Thanet South Rigged – Part One: Tory and Labour’s Great Love

There was perhaps no more greater demonstration of the determination of the British Establishment to keep Nigel Farage out of a Westminster seat than when the Labour and Tory candidates in the Thanet South constituency appeared together, during their campaigning, one on either side of a “don’t let UKIP break our great love” heart.

Unfortunately, for some unknown reason Britons will not take such statements of LibLabCon unity at face value – although at the same time some are willing to forget and abandon their left/right opposition to the other camp on the fake political spectrum (otherwise known as the “great love”) in the face of a UKIP insurgency. The subject of united Tory and Labour disapprobation, Farage, was voted into second place come the night of the General Election – or so we are told. In actual fact, the Thanet South result was surrounded by circumstances so suspicious that it looked like a rather particularly brazen extension of the wider campaign to deny Farage at all costs. A fortnight prior to election day, a Survation opinion poll had UKIP on 39% – 9 points ahead of the Tories. On the 9th May it became apparent that UKIP had won control of Thanet District Council by quite an overwhelming margin in terms of seats, and by 36% to the Tories’ 32. The anomaly was Farage’s performance on May 7th, and the fact of all the unusual happenings in the handling of the ballot papers has produced scope for critics to say that that performance can only be explained by Establishment fixing.

Officially, the potentially criminal aspects of Operation Stop-Farage have been covered over with the biggest lie of the election, which is that voters were scared of a possible SNP-Labour coalition – in the aftermath Farage himself supposed it to be the case (and the author has it on good authority that this rationale was helpful to the Kent Police in excusing their own failure regarding the incident after they had wrapped up their ludicrously inadequate investigation into possible electoral fraud). As has been mentioned previously at this site, the threat of a SNP bogeyman – writ much larger in the corporate-media than it could ever really present – is not the reason for the Cameron Regime (and this becomes clear the more time one spends looking at election results), but in the context of a far reaching fix, this story appears to be precondtitioning given out by the Establishment so that people could rationalise the result of the election. So, what is being proposed here is that the very existence of a nationally-broad cover story that bears little relation to reality is evidence of a big act of nefariousness – illegal interference – that affected the outcome of the 2015 General Election.

Unfortunately, there can be no definitive proof because crucial data is not available to us. Any evidence that suggests a fix will not be widely appreciated or believed; nevertheless, there is evidence. As far as Thanet South is concerned, there are two elements to look at: the vote numbers of the various polls held on 7th May, and the goings-on at the Thanet count. We are going, in this article, to look at the first part of this, and then there will be a follow up looking at the second element. There will also be other subsequent articles at this site looking at other General Election results, and this is how we will build up a universal picture by which patriots may be able to create wide spread doubt about the very legitimacy of the current EU vassal at Westminster as it contrives to destroy British nationhood and the sovereignty of the British people.

We can compare the results of the Thanet District Council with the Thanet South Westminster constituency election that was held on the same day – although this is not straightforward. First of all, there are no official ward-by-ward breakdowns for a Westminster constituency – we have to tally all the District Council ward results together and contrast that against the one constituency one. Secondly, in the council elections, parties are competing for up to 3 seats per ward, so each big party will most likely have more than one candidate in each council election. Secondly, the Thanet South constituency contains two wards that are constituent parts of Dover District Council – these are Little Stour and Ashstone, and Sandwich. As it happened, in the Thanet council wards, the Tories, Labour and UKIP had exactly the same number of people standing – as such we can directly compare votes cast. However, in the Dover wards, UKIP and Labour had less candidates than the Tories. This means that there were more votes cast for the Tories without necessarily reflecting true levels of support. We can’t assume that fewer candidates for each party shows a complete absence of backing in the area – which the results necessarily will suggest. To better understand the voting in the Dover wards, we need to extrapolate how many votes Labour and UKIP would have got if they had each stood 3 candidates. This requires some readjustment of the data – which will be explained more later.

First of all, let’s look at the total number of votes cast (i.e. for all candidates) and the percentages for each party in the Thanet wards (where the Lib Dems did not feature):

Result A (out of 93709 total votes):

UKIP 33770 votes, 36%; Tories 29680 votes, 31.7%; Labour 25551 votes, 27.3%.

