Highlights of the 2010 UK Elections

Blame 538.com for my addiction to this year's UK elections. I hadn't really cared (aside from interest in some of the lesser-known parties) until the Nerdfights between Nate Silver and PoliticsHome. But now that I am fully interested (purely numbers-wise, as a fellow amateur statistician, if I can call myself that), I have been following the polls as they come in, one by one, ever since 10:00PM, BST (when the polls closed).

Although this isn't nearly a timely, updated post, it is my experience of the elections, and should serve as something, if only to inform those who utterly have not cared about the elections up until they read this. You can only be an expert (ha, expert, yeah right) to a certain extent.

• The Sunderlands apparently have a tradition of being the first to reveal their numbers (like that NH county whose name I can't remember), and this year, they've kept with tradition, both in speed and results. All three Sunderlands (the first three out and thus most analyzed) voted Labour, despite a huge increase in Conservative votes.
• BBC exit polls have Conservative barely out of majority, and Liberal Democrats losing seats—even though the LibDem's were predicted to gain seats this election. Well, LibDems remind me of the NDPs in Canada (very similar political party environment, especially regional parties, such as the Bloc Québecois, resemble the Scottish and Northern Ireland parties), so I'm not too surprised they've been losing seats, especially with a possible Conservative majority. But my opinion's probably naive.
• Who's the guy behind Gordon Brown during his speech? I don't have a link right now, because I'm following rolling blogs that keep updating, but if you Google Gordon Brown, I'll bet he'll show up. You know, the guy in the sunglasses, who's making that fist-motion, and supposedly belongs to the "Land is Power" party? He got 57 votes, so maybe (if those votes aren't just his family and friends) he's celebrating.
• With the polls and numbers in so far, Nate's model is leading the predictions against the uniform swing model. I haven't delved deep enough to figure out why Nate's model works (uniform swing is much easier to understand, apparently, and I haven't entirely gotten that). Although Nate's model is significantly worse when minority parties (e.g. SNP, DUP, and such) are contenders, which may be a result of his being used to American elections, which are focused primarily on a few (more like, two) parties, rather than a whole range of them, each with their areas of strength.
• Students forced to line up in longer lines while "local residents" vote first? One of a few scandals of the night (including keeping polls open after the deadline), and definitely going to be a problem. Check out the Facebook group. Some are calling for a re-election, which is very unlikely, but if the results are close, things may get ugly. Fast.
• And of course, exit polls once again prove to be rather informative (the last one, the 2005 UK election exit poll conducted by BBC as well, predicted the Labour majority accurately), as LibDems are faring horridly compared to expectations. Not my expectations, I'll say. But I just really care about whether the Nate-model or the uniform-swing-model will prevail, so I never really had expectations to begin with.
• "3:04 AM. Cameron's body language suggested a touch of disappointment."—538.com
• "0254 A clearly shocked Lembit Opik tries to explain his defeat, but the symbolism of the backdrop - a deserted hall - says so much more about tonight's Lib Dem collapse."—Telegraph
• BBC has been having technical difficulties earlier in the evening, with strange graphics, malfunctioning equipment ("Can I just kick this thing?" I'll have to find the specific quote later), and a boat party filled with celebrities and political pundits that plunged into a blackout halfway through.
• Conservative minority (exit poll predictions) may be disastrous for the stock market, as it will definitely drop due to the Greece bankruptcy and the DOW's near 1000 point drop (before rebounding a bit), and a hung government most likely won't get anything done anytime soon. Nate's predicting Conservative majority (by 10+ seats) based on the exit poll and a minority (by 10+ seats as well) based on no exit poll data. Someone tell me how this makes any sense.
• I've been spending way too much time on this, including looking at the funny pictures (Lembit Opik especially, and maybe the wood-chopping PM, but nothing—and I mean nothing in this election so far—tops the Man In Sunglasses behind Gordon Brown). Telegraph election maps either don't update as often as BBC's, or BBC is making false/early projections, as the Telegraph pointed out earlier. Who knows. I just know I should go to sleep now.
• Latest at 10:20PM—BBC: Con. 92, Lab. 92, Lib. 14 (a tie); and Telegraph: Con. 70, Lab. 74, Lib. 9, Others 26 (includes Sinn Fein, which I had thought was the name of an MP before learning that was a party—just goes to show my amateurishness in all of this, doesn't it?). This may end up like a Canadian government: nobody wants a Conservative majority, but they don't want the Liberals to win, so they vote for a Conservative minority with NDP getting some city (working class) votes and Bloc Québecois, well, you know where they win. They have the strangest ties too, all color-coordinated to show party support.
• SLEEP. Will check results later (in the morning, maybe). Tea said I should befriend Andy, who is also very interested in these elections. I hope he's in it for the math, because then he can explain the swing theories to me.
• THE NEXT DAY. (Yeah, that deserves a bullet point all to itself.)
• 538 report: out of 15 districts (at the time, no later data are provided), Nate's method won 7, and uniform swing won 8. Conducting a confidence interval on proportions (conditions are not quite met so we'll have to use a Wilson's adjustment, but I'm using my calculator so I'll assume it does that automatically), Nate's method was right about 47% of the time, with a (gasp) 21% error (this is why you should always have a large sample size when possible). But the same goes for uniform swing as well, so neither one really wins. That's disappointing.
• "4.19am Douglas Murray writes: 'Labour losses, Lib Dems failing to live up to any hype and the Conservatives failing to make gains they should have walked through. It looks like we the people have turned out in record numbers to punish the major parties equally. And, judging from Scotland, the minority parties too. Fun for the time being but this is going to spell mayhem over the coming days.'"—Telegraph
• Imagine losing by 176 votes (as Evan Harris, who got over 23,000 votes but still 176 less than the oppsition, experienced). That would really, really suck.
• "12.12pm (WH) A reader emails me the full Boris Johnson Paxman exchange (11.41am), saying it has been the highlight so far today.
  
