Winning the weekend vs. Winning the race

Alice Funke reviews the detailed results of the NDP leadership vote.

Nathan Cullen narrowly won all of the real-time voting he appeared on during last weekend’s NDP leadership contest, but his rival Thomas Mulcair’s victory was already a foregone conclusion by the time the convention started, detailed vote breakdowns show.

Unfortunately for Cullen, the convention-day round-by-round voting never accounted for more than 17.5% of the total ballots counted, and he had too big a gap to catch Mulcair in the preferential ballots cast in advance.

Mr. Mulcair effectively had 28,683 votes before the weekend began, more than Brian Topp ended up with after weekend voting.