We can find how many votes each voter cast on average in each ward (total votes divided by ballot papers issued). If we tally all the votes cast for each party (add up all votes for candidates of the same political colour), we can divide each total by vote-per-voter average to surmise how votes would stack up if only one had been available for every elector. Here are findings after the mangling:

Result B (out of 41235 total votes):

UKIP 14803 votes; 35.9%;  Tories 13285 votes; 32.2%; Labour 11216; 28.2%

The bottom line is that support for UKIP in the Thanet council wards was huge – (for reasons about to be explained) it suggests that in the Westminster election, with a seat for Farage at stake, the party must have come first in that stage of the race.

If we now just add the raw votes of the Dover wards to the Thanet ones (see Result A), without any mangling, this is what we get:

Result C (out of 114009 total votes):

UKIP 35566 votes; 31.2%; Tories 42367 votes; 37.2%; Labour 27469 votes; 24.1%.

And if we extrapolate the vote-per-voter result from Result C:

Result D (out of a total of 49709 votes):

UKIP 15565 votes; 31.3%;  Tories 18570 votes; 37.6%; Labour 12017; 24.2%

Now, compare Result D to the actual votes at the general election:

Result E (out of 49401 total votes):

UKIP: 16026 votes; 32.4%; Tories: 18838 votes; 38.1%; Labour: 11740 votes; 23.8%

While the reader is taking this in, notice that the number of total voters in the council elections was very close to the number of voters in the Thanet South constituency election – there is a small difference that might be to do with eligibility issues where a voter can vote in the council elections, but can’t vote in the Westminster one (we aren’t going to worry about it here too much). The obvious assumption to make is that we seem to be dealing with the same people casting votes in the two elections. So, Results E and D confirm what we know about most UKIP voters – they aren’t going to vote tactically for the LibLabCon in a General Election. On the face of things, the UKIP vote held in the Westminster constituency election. It did not switch to the Tories, as we are told that it did. Also on the surface we can see from the statistics presented thus far that the Tories were seemingly brought, by the two Dover ward results, very close to their general election total. So, what this seems to be telling us is that Thanet South was lost by UKIP to the Tories because of an irresistible showing in the Dover wards. Casually, we could say that this makes sense – the Dover constituencies are rural, and a golf course takes up a great deal of space in the Sandwich one.

However, there is a problem with all that because not everyone who wanted to vote UKIP as much as they could in the council elections – or for Labour for that matter – could do so. The Dover wards in the council elections cannot give an accurate representation – the full data about these wards is just not available to us.

But there is a tool on the internet that is quite useful in going some way to building a picture – the Electoral Calculus website. For the wards of Little Stour and Ashstone, and Sandwich in the Thanet South constituency election, Electoral Calculus estimated UKIP scored 870 and 963 respectively [this had to be extracted from an umbrella “others” score based on the actual percentages won in the constituency election].

As for the Tory performance in the Dover wards, Electoral Calculus estimated it to be strong, with 1997 and 1770 votes. If we just added these scores to the basic Thanet vote-per-voter ward numbers (Result B), this is what we would get:

Result F (out of 48469 total votes – [Electoral Calculus reckons a smaller number of total votes cast for the Dover wards, and the author hasn’t worked out why]):

UKIP 16636 votes; 34.3%;  Tories 17052 votes; 35.2%; Labour 12147; 25.1%

This begins to show us, that on the other hand, UKIP were just too strong in Thanet proper to be overcome the way they did by the Tories in Dover. Indeed, a Tory win garnered out of strong Dover support doesn’t necessarily stand up to closer scrutiny, and  the first thing we can do to show this is to use the result of the Dover Westminster constituency to extrapolate the full extent of UKIP support in the Thanet South Dover wards. The Dover constituency election outcome looked like this: Tory 43.3%; Labour 30.7%; UKIP 20.3%; Lib Dem 3.1%.

