left

In high school I wrote a paper on the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) a progressive Vancouver municipal political party.

Vancouver has municipal elections every three years. The elections feature a wide variety of political parties. This past election had two major parties (30-50% support), two minor political parties (10-20% support) that got seats, and two completely new "more minor" parties (5-10% support) that didn't get seats.

When I wrote my paper, one book argued that the turnout in western half of Vancouver was historically 10-20% more than the eastern half of the city. The western part of Vancouver has historically voted for the right, whereas the eastern part has voted for the left (Note: I have a hypothesis that this east/west income divide is true in many cities - possibly due to wind currents and pollution).

The 2011 mayor election results show this divide:

First past the post is an undemocratic method of voting as it excludes minor parties. It is even worse if your supporters are less likely to turnout and vote. The left typically has a harder time mobilizing our supporters than the right.

In Vancouver, not only is the mayoral race decided by first past the post - but the city councilors, school trustees, and parks board members are all elected by the horrible "At-Large" system. For city council, the top ten vote getters are elected to council. So parties run slates of candidates. If it weren't for a small group of people who do not vote for a entire slate, a party could win all of the city council seats if they had one more vote than the second place party.

As a result of the undemocratic nature of the at-large system, the left has consistently advocated for a move to a ward-based system - where city councilors would represent a part of the city. This would provide a stronger representation of the second place party on city council.

The Vancouver Election results website nicely provides the results in a spreadsheet.

I took these results and ran a couple tests in SPSS.

I looked at the mayoral race. I calculated the percent of votes for the incumbent Vision Vancouver (center-left) and NPA (center-right) candidates. I compared this to turnout for the 135 voting districts. Overall voter turnout in Vancouver was 35%.

The result was surprising. I found a positive relationship between turnout and the vote for the center-left Vision Vancouver. The correlation was 0.211, with a significance of 0.014 (so a 98.6% confidence that the result was not random). The NPA vote (center-right) was significantly negatively correlated with turnout: -0.167 (significance of 0.053 - so a weaker correlation).

My guess is that the NPA supporters didn't like their candidate and didn't turn out to vote. Perhaps the incumbent has an advantage in turnout?

There was also an interesting negative correlation between turnout and blank vote percentage (-0.194, significance of 0.024). So the greater the turnout, the less number of blank votes. This shows that right-wing areas, with lower-turnout, may have had unsatisfied voters who chose to cast blank ballots in protest. This is especially probably as there weren't any significant right wing alternative candidates running for mayor. Normally I'd expect low-income areas to have the highest number of blank ballots.

Perhaps a better measure of the left is the results from COPE. I looked at the top-vote getting COPE city councillor (Ellen Woodsworth). Her vote percent had a negative correlation to turnout that was very close to that of the NPA mayoral candidate: -0.181 and a significance of 0.036. This could also be a sign that COPE supporters weren't enthusiastic (and/or the party lacked money in its campaign - COPE has historically been outspent by up to 10:1 margins). COPE did lose half its seats in this election (and 5-10% of its votes).

Adrianne Carr was elected the first Green Party city councilor in Vancouver's history. She won a very narrow 10th place. Interestingly her vote percentage had the STRONGEST negative correlation with turnout. The correlation was -0.347 and a significance of 0.000. Her vote was also heavily correlated with COPE's Woodsworth (0.888), but not with the Vision Vancouver or NPA mayor candidate. I'm not sure what to make of that! My guess is that Adrianne Carr would be in the center of Vancouver politics - however it is possible that there is an environmental dimension in Vancouver politics which isn't correlated heavily with either the left or right (the two very minor parties were both environmental, at least in name - one of them was even advocating for "de-growth"). If she was a centrist candidate it'd make sense that she didn't correlate with either mayoral candidate, but not that she'd correlate so strongly with COPE's Woodsworth.

It could be that I know very little about Vancouver politics =)