After every elec­tion there are geo­graph­ic­al ana­lyses of vot­ing pat­terns, inev­it­ably fol­lowed by sug­ges­tions that cer­tain regions should secede and form their own coun­try. Such ana­lyses are often at elect­or­ate level, but there’s a lot of fine detail below that, and a cell of social­ist insur­gents might live just around the corner from an enclave of con­ser­vat­ive cur­mudgeons. So I made the fol­low­ing map of Wel­ling­ton vot­ing tend­en­cies at a booth-by-booth level.

Welllington detailed voting patterns

For ana­lys­is, explan­a­tions, notes on meth­od­o­logy and a whizzy inter­act­ive Google Maps mashup of the whole region, read the full story.

Each blob rep­res­ents a polling place, and the col­our rep­res­ents the pro­por­tion that voted for either left wing (shades of red) or right wing (shades of blue) parties. The full Google Map allows you to zoom in and see the full detail, but you should be aware of a few lim­it­a­tions. First, the blobs are dis­placed slightly to the north of the actu­al loc­a­tion, though it gets more accur­ate as you zoom in (this is due to a “fea­ture” of the Google My Maps cus­tom icons, which off­sets the images). Secondly, some of the loc­a­tions are fairly approx­im­ate (since I had to manu­ally place them on the map, and not all had full addresses), though giv­en that voters don’t always vote in their imme­di­ate neigh­bour­hood that should­n’t be too much of a prob­lem. Finally, My Maps only allows a cer­tain num­ber of mark­ers on a single map, so the booths in the far north (e.g. Kapiti) and north­east (e.g. Upper Hutt) of the region are on a sep­ar­ate page.

I down­loaded the detailed data from the offic­al Elec­tions web­site, then aggreg­ated the votes by polling place. I only looked at party votes in gen­er­al elect­or­ates, and to pro­duce a simple “left-right index” I added the votes up into two blocs, based upon pre-elec­tion sug­ges­tions of pos­sible coali­tions:

Blue bloc = Nation­al + Act + United Future
Red bloc = Labour + Green + Pro­gress­ive

I decided to omit NZF and the Maori Party, mostly because they were not expli­citly going to coalesce with the main parties, and all the oth­er minor parties because they did­n’t reach the threshold. Then the for­mula for the per­cent­age cal­cu­la­tion was:

Lefti­ness = Red / (Red + Blue)

In oth­er words, of those vot­ing for the two main likely coali­tions, what per­cent­age voted for centre left rather than centre right?

It cer­tainly seems that the Wel­ling­ton CBD, Aro Val­ley and inner sub­urbs voted left, but it’s not all about hip­pies and the trendy urb­an lib­er­al elite. The tra­di­tion­al Labour heart­land of work­ing class, Maori and immig­rant neigh­bour­hoods also stayed staunch, with sev­er­al booths in Can­nons Creek vot­ing for the left by over 90%. The afflu­ent neigh­bour­hoods (Ori­ent­al Bay, Khan­dal­lah and Seatoun) kept to their blue-blood roots, but there’s also plenty of blue in the Hutt Val­ley and parts of Tawa: is that the “Joe the Plumb­er” vote? The only booth to vote more than 75% for the right was in Whitby.

So, what happened at your polling booth?