2013 senatorial election: where did the votes come from?

Do you remember the (in)famous "60-30-10" pattern that Rappler.com that debunked in not just one but three articles? Have you compared it with the 2010 senatorial election results? Now, do you wanna see where the candidates got their votes?


You can see here the last published COMELEC count for the senatorial election. COMELEC says that is not the final count, but at that point, the number of uncounted votes are too few to change the order of the candidates. COMELEC still hasn't released the final count for the national elections (Senate and party-list) but Rappler has had Senate results per province and OAVs canvassed. Since every provincial count is final, and only absentee voters were supposedly left, and we have the "not-yet-final" numbers, we can add up the provincial results, then subtract those from the "not-yet-final" numbers to come up with the absentee totals.

So, we get this:

The candidates are arranged in descending order of votes. Blues are regions from Luzon, yellows are from the Visayas, the reds are from Mindanao and green from OAV. Each region has an alternating dark and light color. Each "block" is a region: they're arranged in this order: I, CAR, II, III, NCR, IV-A, IV-B, V; VI, VII, VIII; IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, ARMM; OAV.

For example, Grace Poe's first dark blue "block" is her votes from Region I, then the thinner light blue "block" are her votes from CAR, then the next dark blue block are Region II votes, and so on.

Some take-aways:

• The vote rich regions are regions III, NCR and IV-A. You can see these three on the graph as fourth to sixth "blocks".
• Grace Poe looks to be far ahead of anyone, trailed by Loren Legarda, who is also sitting pretty at #2. The next candidate, Alan Cayetano is quite a long way from Legarda, followed closely by Chiz Escudero. There are quite distinct "packs"; think of it as cycling.
• Grace Poe won more votes in Luzon against all of the votes of the 13th placed senator, Dick Gordon.
• The senators ranked 7th to 13th have more or less have the same number of votes from Luzon, but those ranked 7th to 9th (Aquino, Pimentel and Trillanes) pulled away from the those ranked 10th to 13th by winning a significant number of votes in the Visayas and Mindanao.
• Among the Top 17 candidates, (better than Hagedorn) only Zubiri failed to win more than six million votes in Luzon. In fact, among the "major", or candidates who won more than two million votes, only Zubiri has more votes coming from Visayas and Mindanao than Luzon.
• The drop off from Cojuangco to Alcantata is pretty remarkable. She had more votes in Luzon than Alcantara (and everybody else below him) everywhere.
• The absentee vote is not that influential; more or less it is 1% of the total vote; the candidate with the largest proportion of absentee vote is Cojuangco who has 2.34%. One can argue that 1% is influential in close races, but since everyone has more or less 1% of their votes from OAV it cancels things out.

So, what does these tell us? If a senatorial candidate wants to win, aside from courting the INC vote, the Luzon vote is crucial. The Senate is a Metro Manila-centric institution; most senators are either registered or live at at the Metro (or Cavite). To further emphasize that Luzon votes are important, the 13th placed candidate (Gordon) has more votes from Luzon and absentee voters than the 14th placed candidate (Zubiri)'s votes from Luzon and Visayas. The top 13 candidates all have their Luzon votes passing the 8 million threshold.