I've been looking through the local election results, and have again been struck by how difficult it is to get an accurate overall picture of how people voted, either within a particular local authority or across Wales as a whole.
The main reason for this is that some wards return more than one councillor, and each voter in these wards has as many votes as there are seats to be won. This makes it almost impossible to meaningfully analyse how people voted, because different voters have different numbers of votes.
I have wondered if the best way to get a clearer picture would be to say that instead of having more than one vote, voters in a four-seat ward have four "quarter-votes", that voters in a three-seat ward have three "third-votes", and that voters in a two-seat ward have two "half-votes". This wouldn't affect the individual election results in any way, but would mean that each voter had only one vote in total.
This is just a question, but has anyone ever seen an analysis of local election results done on this basis?