When we use this as a template for the vote-per-voter numbers from Sandwich and Little Stour, we get these results:

Result G (out of 8474 total votes):

Tory 3669 votes; Labour 2601 votes; UKIP 1720 votes; Lib Dems 263 votes

Adding this to the Thanet ward results we get:

Result H (out of 49709 total votes):

UKIP 16523 votes; 33.2%; Tories 16956 votes; 34.1%; Labour 13817 votes; 27.8%; Lib Dems 263 votes; 0.5%.

Again, the story being told is that the Tory strength in Dover just isn’t enough to overpower the UKIP vote in the Thanet-proper part of the Thanet South constituency.

The next thing we can do is extrapolate what might have happened for a full deck of UKIP candidates in the Sandwich and Little Stour elections. At the same time, we need to keep a track of the Labour and Lib Dem performances to make sure that we redistribute votes properly – and that the total percentages still add up to 100! [Please note, the Green Party and Others made up 1.4% of the entire vote, we’re going to say Green support is at the level of 0.7%; this is a figure extrapolated as an average from all the Dover wards. In fact, for simplicity’s sake, we are going to treat this presence as so negligible that we can get away with ignoring it in our calculations]. We need to begin with Sandwich where UKIP lacked a third candidate against the Tories’ full house. Labour only put up one candidate, and the Lib Dems also had 3. What we need to do is look at the other results amongst the Dover and Thanet council elections statistics for wards where UKIP and Labour put up a full set of candidates in 3-seat wards. For UKIP, we can find a number that we could reasonably expect to fill the 3rd column by looking for the worst performance in all the qualifying seats in terms of the proportion of the 3rd vote to the 2nd– this would be to assume less than average support.

In Labour’s case, we need to fill two columns, so we will use the worst proportion between 2nd and 1st votes and then the same again between the 3rd and 2nd; this gives us the following results:

UKIP: 1st Candidate: 936 (real votes); 2nd Candidate: 860 (real votes); New 3rd Candidate: 725 (additional votes); total: 2521 votes

Labour: 1st Candidate: 975 (real votes); New 2nd Candidate: 842 (additional votes); New 3rd Candidate: 722 (additional votes); total: 2539 votes

These are the votes that we think UKIP and Labour would have scored if they had had the full number of candidates standing.

Because Labour and UKIP suddenly have votes where they didn’t before, we have to make space out of the existing Lib Dem and Tory ones. We are awarding UKIP 725 more votes, and Labour 1564 – a grand total of 2289. The Tories portion of this is 74.7%, while the Lib Dems is 25.3% (we get this by working out the ratio of the Tory vote to the Lib Dem vote). So we must subtract 1711 votes from the Tories, and 578 votes from the Lib Dems.

This gives us these figures for all votes cast:

Result I (out of 10114 total votes):

UKIP 2521 votes; 24.9%; Tory 3777 votes; 37.3%; Labour 2539 votes; 25.1%; Lib Dems 1277 votes; 12.6%.

When we work these figures to get a vote-per-voter number we get the following:

Result J (out of 4291 total votes):

UKIP 1070 votes; 24.9%; Tory 1602 votes; 37.3%; Labour 1077 votes; 25.1%; Lib Dems 542 votes; 12.6%.

At this stage, we should examine how Electoral Calculus estimated the scores of the Sandwich ward in the Thanet South constituency:

Result K (out of  3671 total votes – [N.B. Electoral Calculus reckoned a turnout of 3671 in this ward for the general election – the author does not know why; 4291 is the number of ballots issued for the council election]).

UKIP 963 votes; 26.2%; Tories 1770 votes; 48.2%; Labour 560 votes; 14.9%; Lib Dems 266 votes; 7.2%.

The important thing to focus on is the way the UKIP vote stays roughly the same. And our revised figure for the Tory vote-per-voter (see Result J) is much closer to the Electoral Calculus one than it was when unmodified. In that vanilla form, the Tories had 2328 votes, or 63.4%. [It should be pointed out at this stage that Electoral Calculus overstated the Tory support 75% of the time, and in one case by 10 percentage points, and understated the UKIP support 62.5% of the time, and in one case by nearly 18 percentage points].

