Elections Canada recently released poll-by-poll results for the September 2021 federal election, and I thought I’d check it out to see if there was anything interesting about my performance on election day.
As I mentioned last September, I place 5th place in the election in a slate of 6 candidates.
First of all, here’s how Lethbridge voted:
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % of popular vote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rachael Harder | Conservative | 32,817 | 55.38% |
| Elaine Perez | NDP | 11,386 | 19.22% |
| Devon Hargreaves | Liberal | 8,928 | 15.07% |
| Kimmie Hovan | People’s Party | 4,097 | 6.91% |
| Kim Siever | Independent | 1,179 | 1.99% |
| Geoffrey Capp | Christian Heritage | 566 | 0.96% |
I’m not surprised. It’s really hard to get elected as an independent in a federal election. That being said, out of the more than 90 candidates who ran as independent, I had the 7 highest number of votes. So, as an independent candidate, I did pretty good.
I still lost, but there has to be consolation prizes somewhere.
I didn’t really perform all that well in any one poll. Those 1,179 votes were spread out among 191 polling stations. At 41 of them (or roughly 1 in 5), I got just 1 vote.
Here’s what it looks like broken down by the number of votes I received at each polling station. The numbers along the bottom of the graph represent how many votes I received and the height of each bar is how many polling stations where I received that number of votes.
As you can see, the bulk of my support came in the form of very few votes. There were only 9 polling stations where the number of votes I got reached double digits.
That being said, there were only 16 polling stations where I received no votes, so that’s a good thing. By comparison, Geoffrey Capp received no votes in 86 polling stations, and Kimmie Hovan received no votes in just 1 polling station.
Of those 16 polling stations, 7 were outside Lethbridge:
- Coaldale
- Coalhurst
- Iron Springs
- Picture Butte
- Shaughnessy
- Tempest
- Turin
Now, that being said, I received votes in all the other Coaldale polls, the other Coalhurst polls, the other Picture Butte polls, and the other Shaughnessy poll.
I also received votes in Barons, Broxburn, Chin, Diamond City, Monarch, Nobleford, and Stewart Siding.
Here’s a breakdown of my votes by municipality:
| Lethbridge | 621 |
| Coaldale | 35 |
| Coalhurst | 14 |
| Monarch | 7 |
| Picture Butte | 6 |
| Barons | 5 |
| Nobleford | 4 |
| Chin | 4 |
| Broxburn | 3 |
| Shaughnessy | 2 |
| Diamond City | 2 |
| Stewart | 1 |
| Turin | 0 |
| Tempest | 0 |
| Iron Springs | 0 |
And while my vote counts outside of Lethbridge, Coalale, and Coalhurst were pretty low, I was actually surprised that I got any votes at all in some of those communities.
The highest number of votes I received at a single poll was 15, and that was in the Fleetwood neighbourhood. This also surprised me. Although the neighbourhood isn’t too far from me, I had expected my best showing would be in the London Road neighbourhood, where I live.
The next highest number of votes I received was 13, which occurred in two polling districts. The first was pretty much everything south of the Copperwood neighbourhood and then one of the polls in my neighbourhood. The latter wasn’t that surprising, but the former sure threw me off.
Speaking of the London Road neighbourhood, while it might seem that 13 votes at that one poll wasn’t a whole lot, actually no one did that great in that poll. Rachael Thomas, who won the election for the riding, got fewer than 50 votes in this one poll, and the Liberal and NDP candidates each got under 40.
In fact, this poll was one of 5 polls where I was in 4th place, beating out the PPC candidate. As well, I received 9.22% of the vote at that poll, the highest percentage of votes I received at any other poll. My average share was 2.24% and my median share was 1.71%. So 9.22% was a pretty big deal.
The fourth highest number of votes were in the next poll over, also in London Road, where I received 11 votes, which ended up being 6.51% of the votes. I was in 5th place here, but was only 2 points behind the PPC candidate.
Combined, I received 24 votes from those two polls, which was 7.74% of total votes cast, and which was the 4th highest share.
When looking at all 6 polls that cover the my neighbourhood, I received 47 votes, just 3 behind the PPC candidate, dropping me down to 4th place, but just barely. I ended up with 5.37% of the neighbourhood’s votes.
Now, these weren’t all the votes I received in the election. Over 350 people voted for me in advanced polling, a handful in mobile polls, and 106 under “special voting rules”.
That last group included Canadians living outside Canada, military personnel voting in a military poll, prisoners, and people who voted outside of their electoral districts. However, the majority of them voted in special ballots within Lethbridge, either by mail or at the Elections Canada office.
And to people who complain that Rachael Thomas keeps winning because of the votes outside of Lethbridge, keep in mind that last September, 77.9% of the votes she received on voting day came from within Lethbridge.
It’s not just rural voters who are voting Conservative.
