Talk:Results of the 2019 Canadian federal election

Consistency vs Practicality
So, after looking at this page, I see that some of the prose on here is identical to the prose on the 2019 Canadian federal election page. The prose was added there by consensus when we wanted to put that page in the In the News section of Wikipedia. I'm also planning on adding an analysis section and election aftermath section to the 2019 Canadian federal election page. In fact, some of the prose in the results section can fit in the former. And the latter needs to be added due to some ramifications the election has had already. We've also had an election aftermath section in previous elections, so that will probably need to be added anyways.

To continue, I was looking at other elections for other countries like the UK 2017 general election and I saw that it separated prose and and tables. However, in the past for Canadian elections the prose was in a separate article like this one (the Results page). But, that doesn't seem practical to me. So, I was wondering if we should separate the prose and the tables. The prose/analysis should be on the 2019 Canadian election page since we already reached consensus that there should be prose there and the tables should be on this page. If we don't solve it, we'll have two repetitive pages. A preview of what I am proposing can be seen when we look at the UK pages : Results_breakdown_of_the_2017_United_Kingdom_general_election Results_of_the_2017_United_Kingdom_general_election ''Edit: I need to add that I'm in favor of keeping simple tables on the main page but moving the more detailed stuff here. ''

It's a question of consistency vs practicality. Although, if we do the changes that I propose, we can simply go back to previous Canadian elections and make the changes there as well. -- MikkelJSmith (talk) 15:04, 29 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Fair points. I personally think a short bit of context is always useful in understanding the tables that follow, but that is a matter of taste. I've noticed, though, that the types of tables have seemed to grow over the course of the past few elections, and seem to overpower the entire thrust of articles such as 2019 Canadian federal election. A results article like this is useful work to try to make sense of it all, unless consensus is reached as to what the entire framework of the main article should be. I like 2017 United Kingdom general election as a general template for summarizing what went on.
 * I do like one idea that User:MikkelJSmith has raised, in that Results of the 2017 United Kingdom general election appears to be a great template for revising Results of the 2019 Canadian federal election by riding. It would take a huge amount of work, but would result in a much more revealing presentation.Raellerby (talk) 16:03, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree that we have a lot of tables in the main article. My suggestion is to keep the basic results there but move some of the more detailed stuff here. -- MikkelJSmith (talk) 16:47, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * What do you think User:Raellerby? I'll also tag Ahunt who is a veteran when it comes to Canadian election pages. MikkelJSmith (talk) 22:39, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Be WP:BOLD and do it the way you think best and then see if anyone changes it. If so follow: WP:BRD. - Ahunt (talk) 23:01, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks Ahunt. It's weird that I didn't do that though, since WP:BOLD is usually my MO. - MikkelJSmith (talk) 23:49, 29 October 2019 (UTC)
 * User:MikkelJSmith WP:BOLD works for me. I'm also waiting for all the maps to come out outlining the individual party results by riding. At that point, this article will really take shape, with appropriate prose.Raellerby (talk) 19:08, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I still feel most of the prose should be on the main page though, same thing goes for written analysis. But, the lead and the intro, we have here is good. I'll probably have to move some of the strategic voting to the main page, due to duplication though. That doesn't mean we won't have anything written here btw, some stuff needs to stay. We'll probably get into the specifics when the analysis and aftermath section are actually written on the main page though. Right now, it's a bit hard to have that discussion. Also, can you send me the guidelines concerning opinion pieces? I'm not familiar with them. - MikkelJSmith (talk) 21:58, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Opinion pieces are OK, as long as they fall within WP:RS.Raellerby (talk) 11:19, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Master table for riding results
I'm starting work on a consolidated table of riding results, much like what is seen over at Results of the 2017 United Kingdom general election. So far, the Alberta part of it has been set up and looks like this:

