Spanish Election Results

The results will start coming in in about an hour.

The Guardian will be tracking them as they come in on this site. It defaults to the 2008 election, so you have to navigate to the 2011 results.

Hopefully they will include the votes for the Spanish Pirate Party and Catalonian Pirate Party.

A 44% Absolute Majority & the NZ Referendum

And the results are now in! Spain now joins Scotland in the club of countries which call 44% an absolute majority. In May, the Scottish National Party won 53.5% of the seats in the Scottish parliament with 44.0% of the vote, and now the Spanish People's Party won 53.1% of the seats in the Spanish Congress of Deputies with 44.6% of the vote.

Somewhat surprisingly, and relevant to the Voting System Referendum in NZ this Saturday, both Scotland and Spain have supposedly proportional voting systems. Scotland uses MMP, and Spain uses Party List Proportional, which is what the list seats will be under SM as proposed in the referendum.

Why do these two countries' voting systems, despite being proportional systems, give disproportional results? One word. Regions. New Zealand would fall into the same trap with STV (though it would still be better than SM, PV, FPP). One lesson to draw from this though is that, once the referendum is over, there will still be much to be decided about the voting system in the next 3 years. The journey doesn't end on Saturday, there will still be lobbying and submissions on the little details for years to come. "Little details", as we see in Scotland and Spain, make big differences.

Pirate Parties in the Spanish Election

More importantly however, we now have data on the plight of the Spanish and Catalonian Pirate Parties... or should that be the Catalonian and Spanish Pirate Parties.

Pirates of Catalonia (0.63%)

The Pirate Party of Catalonia (PPCat) did very well. Not by Swedish or German standards, where Pirate Party candidates have actually been elected, but among the other ~38 Pirate Parties, a result like the 0.63% PPCat got is considered a good result. This equates to 0.09% of all votes in Spain.

PPCat has only been around for just over a year - only 3 months longer than New Zealand's own Pirate Party - and the number I have heard in Pirate circles is that a typical result for a Pirate Party in their first General Election is 0.2%. PPCat did contest a State election last November, where they got 0.21%, and local council elections in May, where they got results between 0.77% and 1.19%, but general elections are always harder, and voters are normally less willing to risk "wasting" their vote on a Party that is unlikely to get elected, so Pirate Parties normally poll lower in National elections than in Local, State and European Union elections.

The Pirate Party of Spain (0.41%)

The Spanish Pirate Party (PPEs) didn't do quite as well. If you count all votes in Spain, they only got 0.016%, however they did not contest the vote in every Region or Province. Their best Region was Navarra, where they got 52.6% of all the votes cast for PPEs anywhere in Spain, which amounts to 0.54%. This is also a respectable result, though PPEs has been around since 2006 - much longer than PPCat.

PPEs only ran in 4 Provinces: Navarre, Huesca, Teruel, Castellon. (this is out of 46 in Spain excluding Catalonia). All of them are in the North East and 3 of them border Catalonia. The results in each Province ranged from 0.28% to 0.54%. They only contested the vote in 3.39% of Spain (measured by votes), which is 3.95% of Spain excluding Catalonia. Of this, they got 0.41%. That's not a bad percentage, but it's a shame they didn't contest more Provinces. For comparison, Catalonia is 14.23% of Spain, 4.2 times more than the area PPEs contested the vote in.

If you average PPEs and PPCat together, they got 0.104% of all votes, and 0.59% of the votes they contested. If they got the same average over the rest of the country, and the Spanish parliament was perfectly proportional, PPEs/PPCat would get 2 seats between them.

Senate Elections (0.98%)

Parallel to the above election, Spain also held elections to its Senate. The Senate election uses a slightly peculiar system - each Province elects 4 Senators, but voters have 3 votes and each Party can only stand 3 Candidates. The results can't be compared to elections in other countries, but they are still interesting.

PPCat's candidates in Barcelona all got more votes than the Party's share in the Parliamentary election - 1.18%, 0.92%, 0.75%. In Total, PPCat Candidates received 0.96% of the votes in Barcelona, which I guess is the figure you would use if you wanted to compare anything. In the 3 other Provinces in Catalonia, they only stood 1 Candidate. Of these, the best result was 1.51% and the lowest was 1.12%. If you consider that PPCat is only contesting 1 vote per voter in these provinces, the total number of Senate votes PPCat got in all Catalonia was 1.00% of the total votes they contested. (with less rounding, it comes just under 1%: 0.9969%. It would have taken another 85 people to vote for 3 PPCat Candidates to cross the 1% mark)

One PPEs Candidate that I can tell so far also broke the 1% milestone in Navarra, with 1.05%. Out of all the votes contested by 3 PPEs Candidates in Navarre and Castello, they got 0.86%. Averaging PPEs and PPCat together, Spanish Pirate Parties won 0.98% of all Senate votes they contested. With 208 directly elected Senate seats, this is the same proportion as 2 seats out of all Spain.