Sir, - While both Richard Sinnott and Garret FitzGerald paint a fairly rosy picture of cross-community transferring (The Irish Times, June 29th, 30th), I fear much of the optimism is based on a misconception of the Northern Ireland rules for transferring surpluses which is common in observers looking from the Republic.
Contrary to Sinnott's comments, when the papers in a surplus are distributed, non-transferable votes are disregarded in Northern Ireland, just as in the Republic, but as papers in Northern Ireland are reduced in value to "fit" a surplus in NI (rather than taking a random sample as in the Republic), small rounding errors result which are corrected by adding the error to the non-transferable column.
Confused? Well, try following this example. A candidate obtains 2200 votes against a quota of 2000, leaving a surplus of 200. Of her 2200 papers, 2000 are transferable. The value of each paper is 200 (value of surplus)/2000 (number of transferable papers) equals 0.10 exactly. This results in a transfer exactly equal to the surplus of 200 votes.
Now say only 1850 are transferable. This results in a value of 200/1850 equals 0.1081. However, the value is always rounded down to two decimal places, meaning the papers transfer at 0.10 again. This leaves 15 votes worth of the surplus unused, which are added to the non-transferable column.
These effects are particularly big when the surplus is small. Hence Joe Hendron's surplus in West Belfast appears to Sinnott to have a poor rate of party loyalty and a high rate of plumping. In reality it is more likely that the party loyalty of SDLP voters in West Belfast was around 85 per cent with virtually no plumpers, but in the absence of the full figures to two decimal places (sadly unpublished by The Irish Times), we cannot tell.
This misinterpretation means that estimated transfer rates can be wildly skewed. For example, the actual terminal transfer rate from SDLP to UUP on stage 10 in Fermanagh and South Tyrone was 27 per cent, rather than the 36 per cent as claimed by Sinnott. Indeed he ignores the first whack of transfers which went from Olive Mullen directly to the UUP or non-transferable on Stage 9. The actual terminal transfer rate of Mullen's 4548 votes on Stage 9 to the UUP was 24 per cent, a third lower than claimed by Sinnott.
Sinnott claims a fairly high terminal transfer rate from SF to SDLP across the country of 68 per cent. While there were massive transfers from SF to SDLP in more unionist constituencies (e.g. South Antrim), in traditional republican areas transfer was much poorer. In North Belfast, Martina McIlkenny, whose vote came primarily from the republican heartlands of Ardoyne and the Bone, had a terminal transfer rate of only 41 per cent to the SDLP's Martin Morgan (Stages 10 and 11), directly resulting in Morgan losing a seat to anti-Agreement Independent W. Fraser Agnew by less than 300 votes. So much for the nationalist consensus! - Yours, etc., Gerry Lynch,
Alliance Election Agent
in Belfast North,
New Lodge,
Belfast BT15 2EZ