In 2024, BC tossed an election, and the NDP barely retained a majority, losing seats to hold the government reins by one seat. And that took a lot of recounts, and a nailbiter cliffhanger in Surrey-Guildford to decide the issue.
And I got to wondering, what if the NDP had converted some percent of Green votes to orange. How would they have fared with capturing, for instance, 5% of the green votes.
Time for a database. So I went to Elections BC, and dug around to find the data store and was appalled at the shape of the data, but that is what I am: appalling.
I downloaded the stuff and put together a DB and have set it up to show the result for a General election, and then the same election with some percent of the Green vote switched to the NDP.
This is a table of the general elections in the DB. BC does not go in for history, it seems.
This is a lookup table of the candidates in the DB. Some are listed Firstname Lastname, others are listed Lastname, Firstname. It's BC, Jake.
This is a table of the electoral districts down through the ages. I use an abbreviation from Elections BC for the districts, but there are ambiguities, for instance at BNN.
This is a table of the maps of electoral districts down through the ages, all the way from 2017. I use an abbreviation from Elections BC for the districts, but there are ambiguities, for instance at BNN.
This is an overview map of where all this electioning goes on.
I am not a big fan of the public data provided by Elections BC.
Swing the votes. I added some code to move a percentage of votes from one party to another. Some samples follow, for the 2024 General Election.