Afaal’s Column

“This article was first published at Dr. Abdullah Waheed’s Blog on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 after the second round of the elections. If you would like to see the comments please visit this article at Dr Waheed’s blog. I have brought it to my blog so that I will have an archive of all what I have written.”

On October 11, 2008 I submitted an article on very simple mathematics of the possibilities for swing votes in the second run of the election. In that I made a number of assumptions that would make the suggested scenarios possible.

Usually simple mathematics works. And in this case some assumptions that I made was true.

Voter turnout:

The most important assumption that I made was that voter turnout should be as high as that of the first run. In the first run the total turnout was 176,567 voters. This time around the number in fact was higher at 179,343.

Voter who voted for DRP and MDP at the first round remain constant:

Although this may not be exactly true the following math suggests that it is very close to the assumption. In the first round MDP got 44,293 votes and DRP got 71,731 votes. My calculations were based on 3 scenarios, i.e. 10% swing, 15% swing and 20% swing. I also suggested that it would be difficult to get a 20% swing. (Please read previous article I submitted to this blog for details).

So with a 15% swing my estimated numbers were, 94,889 for MDP and 81,678 for DRP. Of course these numbers are subject to a margin of error. The actual numbers attained are 97,222 for MDP and 82,121 for DRP. For an estimate I would say a close figure. The reason for saying that is if you look carefully, my estimate for a 15% swing resulted in an increase of 12.18% of votes for DRP from the first round. The actual increase is 12.65%. And the rest voted for MDP.

Comments:

I also agree that all the assumptions that I made in the previous analysis may not be true. But what I see here is that it is important that intellectual mathematical analyses are used by the media and even political parties in understanding the real voting scenarios. I encourage that media and political advisors to undertake such analysis during election times so that more objective ideas maybe obtained about the situations at hand.

Though I am not an election statistical expert, I have some academic background on statistics and also worked a large part of my working like producing statistics and using statistics for planning purposes. What I have presented in the October 11^th article and this one are just simple mathematical analysis based on the little statistical experience I have and what I read from the Internet about voting, elections and mathematical analyses elsewhere.

Please do not consider the previous article as well as this article “political” but an intellectual piece of work by an independent (which I am still) citizen of the Maldives.

Note: All figures used for the calculations are taken from the Elections Commission Website