Still battling a cold here, which demands sleep, and that cuts into precious blogging time. I've made a few database updates tonight, including the victor in the contested Conservative nomination in London North Centre last night (Susan Truppe). Thanks to a reader for bringing this clipping to our attention.

The list of official candidates for the 4 by-election ridings was released yesterday, and it appears that no-one got disqualified, while a new Independent candidate has shown up in Cumberland – Colchester – Musquodoboit Valley CCMV), Kate Graves. I've added in all the finalized candidates to the database now, and updated the graph on the main page. There are 23 candidates running across the 4 by-election ridings, 8 of them women, with both the Liberals and NDP running an all-male ticket. Hochelaga has the highest number of candidates running (8), while New Westminster – Coquitlam (NWC) has just 4 running. Each of the major parties is running a full slate. Five of the candidates won contested nominations in order to run, including 3/4 in NWC, the Liberal in CCMV and the Bloc candidate in Hochelaga, two were appointed (the 2 Liberals in Quebec), while the rest were acclaimed or were nominated as independents.

In other news, here are a few items worth following up on:

• Regular readers will recall that the Canadian Election Study (the academic exit poll that has been conducted after each general election for years) publicly releases its raw data a year after the election was held. I wrote to Professor Elisabeth Gidengil to inquire when the data would be released, and she was kind enough to reply earlier today that the data would be made available on their website shortly (probably on this page, along with many of their publications). They have made earlier datasets available in SPSS format (so, it's not for the casual user), but still and all, it is being made public, which is great.
• On a related note, former M.P. Dennis Gruending in his blog Pulpit and Politics has written the first of a two-part series examining data on voting trends by religious affiliation, looking at a recent study by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. In a subsequent post he plans to look at the data collected by the Canadian Election Study on that subject as well, so stay tuned.
• For those who can't get enough of mapping, there have been some very detailed coloured poll-by-poll maps of the 4 by-election ridings posted on Babble (see comment #77) by someone who looks like she or he does this professionally. Here are the links:
  • Cumberland – Colchester – Musquodoboit Valley, NS - (this one is for the 2006 results, since Bill Casey won every poll but one of the Indian Reserves in 2008, which he lost to the NDP)
    
  • Montmagny – L'Islet – Kamouraska – Rivière-du-Loup, QC
    
  • Hochelaga, QC
    
  • New Westminster – Coquitlam, BC
    
  There are also other maps linked to by that Babble user in other threads as well, including Outremont from 2006 and 2008.

Thanks to everyone for their patience, and for staying in touch. I hope to be back in fighting form for a productive weekend's work.

Labels: Data Analysis, Nov 9 2009 By-elections