Canadian election results

So the election results are in. Of the 308 parliament seats at stake, the Conservatives won the largest number, 124, so they will form a minority government. How do the seat counts compare with the popular vote? Well the two leading parties won a somewhat larger share of the seats than their share of the vote. The Conservatives won 40.3% of the seats with 36.3% of the vote, while the Liberals won 33.4% of the seats with 30.2% of the vote. On the other hand, the NDP got just 9.4% of the seats even though they had 17.5% of the vote. The Bloc Québécois benefited the most from our first-past-the-post system, winning 16.6% of the seats with just 10.5% of the votes. And the Green Party won no seats at all, even though they got 4.5% of the vote!

I haven't looked at the breakdown of popular vote here in the province of Ontario, but here's a barchart from today's issue of the newspaper Dose. Although the title suggests that it shows popular vote, it actually shows the number of ridings in which each party was leading or elected at press time (presumably late last night). In addition to the poorly-chosen title, the graph is a disaster. Although the count for "Other" is 0, the bar looks like it has a height of 1. There's the usual unnecessary 3D effect. But one of the worst aspects is the way the party names have been placed in shaded bars underneath the bars themselves! One's eye tends to stack each data bar with its title bar, so the visual effect distorts the numbers. Sheesh!