The Greater Manchester Local Election Olympic Games

Local Elections have just happened across Greater Manchester, and while there are approximately 2 million people eligible to vote, only approx 800,000 actually did so. It’s not that hard to vote — postal votes take barely any time to do, so I assume it’s a lack of interest that’s the blocker. For this reason, I’m drawing from the world of sport to try and make it more exciting, so the electorate have a reason to get involved (apart from the democracy).

Welcome to the Election Olympics — a series of competitive events, where candidates and wards compete for their local authority, to find out which Local Authority ultimately tops the medal table.

There are 10 local authorities in Greater Manchester, who will compete to be the greatest.

There are 215 wards across Greater Manchester. Each ward sits entirely with a single local authority area. 214 of the 215 wards were contested at the 2019 Local Elections*.

Whilst each ward across Greater Manchester has 3 councillors, only 1 is up for election in one election, unless there is also a by-election. 1 ward had two seats in the 2019 local election.

In each event of the election olympics, the winning ward gets gold, the second placed ward gets silver, and the third placed ward gets bronze. The medal is then attributed to the Local Authority that the ward sits in.

Local authorities have differing population sizes, and differing numbers of wards. Whilst this does seem unfair, it’s a similar situation to USA or China vs Burundi or St Kitts and Nevis in the actual Olympics. As the games develop, some authorities my specialise in certain events!

Let the Games Begin!

Our first event is turnout — the proportion of the people who are eligible to vote in an area, that actually do vote. This is a good indicator of democratic engagement in an area — the higher the turnout, the more people have taken the chance to have their say as to who they want to represent them in local decision making.

In this case, turnout has been calculated using the electorate figures provided by local authorities, and counting up the number of available votes. These figures are approximates.

Turnout in local elections is typically lower than general elections — very approximately 40% vs 70%. Before looking at the winners, let’s see the three wards in the GM elections with the lowest turnout:

No penalties in the Olympics for poor performers, so this lot are safe, but that turnout is pretty low. We’re looking at only 14% of eligible people actually voting — that’s around 1 in 7 people.

To the results, though!

Gold is taken by Oldham, thanks to the only turnout in GM that’s higher than 50%. Silver and Bronze are taken by neighbouring wards in Trafford, Ashton upon Mersey and Brooklands, both of which were Labour gains from Conservative. Significant? Maybe.

Here’s what that does to the overall medals table:

This is a straightforward event — and is just a count of the number of votes received. This event favours those candidates in larger wards.

Gold was taken by Manchester here, thanks to Shazia Butt getting a massive 3,047 votes. Oldham in with silver from a great showing by Nyla Ibrahim from St Marys’ with 2,625 votes, and Chorlton Park’s Dave ‘Awesome’ Rawson picking up bronze for Manchester.

Here’s how the medal table looks:

This is always a fascinating event, and goes hand-in-hand with Event 4. This event shows how much a particular candidate (or party) is favoured in a ward over the other candidates.

Unsurprisingly, after the second event, Cheetham in Manchester, and St Marys’ in Oldham take first and second spot. Rumworth in Bolton picks up the bronze medal with over 2,000 votes between Ebrahim Adia, the Labour candidate, and the Conservative candidate in second place.

The medal table is shaping up quite nicely now:

Event 4 is a great spectator sport, and rewards wards where the voting is tremendously close, where candidates may be left wondering if all their friends and family really did vote for them as they said they would.

Oof — In Hyde Werneth, in Tameside, there were only 5 votes between the Labour and Conservative candidates. Clayton and Openshaw in Manchester took silver, with only 12 votes stopping an Independent candidate getting into the mostly-Labour council. In 3rd place, only 16 votes separated the Labour and Conservative candidates in Elton, Bury.

Halfway through the Olympics, we’re starting to get an idea of who our front-runners are:

Spoiled ballots are those ballot papers that cannot be counted. It may be that the voter has put crosses next to two candidates, or marked outside the box, or written “I WANT MY BREXIT NOW YOU BETTER GIVE IT ME OR ELSE” across the voting card.

Wigan in with their first medal of the games — spoiled ballots clearly being a specialty of the westernmost part of Greater Manchester, with over a hundred in Aspull New Springs Whelley ward. Stockport also picking up their first two medals of the games.

Medal table:

This is an important event, and brings together some of the themes from other events. This event looks at the proportion of the people who are eligible to vote in the ward who actually vote for the winning candidate.

Incredible scenes in Rochdale, who have left it late to get their first medals on the board, where a combination of reasonable turnout, and a high proportion of votes for the Labour candidates have seen them take gold and silver, for Central Rochdale and Milkstone & Deeplish. The winning Labour candidate in Central Rochdale was actually voted for by over a third of eligible voters in the area. Taking bronze is St Marys’ in Oldham, who we’ve seen in previous events at these games.

