The Labour website has published the full preference ballot for all Members of the House of Commons and the European Parliament. They also published the primary vote results for each local branch of the party and each affiliated organisation.

After extensive analysis, you find that the result does not vary wildly across the country. On primary votes, David Milliband won the most votes in 546 constituencies, Ed Milliband in 73, Andy Burnham in 11, and Ed Balls in only two. Diane Abbott won the most votes in no constituency. In contrast, all four other candidates won in their own constituency. Using an estimate of preference flows to calculate a “Two Milliband Preferred” figure, you end up with David winning 467 constituencies and Ed winning 166 constituencies, showing a very consistent result, considering David only won 54.4% of the result nationally.

When you examine constituencies according to which party won each seat at the 2010 general election, you find some interesting trends. David Milliband won just under 55% in both Labour and Conservative constituencies, but only won 51.5% in Liberal Democrat constituencies. It’s worth noting that, despite Labour winning far less than a majority of seats in 2010, 49.9% of Labour members who voted live in Labour constituencies.

When you examine how each individual constituency MP voted, you find a very different picture. Abbott received the vote of 7 MPs, Balls 40, Burnham 23, David Milliband 105, and Ed Milliband 78. Four MPs did not vote: former leader Gordon Brown, acting leader Harriet Harman, chief whip Nick Brown, and party chairman Tony Lloyd.

In addition, thirteen Labour Members of the European Parliament also voted. 6 voted for David, 6 voted for Ed Milliband, and one voted for Andy Burnham, giving a second preference to Ed Milliband.

Amongst MPs, the two-candidate preferred vote broke down as 134 for David Milliband, 115 for Ed Milliband, and 4 that exhausted. Those four exhausted votes included the votes of leadership candidates Diane Abbott and Ed Balls, Balls’ wife Yvette Cooper, and prominent left-winger John McDonnell, who originally planned to run before dropping out and endorsing Abbott.

You can also break down the vote amongst MPs by gender. Amongst women, who make up about a third of the voting bloc, Ed Milliband performs much more strongly and Andy Burnham much worse. On a two-candidate basis, David wins 55.5% amongst men, and Ed wins 51.8% amongst women.

I have also broken down the results by the nine regions of England, as well as Scotland and Wales. In most regions, David Milliband wins a slim majority on preferences, amongst both MPs and party members. It’s worth noting that in a number of regions there are a really small number of Labour MPs. In the East of England, Labour only holds the two seats in Luton. They only hold four seats each in South East England and South West England.

There are few exceptions. Out of Burnham’s 24 MP votes, half of those are in the North West, where he won more MP votes than Ed Milliband. He also polled over 19% amongst members in that region, despite not getting over 10% in any other part of the country. Burnham holds a seat in Greater Manchester, so it’s not at all surprising.

In the West Midlands, Ed Balls won the votes of 8 MPs, to nine for David Milliband and seven for Ed Milliband. This isn’t due to any local link: Balls and his wife hold seats in West Yorkshire. Neither did he perform particularly well amongst party members in that region.

Ed Milliband won a majority of MP votes in Wales and Yorkshire. In 168 constituencies, the Labour MP cast their primary vote the same way as the plurality of their constituency, but in 81 their paths diverged.

Below the fold are a bunch of maps I have made showing this geographical distribution:

David Milliband is marked in blue, Ed Milliband in red, Andy Burnham in green, Ed Balls in yellow and Diane Abbott in purple.

Two-candidate vote by constituency branch. Click to enlarge.

Primary vote for each MP. Click to enlarge.

Final preference vote (David vs Ed) for each MP. Click to enlarge.

Two-candidate vote by constituency branch.

Primary vote by MP around Manchester and Liverpool.

Final preference vote by MP in London.

The UK Labour Party elects its leader using an electoral college where votes are weighted, with one third of votes going to MPs and MEPs, one third to members of Constituency Labour Parties, and one third to members of affiliated organisations (mainly being unions).

The primary results had David Milliband leading with 37% to his younger brother Ed Milliband on 34%. After three rounds of elimination the final two-party result of 50.65% for Ed Milliband.

Amongst MPs and MEPs, David won 140 to Ed’s 122 in the final round. David also won 54.4% amongst Labour Party members. Ed overcame this deficit with 59.8% of the  vote amongst union members.

The result is a challenge for the party. The Labour electoral system pretty much prevents the loser in a close contest to challenge again, as you would expect in Australia (as happened with Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull, and many earlier leadership contests). Having said that, the younger Milliband ran on a platform of rejecting New Labour, and managed to win only with the support of union members, with slim majorities of MPs and party members going for David. This will make him vulnerable to attacks from the Conservatives as a puppet of the unions, although it is worth noting that the union vote comes from individual members (with 211,000 voting) rather than from union leadership.

