English local elections, May 2014

[jaichind]

Not sure if someone's already posted this, but apparently the BNP have managed to hang onto one of their seats, in Pendle. Also, this is just an idle question, but will UKIP electing more councillors (if we add today's gains to their previous total it comes to about 380 I think) enable them to run a better 'ground game' in future elections?

I would have to imagine this this year and last year's victories for UKIP in local elections is giving them a good farm team for Westminster elections, perhaps this will not have much of an impact in 2015 but if they can keep this up then I would have to think this will make a difference in elections beyond 2015.

[jaichind]

I have some questions on how UK local elections work as I am still not clear about some items

1) Why is the vote count so slow for local elections relative to Westminster elections?  It has been more than 24 hours and it still seems to be going on with only 150 out of 161 councils done.  Is it because some councils have rules saying that counts cannot be done until the Sunday when the Euro elections results are counted?  If not why is this so slow.  Only place I know of that is slower than this is my home county of Westchester of NY state.  But vote counting in Westchester has to be the most incompetent in the whole world.

2) When I read the BBC indicating the vote share is Labour 31 Conservatives 29 UKIP 17 and LD 13, is this just the absolute aggregation of the votes across the places that voted yesterday? Or does it take into account the PVI (for the lack of a better word) of places that voted and tried to normalize into what the implied national vote share would be.  I hope for the latter but suspect the former.  In 2013 it seems to be  Labour 29 Conservatives 25 UKIP 23 and LD 14, which makes sense only if one takes into account that the places that voted are in the South and and non-urban areas that are friendly to UKIP.  These numbers tell me that these BBC numbers are not normalized which means I am not sure what to make of them and not sure what inferences I can draw from these numbers.

[jaichind]

Seems to be that UKIP did very well as the voting yesterday much more urban focused than the places that voted in 2013 local elections.  Looking at the profile of what I would imagine would be the typical UKIP voter tells me that these results are much more impressive than in 2013 once we take into account that 2013 local elections are most in rural areas and yesterday's vote are much more urban focused and less friendly to UKIP.