There were several claims about the maximum "percentage votes" obtained at the General Election. But I don't think that those calculations make sense.
Here is an example to show why: Let's say I make a one person party, find some names just to fill the nominations, and our unpopular party gets only 10 votes! Being the supreme leader of the party, all those voters have given me a preferential vote. ;-)
So here I am, getting 10 preferential votes out of 10 votes cast to my party. My percentage is 100%, even if there are tens of thousands of others who didn't vote for me! It only shows I am good at preferential vote fight in the party.
So obviously this is not a good way to calculate the "percentage preferential vote".
A better statistic is the number of preferential votes as a percentage of total valid votes. Otherwise, someone with a very low vote count can still claim a high "percentage vote" relative to the party votes.
Here are some percentage votes calculated with respect to total valid votes:
- Basil Rajapaksa: 45.8%
- Namal Rajakapsa: 53.0%
- Ranil Wickramasinghe: 24.8%
- Sajith Premadasa: 26.8%
- Sarath Fonseka: 10.5%
- Wimal Weerawansa: 29.9%
2 comments:
Despite the fact that your argument is mathematically correct, the reasoning behind that is partially misleading. The idea of the 'percentage votes' is to measure how popular a member among the party members, in this case the people who voted for the party. It can also use to compare the popularity among candidates of the same party. I agree that cross party comparison does not make much sense in this respect. In social sciences we cannot go for extreme examples like your's.
Good point!
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