The UK Labour website provides a remarkable level of detail on the result, which I hope to analyse for another post tomorrow. They include primary vote breakdowns for each Constituency Labour Party and for each affiliated organisation, and the entire preference flow for every MP.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown resigned, both as Labour leader and as Prime Minister, on 11 May, six days after the general election produced a hung parliament, leading to a coalition of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

Under Labour Party rules, the Leader and Deputy Leader of the party are elected by a vote of three groups of people, with their votes weighted such that each group makes up one third of the votes counted:

• Labour members of the House of Commons and European Parliament
• Individual members of the Labour Party
• Individual members of affiliated organisations (mainly trade unions)

Votes are counted using preferential voting. In 2010, voting will close today, September 22, with the result announced at the Labour conference on Saturday September 25.

It’s important to stress how different this is to how all political parties in Australia elect their leaders. Under this system, which was introduced in 1993 and used to elect Tony Blair in 1994 and Gordon Brown in 2007, grassroots members of both the party and affiliated organisations become much more significant, although the one third of the vote cast by Members of Parliament is nothing to sneeze at.

At the leadership election in 1994, Blair was easily elected, winning over 50% in every category, although that varied from 52% of party members to 60% of MPs. In 2007, Brown was elected unopposed.

The only close election conducted under this system was the party’s deputy leadership election in 2007. None of the six candidates gained more than 20% of the vote in the first round, with the three voting groups leaning towards different candidates. After a series of eliminations, Harriet Harman narrowly defeated Alan Johnson. Johnson won a majority amongst affiliated organisations and MPs, but lost due to Harman winning a larger majority amongst party members.

There are five candidates standing in 2010. Former Foreign Secretary David Milliband; former Climate Change Secretary Ed Milliband; former Education Secretary Ed Balls, former Health Secretary Andy Burnham; and London MP Diane Abbott.

Each candidate was required to receive 33 nominations from Members of Parliament. Left-winger John McDonnell originally made an attempt at achieving  this number, before withdrawing and endorsing Abbott. David Milliband, who was nominated by many more than 33 MPs, “loaned” some of his nominators to Abbott to get her over the line.

Four of the five candidates are strikingly similar, while the fifth stands out. Abbott is a member of the party’s left and held no ministerial office in the Blair/Brown Government. She is the only woman and the only candidate from an ethnic minority standing. She has been a Member of Parliament since 1987, while none of the other candidates was elected to Parliament before the turn of the decade.

The leading candidates are the brothers Milliband. David, the older brother, was elected to Parliament in 2001 and was previously a senior advisor to Tony Blair. Ed was elected to Parliament in 2005 after serving as an advisor to Gordon Brown.

Ed Balls was an advisor to Gordon Brown in opposition and the early years of government, going on to serve as chief economic advisor at the Treasury before being elected to Parliament in 2005. He went on to serve in the Brown Cabinet, alongside his wife Yvette Cooper, who has been a member of Parliament since 1997. Cooper was considered a possible candidate for the leadership, but withdraw in favour of her husband.

Andy Burnham has been an MP since 2001, and served as Health Secretary from 2009 to 2010, and a number of other roles before that.

Limited opinion polling has shown that, on primary votes, the Milliband brothers stand out ahead of the rest of the field, a September poll showed Ed Milliband slightly ahead, although David was winning a slim majority amongst MPs. Their campaigns have drawn a sharp distinction in terms of the direction of the Labour Party. David Milliband has emphasised the need to win back the voters lost to the Conservatives by maintaining the centre ground staked out by Tony Blair, while Ed Milliband and his supporters have talked more about winning back those alienated by Tony Blair’s “third way” agenda.

Cameron’s plan involves immediately introducing legislation following an election which would trigger a rapid review of electoral boundaries in England and Wales in order to cut the number of seats by approximately 10%.

Electoral boundary reviews in the past have taken as long as seven years, and the new boundaries being used for the 2010 election are based on registered voter figures from the year 2000. Cameron’s legislation would give only 18 months for a new review.

The Conservatives are arguing that the cut in the size of the Commons, which will have 650 members after this year’s election, is intended to cut the cost of politics, not to achieve electoral gain. While it is probably a good idea to shrink the Commons to less than 600 seats, the costs of those 65 members of Parliament really don’t add up to a lot in the scheme of things.

