Guesstimation

Candidates

BAILHACHE, Philip Martin (Philip Bailhache)
COHEN, Frederick Ellyer (Freddie Cohen)
COLLEY, Rose Edith
CORBY, Linda Daphne Irene Gay (Linda Corby)
FARNHAM, Lyndon John
FORSKITT, Mark Bruce
GORST, Ian Joseph
LAGADU, Sylvia
LE GRESLEY, Francis du Heaume
PEARCE, Darius James
RICHARDSON, David Raulin Tanqueray (David R.T. Richardson)
SYVRET, Stuart
WHITWORTH, Christopher Paul (Chris Whitworth

"She voted for four because she felt under pressure to do so." (Nick Le Cornu)

Is voting preference determined in anyway by alphabetical order? Given that - as Nick Le Cornu has demonstrated by anecdotal evidence - there is a "push" to use all four votes, when electors have "spare" votes, especially from first time voters there may be a tendency to give the spares to those at the top of the list.

This very much like the phenomena in Australia termed "donkey voting", and is most often seen as a result of ignorance - the voter does not understand the voting system. It is more likely to occur in Proportional Representation systems, but can also occur where there is more than one candidate to vote for (so the election is not a straightforward First Past the Post). Votes who are confused either assign votes at random, or pick the names at the top. Chance favours those at the top. So perhaps the names should be listed - not in alphabetical order - but in a random order.

Perception influences voting, which is why the extremely selective reporting of the Hustings by the JEP may influence voters considerably more than the Hustings themselves, a phenomena I have noted before, especially when candidates see good feedback from hustings, and wonder why that doesn't translate into votes - the reason is the bias in the reporting. Philip Bailhache has received more press coverage than the other candidates, and better priority in being pictured or mentioned on front pages.

BBC Radio Jersey, in getting Frank Walker on to talk for an hour, with repeat quotations from that later in other shows, while he mentioned no names, nevertheless painted a picture of the kind of candidates he would like to see get in and those he would not ("wreckers"), and his letter in the JEP endorsing Freddie Cohen will undoubtedly have linked this in the minds of readers and listeners. So far the BBC have shown no sign of balance by getting in someone like Daniel Wimberley to talk for an hour.

The dominant narrative of the election is not so much policies, although those do count, but telling a story of a States Assembly that is "destructive", with people on the sidelines, outside of the Council of Ministers, causing trouble, making over long debates, asking endless questions, etc. That is the picture that is being drawn, and presented as accurate. It is, however, propaganda, not history.

There are many failures - and to name a few - the fiasco of the hedging of the euro (brought by the rush of Terry Le Sueur to sign the contract), the failure of housing to maintain properties (with Terry Le Main in charge for years doing nothing in funding maintenance), the failure of the Treasury Minister over Lime Grove, and the sheer neglect to consider terms of contract so that Senior Civil servants could walk away with thousands of pounds when they decided of their own volition to resign ahead of the end of their contracts, and the requirement of a costly hospital administrator brought in from the UK on a contract to sort out the mess there (although how that could be with James Le Feuvre in charge is ponderable!). We also have the record of Terry Le Sueur often saying one thing ("building a wider consensus") and doing nothing or the opposite.

The dominant narrative ignores or glosses over these failures; it's a version of history that ignores the mistakes made. In a party system of elections, a government that has just taken office can blame mistakes on its predecessor. But in Jersey, in the absence of parties, the only way to do this is to move to a different position, and for the incoming incumbent to gloss over the errors they inherit.

The dominant narrative calls critical history into question - raking over old coals, going over the same old ground, Groundhog day, and so on, and mocking anyone who wants to scrutinise that past. The results is that the past is another country, and we must move on - in case, of course, we look back in anger and see the catalogue of errors.

This can be seen in the trajectory of the Treasury Minister, whose deficiencies in the £22,000 saga of Jodie Marsh as Economic Development Minister was highlighted by the Auditor-General - "A failure by the Minister to ensure that the terms on which he offered further grants had been discussed with the Department's officials and that they were then properly recorded, defined and applied." " I understand that decision to make the payment was made by Senator Philip Ozouf, the Minister, without previously seeking the Department's advice.". Of course, Senator Ozouf moved on to become Treasury Minister, and the past was buried.

