[EM] IRV in action

[James Gilmour]

For an example of a real IRV election see
http://www.parliament.uk/
and select the link for Hereditary Peers By-Election.
It is a PDF file (27 KB) so you may want to "Save target as ..".

There were 81 candidates, of whom 44 received one or more first preference votes.
There were 423 valid votes.  The count went through 42 stages, right to the wire
for the decision between the last two.  Interestingly, there were no
non-transferable papers until the 18th stage and the number of non-transferable
papers did not rise significantly until stage 40.

Ullswater, the IRV winner, received the greatest number of first preference votes:
86 (20%).  So he would have been the FPTP winner.  But the runner-up did not
receive the second greatest number of first preferences - he was third and didn't
pick up any transfers until the 25th stage.

James