4056 lines of data

[fivemack]

So you don't have to scrape the BBC yourself:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~twomack/2010-results.txt

contains 4056 lines of the form

Chelsea & Fulham } Blue Environment Party } 17

The vote-count is blank for all the parties in Thirsk & Malton since that election hasn't happened yet.

The example script here makes the following list of parties standing in more than twenty places:

Party name	Number of places standing	Deposits saved
Socialist Labour Party	23	0
Monster Raving Loony Party	27	0
Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition	38	0
Plaid Cymru	40	29
Scottish National Party	59	59
Christian Party	71	0
English Democrats	107	1
Independent	250	13
Green	335	7
British National Party	338	72
UK Independence Party	558	99
Conservative	630	627
Labour	631	625
Liberal Democrat	631	630

(for the curious, the English Democrats kept their deposit in Doncaster North; the Liberal Democrats kept all of theirs but I divided by zero in Thirsk; the Conservatives lost theirs in Na H-Eileanan An Iar and Glasgow East; Philip Lardner stood as an independent in Ayrshire North after being deselected from the Conservatives)

Comments

[mooism.livejournal.com]

650 seats in the UK, less 18 for NI gives 632 seats in GB, less one for the speaker leaves 631. Leading to the questions of which other 2 seats didn't have a Lib Dem candidate, which 2 didn't have a Labour candidate, and which 3 didn't have a Tory candidate?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I omitted Aberavon (the list at the bottom of each HTML file, which looked like a list of constituencies, was in fact a list of other constituencies).

And I assumed that every constituency had a three-character code. In fact every constituency except Berwick-Upon-Tweed has a three-letter code, and Berwick has a two-letter code. Bother.

More-correct data (recognisable by having 4069 rather than 4056 lines) now up.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I have 20 seats with no Conservative candidate: Buckingham, eighteen NI seats, and Ayrshire North and Arran (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/constituency/848.stm) where the suspended homophobic candidate Philip Lardner (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/scotland/8647206.stm) stood as an independent.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm sure Lardner would have been listed on the ballot paper as the official Conservative candidate. But that makes sense, thank you.