There is some electoral benefit for the Conservatives in speeding up the process of boundary reviews. Strong Labour areas like the inner cities tend to be depopulating, which means that boundaries drawn using out-of-date data will tend to mean that the number of voters in Labour seats is less than in Conservative seats. Yet this is only a minor issue. The main bias against the Conservatives in the electoral system comes from the geographical distribution of Conservative voters. Labour voters tend to be more ‘effective’, spread efficiently over marginal seats, while Conservative voters are locked up in huge majorities in safe seats. This is the main reason why the Conservatives need to beat Labour by a wide margin to win a majority. No redrawing of the boundaries will fix this: all systems of single-member electorates favours one party over another.

Labour in the UK is crying ‘gerrymander’ over the proposal, although it seems that numerical fairness is on the Conservative side. It seems that the Conservative plan is a good idea, but won’t achieve any of the aims being spun by either side about removing the bias in the electoral system.

In other news, I have just finished the South-East England region in my map of the 1997-2005 electoral boundaries, which I am hoping to finish before the UK election later this year. Maps below the fold.

1997 election.

2001 election.

2005 election.

Voters are now going to the polls to elect a new Member of Parliament in the Glasgow North East constituency in Scotland. Vacated by Speaker Michael Martin in June after he was forced from the Speakership, the seat has seen a fierce contest between the ruling Labour Party and the Scottish National Party, the third such contest since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.

Michael Martin won the former seat of Glasgow Springburn for the first time in 1979 for Labour, and held the seat up until the 2005 election, when a redistribution saw Scotland’s seat numbers reduced and the new seat of Glasgow North East created. Martin was elected Speaker in 2000, when he renounced his Labour membership and ran for re-election in 2001 and 2005 as an independent. In line with convention, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats both declined to run in his seat, although the SNP has bucked that trend.

At first glance, you could argue that recent election results in the seat have little bearing on the real state of political opinion in the seat. However, examining the results from the 1997 election, it’s clear that Martin didn’t need the absence of two major parties in order to win a large margin, winning 71% in 1997. The SNP polled 16% and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats polled 6% and 4% respectively. In 2005 Martin polled 53%, the SNP polled 17% and the Socialist Labour Party 14%, undoubtedly due in part to their being the only party with the name ‘Labour’ on the ballot.

Gordon Brown has had a poor record of winning by-elections in his two years as Prime Minister. Glasgow North East is the fourteenth by-election since the 2005 election, and the ninth since Brown took office in 2007. The Liberal Democrats won the Scottish seat of Dunfermline and West Fife off the Labour Party in February 2006, and Labour lost a further three seats in by-elections in 2008 and 2009.

Alex Salmond, Scottish First Minister and SNP leader, campaigns with SNP candidate David Kerr

The Conservatives won the seat of Crewe and Nantwich in Cheshire in May 2008, before the Scottish National Party won Glasgow East in July 2008.  Glasgow East was one of Labour’s safest seats and came as a shock to the party barely months after the SNP won power in the devolved Scottish Parliament. Yet another fiercely contested Scottish by-election came along in November 2008 in Glenrothes, where there were expectations of yet another SNP win off a large swing. While the SNP did gain ground, Labour managed to retain the seat with a 19% margin. The last by-election in the UK was held in July 2009 in Norwich North, after the sitting Labour MP resigned over the expenses scandal which engulfed Westminster over the northern summer. The seat was won by the Conservatives.

Since their win in the Scottish elections and Glasgow East in 2008, the shine has worn off the Scottish Nationalists, with Labour fighting hard in this by-election. While the SNP should gain ground on Labour, it will be extremely difficult for them to make the gains needed to win the seat.

The fourty constituencies are divided into five regions for Assembly elections. Each region elects four top-up AMs. Three of these regions cover eight constituencies, with one covering seven seats and the other covering nine.

Since these maps are used for two purposes, I have uploaded the maps as two separate files. One includes the Assembly region boundaries and seats coloured according to the 2007 Assembly election, while the other uses notional colours based on the 2005 Westminster election.

Maps over the fold.

Welsh Assembly constituencies and regions, showing 2007 election results.

New Westminster constituency boundaries for England and Wales, showing notional votes based on the 2005 general election.