Being fully sortable, it promises to provide lots of opportunity to analyze all results at the riding level, once all 338 are in place. When I finish it, should I insert it in full, or default to autocollapse to save space on the screen? Your comments are appreciated.Raellerby (talk) 13:15, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
 * While I like it, I think it's a better discussion for the talk page on the results by riding page. - MikkelJSmith (talk) 12:11, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
 * But, in hindsight, I now prefer what they have on the results by riding by page. Sorry for not saying so sooner. - MikkelJSmith (talk) 16:36, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
 * MikkelJSmith I never meant to displace that work, but it does tend to dwell on the region-by-region breakdown and the emphasis on candidates thus creating a great deal of noise in the analysis. The UK-style focuses on the national results of the major parties all at one go. I've decided to add an extra column onto the table I'm working on to display percentage margins of victory, so that readers can easily determine the safest and most marginal seats across the country, as that data has always been difficult to obtain at a glance. The table will be going into this article.Raellerby (talk) 21:17, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Would it count as duplication though? Btw, in case you didn't notice, due to my idiocy I lost my previous account. - MikkelJSmith2 (talk) 15:02, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't think it would be duplication, as it would be a great aid for anyone to be able to easily download for further analysis offline.Raellerby (talk) 17:00, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Here's the table, as far as Alberta goes:

There's an awful lot more data at a glance on hand than what's available elsewhere. I'm moving forward to get all 338 ridings done.Raellerby (talk) 19:10, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

problems with swing analysis
The new swing analysis has problems. First, if the heading is lost, then negative values imply gains, not losses. Second, if you're going to display negatives, we use an en-dash (–) not a hyphen (-). That applies to the change column as well. Walter Görlitz (talk) 01:42, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I was not aware of anything prescribing en-dashes for that purpose. My apologies.Raellerby (talk) 03:10, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Have read MOS:DASH? Walter Görlitz (talk) 06:22, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * MOS:DASH has nothing to say about that. However, MOS:COMMONMATH prescribes the use of the minus sign, inserted by way of Unicode character U+2212, directly typing, or inserting Alt+8722 (minus sign) using the numeric keypad (as explained under WP:HTMD). This is very nice to know.Raellerby (talk) 22:48, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Ah, but still not a hyphen. Walter Görlitz (talk) 01:58, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
 * ,, thanks for the info. I didn't know that. I used a hyphen previously. MikkelJSmith (talk) 21:10, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Vote totals in article are incorrect
The official voting results from Elections Canada have a number of discrepancies with the current version of this Wikipedia article. For example, our article says the Green Party received 1,162,361 votes while Elections Canada lists the Green Party total as 1,189,607. Mathew5000 (talk) 10:26, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

I noticed a similar discrepancy. Our provincial vote tables copy Elections Canada's provincial vote tables, which still don't show 100% reporting. When compared to Table 12 on the EC website, there are more total votes provincially(at least for Manitoba) and federally than their summary tables, which suggests to me that Table 12 represents 100% reporting - or at least closer to that than EC's summary tables. If I use a computer to calculate provincial vote share from Table 12 would that be considered original research? Jethro 82 (talk) 22:01, 8 May 2020 (UTC)


 * I think you may be mistaken, or else I don't understand what you mean. The figures now on the EC website for the 2019 general election are the final figures, and they do reflect 100% reporting. At this point, there are no more votes still to count! Elections Canada has completed all the reports for the 2019 election and posted the final counts. When you refer to Table 12, are you looking at the HTML version or the "raw data" CSV version ? The HTML version of table 12 is unwieldy to work with, so I'll look at the CSV version. You mentioned that there are more votes in Manitoba in table 12 than in the summary tables, but I don't see that. I loaded table 12 into my spreadsheet (Apache OpenOffice Calc) and all the candidates for Manitoba appear in rows 1487 to 1571 inclusive.  The votes received by each candidate are in column G. So I go to an empty cell and enter =SUM(G1487:G1571) to get the total valid votes in all districts in Manitoba and it gives me 592239. That's exactly the same as the total listed for Manitoba in the summary table (Table 8 HTML version Table 8 CSV version). That figure, namely 592,239, also appears in Table 3 under the column Valid Ballots. So again, I'm not sure what you mean by a discrepancy on the Elections Canada website. If I am overlooking something, please let me know what it is. I believe the issue is, that some or all of the figures in the current version of the article  are based on the preliminary figures that appeared on the Elections Canada website last year, and the Wikipedia article was never updated to the final figures that are now on the Elections Canada website. (The same thing might be true of two other articles, 2019 Canadian federal election and Results of the 2019 Canadian federal election by riding.) Of course, for the vast majority of ridings, the preliminary totals are exactly the same as the final totals, meaning it can be difficult to verify that we are using the final totals without checking every single figure. Mathew5000 (talk) 03:26, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * , I am confused too, since I thought EC now had the final figures, which is why turnout is no longer the same on the 2019 Canadian federal election page. MikkelJSmith (talk) 18:40, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Sorry.. The table "Distribution of seats and popular vote %, by party by province/territory (2019)" was the only wikipedia table I was looking at. It matches exactly the data found at https://enr.elections.ca/National.aspx?lang=e and https://enr.elections.ca/Provinces.aspx?lang=e. This data mostly has reporting rates of between 99 and 100% on Elections Canada's website. While this is not generally a big deal, the data is off by more than a tenth of a percentage point here and there with the tallies a computer program I wrote to help forecast elections that uses date from table 12 as it's baseline. At first I thought I had got it wrong, so I had my computer program spit out the total votes it was using for the various regions(it lumps the east coast in as a single polling region), compared this data to the enr part of the website and my tallies were all higher(with the enr website having reporting of less than 100%). I took one of the two fourteen seat provinces, summed up the table rows and got the same tally that both you and my program did. which is why I think the numbers in "Distribution of seats and popular vote %, by party by province/territory (2019)" are off. Jethro 82 (talk) 19:53, 14 May 2020 (UTC)