  

  Boris: “I think if our new government is to be a Wall’s sausage, the meat of that sausage should be Conservatism. Of course there will be plenty of other bits and pieces in there like bread and what have you, but the meat should be the Conservatives.”

  Paxman: “Will it be a chipolata or Cumberland sausage?”

  Boris: “Enough of this gastronomic metaphor, I have tired of it.”

            Paxman: “But you started it!”"—Telegraph
• "Deal or No Deal" is chosen over Nick Clegg (LibDem leader). Adding insult to injury. (Here's the link.)
• Hung government made official, because apparently the UK can't deal with a minority government for some reason. Or maybe they just don't like to deal with one (lots of political bickering, that's for sure, and if Clegg doesn't form an agreement with the Tories, and David Cameron decides on a Tory minority, then any major decision in Westminster could become a nightmare—like Obama's healthcare bill debate, except possibly worse, since Obama at least had a Democrat majority). Business big-shots not liking this one bit—but this doesn't affect me directly in any way, except perhaps the possible spike in gold and silver prices after a loss of confidence in stocks and currency, which would be harsh on our jewelry club budget.
• A 14-year-old boy voted in Wyre and Preston North. What? How? You'd think a national election would be better regulated than that. Even convenience stores do a better job of monitoring who comes in through the doors.
• Here's the kicker: BBC's exit polls predicted a Tory minority of 307 seats, Labour with 255, and LibDems with 59. Real results? Conservative 305, Labour 258, and LibDem 57. Nate predicted 312/204/103, and PoliticsHome (since I haven't followed them consistently, I have two dates up for comparison) has 291/230/97 on May 4th and 307/229/82 on May 6th (although perhaps after the exit poll was released, because British law forbids any information regarding polls released during voting time from 7am to 10pm to prevent bias—I'll have to check later). Looks like that sample size of 18,000 worked out really well for the BBC for yet another year (much to the dismay of the Telegraph, which had been taunting the BBC's stubbornness in clinging onto its exit poll).

