Cambridgeshire PCC elections

ghoti was speculating that people might well just choose to vote along party lines for Thursday's PCC elections, and was considering voting tactically as a result. I wondered what those party lines would amount to across the county. Here's what would happen in Cambridgeshire if everyone cast their first preference in exact accordance with their vote in the seven parliamentary constituencies in the 2010 general election (data from Wikipedia; errors my own). I cheated a bit and aggregated the independents together, since none of the same people are standing and their total vote share was rather small.

Party	Standing?	Votes	%
Conservative	Y	169,389	45.0
Liberal Democrat	Y	109,159	29.0
Labour	Y	60,983	16.2
UKIP	Y	19,288	5.1
Green	N	6,794	1.8
Various independents	N	5,034	1.3
English Democrats	Y	2,564	0.7
BNP	N	1,747	0.5
Monster Raving Loony	N	548	0.1
Christian Peoples	N	489	0.1
Cambridge Socialists	N	362	0.1
Animal Protection	N	181	0.0

Total turnout in 2010 was 67.8%. (And I've just noticed that there's a less prettily-presented version of these totals on the Wikipedia page above. Oh well, I've done the work now, and maybe this will help to inform people's voting intentions anyway.)

I am not even slightly Nate Silver, and even if I were I'm not aware of any meaningful pre-election polling that I might be able to go on, so this is about the best I can do. First-past-the-post with this naïve approximation would have the Conservative candidate winning handily. Under the Supplementary Vote scheme in use for this election, well, it's hard to say. (If a candidate obtains more than 50% first preference votes, they are elected; otherwise, the top two candidates remain in the contest and any second preferences for either of them from ballot papers whose first preference was for an eliminated candidate are added.)

More people normally vote for smaller parties under non-FPTP systems, but surely not enough to swing this? Pre-coalition I would have made a rough guess that this might be a case of a split left-wing vote and Liberal Democrat and Labour votes would mostly pool one way or another while UKIP votes would mostly transfer to Conservative, but who knows what effect the coalition has had on this. Plus there are two strong independents running as well - I plan to vote for at least one of them - and it is difficult to guess what share they'll pick up. On the other hand, Supplementary Vote is a rather poor system which only counts some second preferences, which may reduce the extent to which any differences matter.

We will find out soon. Please vote if you can!