WGP leadership
Picture by Wales Green Party

Pippa Bartolotti (right) has been elected joint deputy leader of Wales Green Party – by just one vote.

The former leader of Wales Green Party was elected in the second round of counting, after TGV Hydro managing director Grenville Ham was elected Deputy Spokesperson in the first round.

Alice Hooker-Stroud was overwhelmingly re-elected as leader, with 136 valid votes being cast for the post.

For the deputy spokesperson roles, once the second preferences of Ham’s voters were taken into account,  Bartolotti secured 45.4 votes, to Newport based comm’s professional Mirka Virtanen’s 44.44 votes.

That means Bartolotti became Deputy Spokesperson by just 0.96 of a vote in the second round, under the preferential voting system.

Due to the weighting of second preference votes, if Virtanen had taken two more first preference votes from Bartolotti, the former would have won.

More importantly though, if one more non-voter had cast a first preference for Virtanen, she would have won. 

With the three invalid votes excluded – as is common practice – it would have taken a swing of just one first preference vote from Bartolotti to Virtanen for the latter to win.

135 valid votes were cast for deputy spokesperson in total, with Bartolotti receiving 34 first preferences and Virtanen 30.

Although not officially released, turnout appears to have been around 5% of Wales’ 3,000 or so members.

Bright Green can release the full results, as reported by the ERO:

IMG-20161217-WA0001

Commenting on her election, Pippa Bartolotti said:

“I’m thrilled to be invited once again to be part of the leadership team of Wales Green Party.  Many people are prepared to switch their vote to Green and I very much look forward to being part of the campaign where Green candidates will be elected to council seats in Wales next year.”

Joint deputy spokesperson Grenville Ham said:

“Wales needs and deserves a change. We have the potential to be a world leader in renewable energy and environmental science, which makes me very proud to be Welsh. I want to make sure we grasp all the opportunities we can whilst transitioning to a climate safe-future.”

The new team will take up their roles on 1st January 2017.

Congratulations to Alice, Grenville and Pippa – and commisserations to Mirka. 

And  to everyone else, next time you consider not voting in an internal election – remember that one vote can make the difference, folks. 

PS. We hope you enjoyed this article. Bright Green has got big plans for the future to publish many more articles like this. You can help make that happen. Please donate to Bright Green now.