Off the back of my last post I have been poking around a little more at the Cornwall local elections, this time exploring voter turnout. Cornwall Council provide the full turnout results unhelpfully shared as PDF which I had to painfully parse!
Here’s the turnout % data projected onto the map of Cornwall and its electoral divisions:
Unsurprisingly turnout was the same-ish across the county which makes the image above a little difficult to interpret. The high-level stats are:
- Overall turnout was 37.21%, which looking at the other unitary authorities that had elections it seems as though Cornwall performed above average! Go us.
- Just 1 ward (Rame Peninsula & St Germans) reached a 50% turnout.
- Meanwhile 11 wards scored under 30% with Camborne Roskear & Tuckingmill performing worse with 25.50%.
- Excitingly Saltash Trematon & Landrake had 1 more ballot cast than issued. I’ve queried to understand how that’s even possible…
- There were 428 rejected votes and annoyingly I can’t easily drill into the reasons given without clicking into each ward right now!
Here is a clearer (less accurate) graph showing voter turnout where I use a darker shade of red for every 5% increase in voter turnout:
Using this more advanced shading it becomes obvious that low voter turnout in the middle of the county is sandwiched between strong turnout to the north and south. But are there any correlations between turnout and party elected? Maybe!
The top 15 wards with the highest turnout overwhelming voted Liberal Democrat:
- Liberal Democrats (8)
- Reform (2)
- Independent (2)
- Conservative (2)
- Labour (1)
Meanwhile the bottom 15 wards for voter turnout largely voted Reform:
- Reform (7)
- Liberal Democrat (3)
- Independent (1)
- Labour (1)
- Green (1)
- Mebyon Kernow (1)
- Conservative (1)
In my next post I’m going to generate a map which shows wards with the largest majorities. Stay tuned because that’s going to require a lot of manual data processing!