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?