Talk:2016 Alderney general election

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the 2016 Alderney general election article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Channel Islands Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Channel Islands, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Channel Islands on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Channel IslandsWikipedia:WikiProject Channel IslandsTemplate:WikiProject Channel IslandsChannel Islands-related articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Elections and Referendums

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Elections and Referendums, an ongoing effort to improve the quality of, expand upon and create new articles relating to elections, electoral reform and other aspects of democratic decision-making. For more information, visit our project page.Elections and ReferendumsWikipedia:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsTemplate:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsElections and Referendums articles

Islands

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Islands, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of islands on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.IslandsWikipedia:WikiProject IslandsTemplate:WikiProject IslandsIslands articles

Lists Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Lists, an attempt to structure and organize all list pages on Wikipedia. If you wish to help, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.ListsWikipedia:WikiProject ListsTemplate:WikiProject ListsList articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Percentages of what?[edit]

@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)[reply]

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 5 7 19:58, 12 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Your question is a straw man because it is completely different. Let's just remove the percentages. Number 5 7 13:30, 23 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]