UK local by-elections, 2024

[EastAnglianLefty]

Though not with continuous service, and for more than one party.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Though a lot of those independents were party members, there was just a belief (with various degrees of hypocrisy involved) about "keeping politics out of local government."

This isn't entirely unknown these days. A few years ago I was elected as a parish councillor (the bottom level of English democracy, with very few powers) as Labour. Aside from myself and the other Labour councillor, at least 12 of the remaining 13 councillors were members of political parties (and I think the remaining one was ex-UKIP.) But they all stood as "independents", even though several of them served at the same time as party candidates at other levels of local government.

[EastAnglianLefty]

http://opencouncildata.co.uk/byelections.php

according to this there are 42 by elections scheduled for May 9th! Why not hold these with the May 2nd elections?

Only Kilwinning, North Ayrshire has the date next to it so I assume the others haven't been scheduled yet.

Oh ok. I misread the chart. Wonder why those elections weren't but with local elections.

Most of them are: https://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/18861/local-council-elections-2nd-2024

I think the answer is that the website hasn't been updated.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The SNP were very close to making it into the final two, but in practice if either the independent or the LD had been eliminated instead of them, then the remaining candidate would have beaten the SNP candidate by a much wider margin than the independent beat the LD by.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The SNP were very close to making it into the final two, but in practice if either the independent or the LD had been eliminated instead of them, then the remaining candidate would have beaten the SNP candidate by a much wider margin than the independent beat the LD by.

They weren't actually close to the final two. Here's BallotBoxScotland's plot of the transfers:


For the first few counts, there wasn't that much in it between the top three candidates, with the SNP overtaking the Lib Dems and getting quite close to McDonald with transfers from Alba and the Greens. But that left those three candidates close together on count 5 with the Tory vote just about to be transferred. Unsurprisingly that Tory vote produced hardly anything for the SNP and substantial amounts for the Lib Dems and McDonald, so the SNP were clearly eliminated on count 6.

In fact the Lib Dems were 15 votes ahead of McDonald on count 6, but the SNP elimination favoured McDonald, hence his eventual win by 12 votes on count 7.

Apologies, you're correct. I misremembered which elimination it was that separated out the candidates.