Talk:2016 Alderney general election

Percentages of what?

@Number 57: Your addition on the total numbers of voters is nice! However, I do not understand the percentages per candidate you gave. Did you fetch them from somewhere else; or were they forinstance calculated by a programme that is chiefly intended for one person per constituency elections?

I think that in general in elections in the Channel Islands each voter is allowed to vote for several candidates. Therefore, the total number of votes cast is considerably higher than the total number of voters. However, isn't the interesting question rather "What percentage of the voters voted for John Doe?" rather than "What percentage of the total number of votes, counted for each candidate separately and then added, were cast for John Doe?" This is not the same thing, as you easily can see.

In this case, if I understand this correctly, out of the 940 people casting valid votes, 624 (66.2%) voted for James Dent, and 527 (56.0%) voted for Louis Jean. (Obviously, many people used their right to vote for several candidates.) I think, that we should give these percentages rather than the ones you gave (16.0% and 13.5%, respectively), if we should give any percentages at all.

This does not concern just this 2016 particular election, but also Alderney general election, 2014, and perhaps some others. (Compare with Alderney general election, 2010, where the percentages obviously were calculated in the manner I suggest!)

Regards, JoergenB (talk) 19:02, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

The issue with that is that the percentages will total way above 100%. I would prefer we don't give any percentages in that case. Cheers, Number 57 19:58, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

So what? There is no fault in giving percentages whose sum is not 100%. (Would you be against presenting a table of how large parts of a population are men, women, children, teen-agers and retired, because the sum of these percentages would be more than 100%?) However, perhaps we should use a few words to explain of which percentages we use, and even comment on the reason for the large sums - that is, that people normally vote for more than one candidate. This then also should be done for those articles on older elections, which already give "percent of the voters" per canidate, rater than "percentage of the total number of cast votes per person, calculated separately and then added". JoergenB (talk) 02:55, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

Your question is a straw man because it is completely different. Let's just remove the percentages. Number 57 13:30, 23 July 2017 (UTC)