Lib Dems win by seven votes
4 November 2011
The Lib Dems beat the SNP in the Inverness South Ward 20 by-election for the Highland Council by seven votes.
The quota for an outright win was1304 votes, and neither party reached this figure. At stage six of the count 1091 votes had been cast for Carolyn Caddick of the Lib Dems, and 1084 for Ken Gowans of the SNP. The Lib Dems were declared the winner with the larger vote, although the SNP were the leaders through the previous five stages.
After the first stage, the SNP had 885 votes; the Lib Dems 747 votes; Labour (although they had no campaign and no posters) 308 votes; the Conservatives 290 votes (mainly postal votes); the Greens 157 votes; the Scottish Christian Party 126 votes; and the Independent 94 votes (the biggest group on the Highland Council).
This shows that every vote counts. This was an STV election allowing voters to number their preferences. In spite of this, many people voted for only one or two candidates and therefore at the critical stage of deciding whether the Lib Dems or the SNP would win, there were 454 voters who lost out the opportunity to decide the election because they did not carry on giving their preferences on their ballot paper. Eight of them could have swung the result the other way. The same thing is true at other stages in the count, so that if the SCP had 43 more votes, we could have reached the next stage, and so forth.
It is evident that the main parties are making good use of postal votes and we will need to promote this side of our campaign. Apart from postal votes, our vote was close to the Tories.
The turnout was low at 26.8%. The total electorate was 9760; total votes were 2620 with 13 rejected or void votes. The Lib Dem winner got just 7.7% of the vote as first preference votes, so there is a huge number of non-voters to boost the SCP 1.3%.
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Inverness South Ward by-election detailed results at each stage