Now we repeat the entire process for Little Stour and Ashstone:

Once again, the Tories and the Lib Dems had 3 candidates apiece. Labour had one, and UKIP hand none. UKIP’s first candidate’s score was assumed to have the same percentage of the vote that their first candidate had had in the Sandwich election. This was thought to be a fair number. In the Dover wards, the average percentage for UKIP’s 1st candidate (against total votes cast) was 17%. The Stour first candidate had 9%. The rest of the numbers were found in the same way already described so that the new Labour and UKIP scores would look like this:

UKIP: New 1st Candidate: 943 (additional votes); New 2nd Candidate: 872 (additional votes); New 3rd Candidate: 734 (additional votes); total: 2549

Labour: 1st Candidate: 943 (real votes); New 2nd Candidate: 815 (additional votes); New 3rd Candidate: 698 (additional votes); total: 2456

The votes are swapped across as follows:

UKIP +2549; Labour +1513; Tory -3164; Lib Dems -898 – so that the new totals are:

Result L (out of 10186 total votes):

UKIP 2549 votes; 25%; Tory 4035 votes; 39.6%; Labour 2456 votes; 24.1%; Lib Dems 1146 votes; 11.2%.

When we work these figures to get a vote-per-voter number we get the following:

Result M (out of 4183 total votes):

UKIP 1047 votes; 25%; Tory 1657 votes; 39.6%; Labour 1009 votes; 24.1%; Lib Dems 470 votes; 11.3%.

Now compare with the Electoral Calculus estimates:

Result N (out of 3563 votes):

UKIP 870 votes; 24.4%; Tories 1997 votes; 56.1%; Labour 372 votes; 10.4%; Lib Dems 223 votes; 6.3%.

When the one vote-per-voter figures are understood in all the wards that make up the Thanet South constituency, these are the results:

Result O (out of 49709 votes):

UKIP 16920 votes; 34%; Tories 16545 votes; 33.3%; Labour 13301 votes; 26.7%; Lib Dems 1012 votes; 2%. Other 4%.

Finally, let’s have another look at the general election results:

UKIP: 16026 votes; 32.4%; Tories: 18838 votes; 38.1%; Labour: 11740 votes; 23.8%; Lib Dem 831; 1.9%. Other 3.8%.

Off the bat, this suggests that the Tories gained votes mostly from Labour across from the council elections to the constituency election. This is totally contrary to what we have been told about voter behaviour, and this is not surprising. We aren’t supposed to know that the Labour and the Tory vote is interchangeable to keep UKIP out of office. So the Tory win in Thanet South might have been organic… or the figures might help us to know how the Thanet South election was rigged (more on this in the next article), for it is quite possible that our final reckoning of the Labour vote (see Result O) is over stated. Indeed, Electoral Calculus’ estimates were massively underweight for Labour in the Dover wards, and this is where we have somewhat boosted them. If we go back and look at Result D, Labour scored 12017, or 24.2% in all the council wards that comprise the Thanet South constituency – this was without any transfer from the Tory and Lib Dem vote, and is more in line with the constituency election result. Feeding the excess vote back into the Tories’ share, the figures would look like this:

Result P (out of 49709 votes):

UKIP 16920 votes; 34%; Tories 17524 votes; 35.3%; Labour 12017 votes; 24.2%; Lib Dems 1317 votes; 2.6%. Other 3.9%.

The Tories are still shy of 1000 votes compared to the constituency election, and it suggests that the Tory victory could only have been as large as it was with a transfer of support from UKIP – which evidently did not switch very much between the council and the general election. It’s hard to imagine where the Tories’ margin of victory came from.

If everything had gone as normal on election night in Thanet South, we could shrug our shoulders and say that after all, people who had voted UKIP in the council elections decided not to vote to put the leader of UKIP in the House of Commons, but to vote Tory instead. But as there were shenanigans, and as it is simply not believable that UKIP voters would not vote for Farage, and because the figures testify that the Tories should not have won so incredibly big, if at all, if the UKIP vote had held up (which it looked like it did), then we have to start contemplating the reality of the vote having been rigged. How it could have been achieved is for the next article.