In 2010, Senator Ozouf employed temporary Treasurer of the States Hugh McGarel-Groves on the grounds that he was needed to sort out problems. But if the problems had been there under Terry Le Sueur's watch, why did he do nothing about it? Again, the trajectory of moving from one position to another meant that any problems which Senator Le Sueur had not tackled were forgotten!

Dominant narratives are well known to students of history, and the Bible, especially the Old Testament, can be seen as a conflation of at least 5 dominant narratives, all vying for their version of events.

Anyhow, my "guestimation" on how well they may do - is built up from three "slates"...

This is NOT a recommendation, just a prediction.

If you wanted an "establishment slate...", you might well vote for

1. BAILHACHE, Philip Martin (Philip Bailhache)
2. COHEN, Frederick Ellyer (Freddie Cohen)
3. FARNHAM, Lyndon John
4. GORST, Ian Joseph

Outsider "split" votes to
RICHARDSON, David Raulin Tanqueray (David R.T. Richardson)
COLLEY, Rose Edith

I imagine this will be the rural vote, except perhaps in St Ouen, where Mark Forskitt has his heartland and may make some inroads.

If you wanted a "progressive slate..."

1. GORST, Ian Joseph
2. LE GRESLEY, Francis du Heaume
3. COLLEY, Rose Edith
4. FORSKITT, Mark Bruce

Outsider "split" votes to
CORBY, Linda Daphne Irene Gay (Linda Corby)
SYVRET, Stuart

I suspect this will be the urban vote.

If you wanted a more "maverick slate..."

1. SYVRET, Stuart
2. CORBY, Linda Daphne Irene Gay (Linda Corby)
3. WHITWORTH, Christopher Paul (Chris Whitworth
4. LAGADU, Sylvia

Outsider "split" votes to
PEARCE, Darius James
FORSKITT, Mark Bruce

I suspect this will also be the urban vote.

On the assumption that votes will be split, the "maverick slate", although not commanding as many votes as the others, will split votes off the "progressive slate", and there are more possible outsiders in each camp.

The "outsider votes" will tend to remove candidates in places 3 and 4. Some people may come across as appealing to more than one camps.

Note that I am not saying that they are actually "establishment" or "progressive" or "maverick", but simply how they may be perceived by portions of the electorate - see the notes on "perception" and the "dominant narrative" above.

It is also well known that if the turnout is lower, this usually favours the establishment camp, as the curve of voter turnout parallels those of education and income.

There is another factor, that of "pivotal status", which is also - again a matter of perception - if it is perceived - perhaps from reading the JEP's printing of odds by "Honest Nev" that a preferred candidate will do very badly, then the voter may well decide not to vote for them after all. If they think their candidate stands a reasonable chance, and their vote may well be pivotal, then they will turn out. The "cost" of voting determines whether a voter will turn out, and that is related to how they perceive the margins of victory.

This has been dealt with in a paper called "Victory margins and the paradox of voting" by Micael Catanheira, but it involves some extremely complex and abstruse mathematics involving Bayesian Nash Equilibria, which I am not going to inflict on the reader!

My final guestimation:

1. GORST, Ian Joseph
2. LE GRESLEY, Francis du Heaume

Then for the next places, any two of:

BAILHACHE, Philip Martin (Philip Bailhache)
COHEN, Frederick Ellyer (Freddie Cohen)
COLLEY, Rose Edith
FORSKITT, Mark Bruce
FARNHAM, Lyndon John

and with perhaps more chance of the first two, but place 4 will be very close indeed

and in the middle ranks

SYVRET, Stuart
CORBY, Linda Daphne Irene Gay (Linda Corby)

RICHARDSON, David Raulin Tanqueray (David R.T. Richardson)

and at the bottom of the heap:

WHITWORTH, Christopher Paul (Chris Whitworth
PEARCE, Darius James
LAGADU, Sylvia

Whitworth will do badly because of the silly faces on the vote.je site and elsewhere that he's been pulling, and the ridiculous stunt with the cut-out. Pearce will do badly because of his bizarre ideas of polling the voter every time he wants to do something, and Lagadu will do badly simply because she's probably a very nice person, but no one has ever heard much of her before.