CONCLUSION:

Britain may very well be headed towards a minority government or a Tory-Lib coalition (with numerous experts prediction a re-election within a year, but hey, these are probably the same—I can't voucher for sure because all of their names blended into one for me, the usually non-political girl—experts who doubted that the Liberal Democrats would do so pathetically, so I would take their words with an idiomatic grain of salt).

On the front of statistics (why I'm doing this in the first place), all polls before the exit poll were off. Mostly because of overly optimistic LibDem projections, but also many thought a Conservative majority might be possible. Telephone polls were generally more accurate than Internet polls. And the most pressing issue? There's no clear winner in the Nerdfight, sadly. We're better off with BBC and its exit poll predicting the UK's future for those who wish not to stay up late (like David Dimbleby) and watch the events unfold. But really, it was so much more fun to see the election map being filled out one by one, and to watch the comments as they rolled in after each astounding (or not so astounding, in the safe seats) win.

Let's hope everything works out just fine for Britain. Of course, I can't wait for the 2012 presidential elections (hopefully by then I will fully understand the swing projection mechanism). I'd say I'm interested in it from a purely statistical standpoint, but that would be untruthful. With the US elections, I can also apply everything I've learned in US history. Imagine, math and social studies!


Sources where I got my information is as follows (and some interesting links to check out):
FiveThirtyEight: Election Night Liveblog Part 1 Part 2 Poll Analysis
The Telegraph: General Election 2010 Liveblog Election Map What's a Hung Parliament
(The General Election link above is updated daily—until they choose not to update it anymore—and archives are at the bottom of the post, but before the comments. I predominately used the May 6th/7th post, which is no longer the one displayed on the first page.)
BBC: Election 2010 Live Coverage Results Swingometer
(Try the Swing-o-meter. It's so amazingly fun I am kind of sad the US elections aren't quite the same as the UK elections. Swings don't really work as well here. Pity.)


UPDATE(s):

"2054 Among the thousands of disappointed candidates few could claim to have been dealt a harsher hand by fate than Bob Peck, a Conservative councillor in Great Yarmouth. When he and Labour rival Charlie Marsden were tied on 1,034 votes each in his Yarmouth North ward, a returning officer settled the stalemate asking each to draw cards from a pack. Mr Peck lost his seat."—Telegraph

Some other UK newspaper headlines (and sources)—

The Independent: Big two woo kingmaker Clegg, "Britain was today plunged into uncertainty over its future government, as both Labour and the Conservatives competed for the support of the Liberal Democrats to form an administration."
The Sun: Cam to Clegg: Let's do a deal/Shameless PM's still clinging on, "Mr Clegg had suffered one of the worst nights of his political life yesterday - but STILL woke holding Britain's future in the palm of his hand."
The Daily Mail (which Tea does not completely trust): Now for the shabby deals: As the Election descends into shambles, Cameron and Brown battle for crushed Clegg's support, "The most tumultuous election anyone could remember ended in a weekend of 1970s-style horse-trading between the parties and a dangerous period of uncertainty. David Cameron made an astonishing power-sharing offer to the Liberal Democrats, while Mr Brown shamelessly refused to budge as PM after leading Labour to its worst drubbing since 1983."
Washington Post (all-American, and so no headlines, but a small, almost hidden Opinions page): An electoral earthquake, "Dionne: In Great Britain, economic change crushed old political strategies on the left and right."

Yeah, I'll stop now. Much more interesting things (such as our trip outdoors in calc) are at stake here, now that Clegg (of all people) is now the one to decide Britain's future. It's a lose-lose situation for him (namely, Clegg goes Tory, he gets sidelined; Clegg goes Labour, chance of re-election with more people voting for the two main parties), and quite the lose-lose situation for the country (namely, despite voting for "change," it all depends on one man and his party's politics).

Besides, you've got to follow it as it unrolls to really experience the fun.