Lydia Blundell will win the YUSU Presidency tonight, according to exit polls released by YUSU this afternoon.
The ex-Halifax Chair is expected to win with a comfortable 11% lead over Charlie Rowley, at 43 of 100 votes. Aaron Rolph and Tim Ellis trail behind, with 17% of the vote each after second and third preferences.
The poll is formed by 100 randomly selected ballots from this Monday. It also predicts wins for Robert Hughes for Welfare Officer, Artuhr Pitt for Student Activities, Graeme Osborn for Academic Affairs and Sam Asfahani for York Sport. The tightest battle is set to be Academic Affairs, with the exit poll only putting a 1% difference between the two candidates. The poll also predicts a 3% gap between Student Activities candidates James Croydon and predicted winner, Pitt.
Nearly 10% of voters are predicted to place “Re-Open Nominations” (RON) as their first choice in the Presidential battle.
Blundell was unavailable for comment, but runner-up Charlie Rowley is optimistic, keen to point out the nature of the poll, saying that it is “based on 100 randomly selected votes on Monday the 28th so anything could happen! It is unclear how many votes were cast when voting first opened and with 300 votes being cast in the last five minutes today, anything could happen.”
Predicted Academic Affairs Officer-elect Osborn shares the sentiment, saying that his category was “far, far too close to call,” highlighting the similar problem with Welfare and Student Activities predictions. James Croydon, expected to come second in the Activities race, notes the he “would have preferred it if it had come out as [him] winning, but with two votes of a hundred in it, it should make for an interesting night!”
Osborn added that he thought it would be “an uncomfortable afternoon for a lot of people, candidates and campaigners.”
Voters use the Single Transferable Vote system, which enables ballots to list candidates in order of preference. If no candidate reaches 50% of first preference votes, then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and second choices are reallocated and the winning quota reduced accordingly. This continues until one candidate reaches the quota. It is rare for a candidate to win on first preferences alone. The poll takes 100 ballots and completes an example run of this system through.
Unlike national exit polls, however, the poll has been wildly inaccurate in years gone by. Last year it predicted that Oliver Hutchings would take the presidency, despite current President Tim Ngwena’s eventual win. Similarly the previous year Tom Langrish was expected to win, but Ngwena triumphed once more. With votes being gathered from Monday, it is difficult to assess the reliability of the polls. Over 32,000 ballots were cast across the voting period, which closed at midday today.
The full predictions are available here. Results will be announced tonight at a free event in L/N/028 and The Courtyard from 8pm. You can follow Vision’s liveblog and URY’s live broadcast from 7.30, with YSTV adding their live coverage after 9.15.
“Aaron Rolph and Tim Ellis trail behind, with 17% of the vote each after second and third preferences.”
*Before* second and third preferences, as they are 17% of first preference. And the stats are pretty skewed on this article – the ratio that’s important as things stand is 32-35-17-17-9, still with Lydia ahead… but in the real vote, a tiny difference in the first round (e.g. 17.2% Tim and 17.1% Aaron) could easily change the shape of the final result.
But 52-46 in welfare, 41-38 in student activites, 47-46 in academic – going to be extremely tight elections this year! Well worth watching the Vision live blog tonight :)
Let’s be clear here – these percentages are taken from 100 random votes, four days before the polls closed. Speculating on a 1% difference in Academic Affairs is pointless – that’s 1 vote.
Hopefully the turnout will be good this year, I was disheartened to see on the YUSU blog that 3,000 fewer people had voted by the same point earlier this week.
It is also worth noting that the poll was only taken from votes cast on monday. There is a chance that certain candidates would have done better/worse on this day relative to the other days. The tricky thing is how many votes have been cast for each position, taking the voting stats from last night (http://www.yusu.org/blog/entry/586) you could expect an average of about 2000 votes for each position, meaning that only 5% of votes had been taken into consideration. Certain candidates could have performed relatively well or poorly in this 5%, a small variation could affect three out of five of the sabb results, something Ngwena profited from twice.
Interestingly the closest sabb elections are the ones that had the least ballots cast, meaning that only a few votes could swing it.