Medal table:

This event is a team event — where the number of Wards switching party are counted up. The more switches there are in an area, the more chance they have of getting gold. Shout out to the Manchester Evening News for this, because that was the easiest place to get the data from 🙄 (except Rochdale, where I had to look at their 2015 election data because for some reason it wasn’t included in the MEN reports).

Trafford tops the leaderboard here with 9 wards switching (out of 21). Something is definitely afoot there. Bolton takes the silver medal with a strong 8, and there’s a 4-way tie for third between Bury, Oldham, Stockport and Wigan, each of whom saw 5 wards switch party.

Here’s the medal table after the penultimate event:

This last event is a chance for a bit of a moan about the state of the data. In pulling this stuff together, and some of the other stuff about the election that I’ve included at the bottom of this post, I’ve had to use 10 council websites with varying degrees of completeness of data, the Manchester Evening News, twitter, and some assumptions.

It took time to do all this, and each local authority will have also spent time typing data into websites and creating pdfs(!), and there will be other people like me who either put similar amounts of time in, or wanted to do something but didn’t because of this initial barrier around munging the data into shape.

This event scores local authorities on the way they’ve published data — ease of reuse, and completeness — in the following areas:

Here’s the results:

Data published — 3/5

Ease of reuse — 2/5

Total — 5/10

Data published — 4/5

Ease of reuse — 3/5

Total — 7/10

Data published — 4/5

Ease of reuse — 3/5

Total — 7/10

Data published — 2/5

Ease of reuse — 3/5

Total — 5/10

This transgression aside, having to flick to individual pages to get to each ward’s results is a bit of a pain. Rochdale do provide a total for the number of votes cast, but no data about the electorate or turnout. In fact, to calculate the turnout for these games, I had to use 2016 data from elsewhere.

Data published — 2/5

Ease of reuse — 2/5

Total — 4/10

Data published — 5/5

Ease of reuse — 4/5

Total — 9/10

Data published — 5/5

Ease of reuse — 3/10

Total — 8/10

Data published — 5/5

Ease of reuse — 3/5

Total — 8/10

Data published — 5/5

Ease of reuse — 4/5

Total — 9/10

Data published — 4/5

Ease of reuse — 3/5

Total — 7/10

All of which means we have a tie for first place, with both Trafford and Salford scoring 9/10, and Stockport taking the Bronze with 8/10.

Here’s the final medal table. Each local authority has got at least one medal, which satisfies my need to reward participation (even if it is unknowing).

Manchester and Trafford tied for top place with 2 gold medals, and a silver and bronze each, with Oldham taking third spot thanks to its 1 gold, 2 silver and 2 bronze.

Golds for Rochdale, Wigan, Salford and Tameside leave them in mid-table, while towards the bottom are Stockport, Bolton and Bury.

These results will go down in history, forever associated with the inaugural Greater Manchester Local Election Olympics. But there will be another set of elections in 2020, and the best way to influence the medal table is to vote, get other people to vote, and help local authorities the publish data better!

While it’s a great motivator to get people to try and get their area to the top of the league table, It would be ace if people (the remaining 60% or so) would vote because they’re interested in democracy. I think that there’s a lot of organisations who can help get people more engaged — through visualisations, analyses, cartoons, events, blog posts(like this 💪), think-pieces, conversations, tweets, facebook posts, instagram, forums (fora?), and so on.

I feel like councils have a role to play — at the very least making data more accessible to allow people to make stuff. But really, they should be actively encouraging people to vote and participate. My local authority (Trafford) has recently announced community grants for neighbourhood-type activities. It could be that these sorts of grants are awarded based on voter turnout of greater than 60% (for example).

The problem is that in order to get people to do stuff, generally it’s useful to be able to make it easy to do the good stuff, and hard to do the bad stuff. With voting, that’s not the case — it’s all about incentivising engagement in the process, and that’s what we need to do better.

This post sprang out of some of the other stuff I was trying to do with the data from the election. On election night itself, I live-tweeted a map of Trafford, fed by a combination of Trafford Council tweets, and Lisa Meakin’s reporting from the MEN. I genuinely find it exciting to watch things develop.

I then pulled the data to make a few maps and other visualisations. Here’s the map of winning parties across Greater Manchester:

A sea of red, but some interesting pockets of yellow, green and grey that I’m sure proper political commentators will pick up on.

The next thing I did was look at the second-placed parties in each ward:

There’s a very different feel to this map — much more green, but also much more purple (UKIP).

The final thing I’ve done so far is a sankey diagram, showing how the vote this time around has led to more / fewer councillors of different parties:

Needs a bit of design work on it — the poor Greens are obscured by their label, which I’ll try and fix. I think I’ll try and do instructional-style blog posts for these things, and stick them on GitHub, so other people have the chance to make them better, or make better things using the same principles.

* Walkden South election postponed because the Conservative candidate sadly died before the election

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