 * You mention that you have been looking at web pages on the domain enr.elections.ca. You should not be using those pages! The "enr" stands for "election night results". But the election was seven months ago; those results from election night are outdated. On those web pages there are headings in bold: "Preliminary Results". For an encyclopedia, we don't want to reference these preliminary results, they are irrelevant. We should be referring only to the "official voting results" (ovr), not the "election night results" (enr). The official voting results for the 2019 general election are here: https://www.elections.ca/res/rep/off/ovr2019app/home.html and for prior elections, the link to start from is here: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=ele&document=index&lang=e    Mathew5000 (talk) 21:41, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Turnout percentages
Some comments about turnout. I will use Manitoba as an example.
 * (1) Per Elections Canada, table 3, the correct final figures for turnout are: Manitoba 595,998 ÷ 927,347 = 64.27% ; Canada 18,350,359 ÷ 27,373,058 = 67.04%.
 * (2) Wikipedia article Results of the 2019 Canadian federal election has a table labelled "Results in Manitoba (2019 vs 2015)" which incorrectly gives turnout for the 2019 election as 63.8% in Manitoba. This article does not give a Canada-wide turnout figure.
 * (3) The section "Synopsis of results" has numerous data points for turnout that don't match the final results. For example, the table lists turnout in the district Elmwood—Transcona as 62.8% while Elections Canada gives 62.3%. Actually I don't understand this at all because in that table the "Total" column matches the "Valid Ballots" column in Elections Canada's Table 11 for all the Manitoba districts, but the "Turnout" column in the Wikipedia table is different from table 11. There is a note (a 2) in the heading of the Turnout column saying "including spoilt ballots", and maybe that has something to do with Wikipedia's erroneous turnout data? (In any event, the terminology "spoiled ballot" means something different in the context of Canadian federal elections than it means in other jurisdictions, so it would be better to use the term "rejected ballot" if that's what is meant, rather than "spoilt ballot".)
 * (4) Wikipedia article 2019 Canadian federal election was edited last week so as to change the turnout figure in the infobox. But the original reference (to a CBC News piece from 2019-10-25) was unaltered! So now the infobox contains a fact that fails verification.
 * (5) That Wikipedia article, under the heading "Full Results", lists a turnout figure of 67.03%.  I'm not sure why the number 67.03803% was rounded down to 67.03% instead of being stated as 67.04% or 67.0%.
 * (6) The Wikipedia article Voter turnout in Canada gives a figure of 65.95% for the 2019 election, rather than the correct final figure of 67.04%. The figures there for the 2015 election are also different from the final figures on Elections Canada's website. Not sure about previous years in that table.

Mathew5000 (talk) 21:50, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Use of Infobox legislative election
Infobox legislative election is used on the 2015, 2011 and 2008 pages, using it is consistent with them. WanukeX (talk) 16:05, 3 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Sorry. I was thinking of the main page, which has a different template. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 16:13, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Results by riding - 2019 Canadian federal election table
An anon pointed out an error in the Berthier—Maskinongé entry. Did somebody use the preliminary numbers for the table instead of the validated ones? G. Timothy Walton (talk) 23:47, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I composed it sometime after the election was finalized, and did a "copy and paste" directly from the Elections Canada site. If there is indeed a difference, it must have been adjusted after that date.Raellerby (talk) 23:59, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay. Thanks. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 00:29, 25 September 2021 (UTC)