Talk:Liberal Democrats leadership election, 1999

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[edit] Intermediate rounds?

Were there any intermediate rounds of transfers? Since Ballard, Bruce and Rendel combined still got fewer votes than Hughes I can see why they might go straight to the last two but it'd be interesting to see how the votes moved about and where the last two got their transfers from. Timrollpickering 20:43, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure there will have been - they would have stopped earlier if any candidate had passed the 50% mark then. LibDems are very pure in their STV/AV and wouldn't have used the French presidential "take the top two after round one" approach.

That said, I don't know if the information is out there somewhere. Colin Rosenstiel's site is pretty comprehensive and that's where I sourced those figures from, which are all there were on the page for that election. --Whouk (talk) 21:54, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

The intermediate stages are available on my website: [1]. David | Talk 10:43, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Great, thanks David. --Whouk (talk) 12:24, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Strictly speaking the method I described isn't a French "just the top two" approach or even the supplementary vote used for Mayors in the UK, but instead a common practice of returning officers to expedite the count when the numbers are clear that two or more of the bottom candidates lack the votes combined votes to save them all from elimination. When there are five or more candidates and a lot of ballot papers it can save time immensely and makes no difference to the actual result though makes it harder for commentators to track movements. Timrollpickering 14:03, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Ah, right, I see what you were getting at. As they answer as that there were intermediate rounds, I suspect it's still LibDem purism, but I don't know for sure. --Whouk (talk) 14:12, 12 January 2006 (UTC)