• Ireland - While Fianna Fail’s vote collapsed and Fine Gael’s vote rose, it didn’t dramatically alter the party’s performances. Each party lost one seat each, while Labour gained two. Sinn Fein lost their sole seat and the Socialist Party’s Joe Higgins was elected. One of the two independents was defeated.
• Northern Ireland – Northern Ireland followed the pattern of electing one MEP from each unionist party and one from the more popular republican party, in this case Sinn Fein. However, in this case Sinn Fein for the first time topped the poll. This was partly due to the majority unionist vote being split three ways, with former DUP MEP Jim Allister running on the Traditonal Unionist Voice ticket.
• Great Britain – Labour’s vote collapsed, losing 7% and coming third on 15.7% behind the Conservatives and the UK Independence Party. UKIP kept its vote steady at just over 16% while gaining an extra seat, while Labour lost 5 of its seats. The Liberal Democrats also suffered a 1.2% swing and lost one of their seats. The Green party gained 2.4% and came close to winning a number of extra seats but ultimately only managed to maintain their two seats. The British National Party managed to elect two MEPs in the North of England. Labour was beaten into second place in Wales for the first time in 91 years, and were also defeated by the Scottish National Party in Scotland. Labour came fifth behind the Conservatives, UKIP, Liberal Democrats and Greens in both South-East and South-West.
• Portugal – The centre-right Social Democratic Party recovered from its massive 2004 defeat, winning 8 seats to the 7 seats won by the centre-left Socialist Party (which had won 12 in 2004). The Left Bloc gained two seats while the other two minor party coalitions maintained their existing two seats.
• Spain – The 2004 election took place shortly after the election of the new Socialist government and the Madrid train bombings, and were a major defeat for the centre-right. This time around, the governing Socialists suffered a 5% swing while the People’s Party gained 1%. Overall, due to the reduction in MEPs, this resulting in the Socialists losing 4 seats and the People’s party losing 1.
• France – The French result was a major victory for Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) who gained an 11.2% swing to poll almost 28%, which gave them four extra seats. The opposition Socialist Party lost 12.4% of its vote, falling to 16.5%, which cut their number of MEPs from 31 to 14. The result was very strong for the Greens-led Europe Écologie, which polled more than double the 2004 Greens vote, winning 16.3%, almost overtaking the Socialists, and winning 14 seats (up from 6 in 2004). The centrist Democratic Movement lost one third of its vote and half its seats in comparison to the former UDF party. The far right National Front suffered similarly, losing 4 of its 7 MEPs. Socialist votes also went to the Left Front, which doubled its MEP contingent (bringing it to 4) and the New Anticapitalist Party, which polled over 4% but did not elect any MEPs.
• Belgium Dutch-speaking – The result saw all five parties that won seats in 2004 lose votes. The centre-right Christian Democrats lost almost 5% of its vote, keeping its 3 seats. The liberal Open Flemish Liberals and Democrats lost 1.35%, but maintained their 3 seats. The far-right Flemish Interest (formerly Flemish Bloc) lost 7.3% of its vote after polling 23% in 2004 and lost one of their 3 seats. The Socialist Party fell to 13.2% with a 4.6% swing, and losing one of their 3 seats. The Greens were the only party to hold up, only losing 0.08% and maintaining a 7.9% vote, and their one seat. The remaining vote flowed to the new centre-right Flanders secessionist New Flemish Alliance (9.9%) and the right-wing List Dedecker, who polled 7.3%.
• Belgium French-speaking – Three of the four main parties in the French-speaking region lost votes, all flowing to the local Greens (called ‘Ecolo’). The Socialist Party lost 7%, falling to 29.1%. The liberal Reformist Movement lost 1.5%, falling to 26%. The centre-right Humanist Democratic Centre lost 1.8%, falling to 13.34%. The far-right National Front’s vote halved from 7.5% to 3.5%. The  Greens gained 13%, polling 22.9% and gaining a second MEP.
• Belgium German-speaking – Like the French-speaking region, the result was good for the Greens and bad for everyone else, with the incumbent Christian Social Party suffering a 10% swing, but they still safely won the sole MEP for the region.
• Luxembourg – The six Luxembourg seats broke down between the parties the same as in 2004, with the Christian Social People’s Party winning 3 seats and the three other main parties winning 1 seat each. However, the centre-right CSVP suffered a 6% swing and the Socialist Workers’ Party lost 3%, while the Greens and Democratic Party both gained votes.
• Netherlands - The Dutch result was strong for left-wing minor parties and the far-right. The far-right Party of Freedom polled almost 17% in their first European campaign, coming second and winning 4 seats. The liberal Democrats 66 went from 4.2% to 11.3%, winning 2 extra seats on top of their existing one. The Greens went from 7.4% to 8.9%, gaining a third seat. The centre-right Christian Democratic Appeal lost 4.4%, polling 20%. The Dutch Labour Party suffered most, falling from 23.6% to 12.2%, losing 4 of their 3 seats. The liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy also lost 1.3% of their votes, and one of their 4 MEPs in the process.