What Is A Marked Register?
The list of people who have registered to vote is called the Electoral Register. The Electoral Register is prepared for each constituency by the Electoral Registration Officer. On Election Day that person becomes the Returning Officer. The Electoral Register is broken down into wards. The wards are broken down into polling districts. The people for one polling district vote at a polling station.
Within each polling district, the streets are listed in alphabetical order. The voters in each street are listed by house number.
On election day the Presiding Officer at each polling station has a copy of the Electoral Register(s) for that polling station..
When you go to vote, the Presiding Officer marks on the Electoral Register that s/he has issued you with a ballot paper.
At the end of the day the Presiding Officer has marks on his register for every person who has voted. This is called “the marked register”.
A copy of the marked register may be purchased by a candidate, or by any political party, within one year of an election. Breakthrough is a registered political party.
There are a number of reasons to purchase a marked register.
You will mark on your electronic records which voters voted.
If some of your “promises” failed to vote, it may be worth visiting them and encouraging them to register for a postal vote.
Why Analyse the Marked Register?
In our early days in each ward and constituency, the Breakthrough Party wants to know who did not vote.
The people who voted when there was no Breakthrough candidate were willing to vote for one of the parties who stood candidates.
We want the people who were not willing to vote for the established parties.
In many areas, roughly 35% of the electors vote in a council election. Within that average, you will find streets where fewer than 15% voted.
If we find a street or a district where 75% or 80% of the people refused to vote, this is a signal that a lot of people in that area are potential Breakthrough voters.
How To Analyse the Marked Register
In some areas, the Electoral Registration Officer provides you with physical photocopies of the marked register. In other areas, you are given the photocopies in PDF format.
You need to build a spreadsheet. I assume you are using Excel.
Remember to mark each page with which polling district this is, its identifying number (like QA52), and which polling station it is. Some polling stations serve more than one polling district. You want constituency and ward.
Column A is the Street Name. I normally put all the identifying information into Line 2 of Column A (because Line 1 is “STREET NAME”)
Column B is the number of voters in each street, or each part of a street. Blocks of flats for instance usually have a separate listing.
The streets and blocks of flats are conveniently listed for you at the beginning of the Electoral Register for each polling district. Copy them into Columns A and B. I have not found an easy way to copy them.
If we had the electoral Register on a computer system it might be possible to copy and paste, but our system is still being developed.
Column C is the number of people who actually voted. You obtain this number by counting the voters with marks against their names. Ignore postal voters because these come later.
Column D is the number of electors who did not vote. The formula to put in is “=B2-C2”.
Column D is the percentage of electors who did not vote. The formula for this is “=D2/B2*100”.
The calculation comes out as a multi digit figure. You can go to “Format Cells”, choose “Number”, and round down to a whole number or one or two digits.
Column E is the number of postal voters.
Column F is the number of postal voters who voted. The information comes from the Postal Votes Marked Register, which is a different document.
Column G is the number of postal voters who did not vote. The formula for this is “=E2-F2”
Column H is the percentage of Posta Voters who did not vote. The formula is “F2/E2*100”
Column I is the percentage who did vote. The formula is “C2+F2/B2*100”
Column J is “Comments”. This might be “students” or “more properties than voters” or VR (Voter Registration) because we think there are voters who are so fed up that they did not register to vote. “Old people / no PVs”. My classic is “only Flat 14 registered!”
SAVE Constituency/Ward/Polling Station/Polling District eg HSP/Bloomsbury/Ramsay Hall/QA52.
That was Stage 1!
In Stage 2, you shade a street map with the streets for which you have information. Streets or parts of streets where 75% did not vote are shaded in a different colour to the others.
Are there streets where no-one has even registered to vote? Wow!
You will build up a map of where Breakthrough should start campaigning. Be aware that these areas may straddle polling districts, may straddle wards, and may even straddle constituencies.
Recent Comments