How to tell lies with election statistics

I do not blame politicians for abusing statistics to their own advantages. It is straight forward and simple. People who do not bother to do mental maths are to blame.
I like i-cable news because it is informative and has the guts to be independent. However, the readers may not have enough time and patience to swallow the figures. Let us take a look at the objective data. More than 2 million people turned up to vote on Sunday, 400 thousands more than the previous one 2012. 26 new faces have been elected into the Council and some old soldiers have failed to garner enough votes. After hearing these figures, the first impression people have would be that 400000 new comers came out to vote for the new generation of localists. This election has conveniently been divided between the pro-establishment camp and the non-pro camp, i.e. pan-democrats and localists. Here comes the first surprise.

They are equally shared by both camps!
But this is wrong! We have made the wrong assumption that people did not switch sides in this election! The pro-establishment camp always accuses the non-pro camp for wasting resources with filibustering. They encouraged voters to vote them out. Perhaps some previous non-pro camp really get tired of the actions of non-pro legislators and switched side this time. On the other hand, we cannot rule out the possibility that since a greater turnout was expected, some pro-establishment voters had the room to switch side and voted according to their conscience, instead of instructions from above!

Here comes the second surprise. The numbers add up.

The localists garnered 400,000 votes. Are they all new comers? Together with the first picture above, where did the extra 200,000 votes come from? We don't know. But they look as if some supporters of pan-democrats have abandoned the traditional way of voting and thrown their weigh to the localists to look for a change. This reasoning is further reinforced by the following two pictures.

The radicals have lost 100,000 votes and the pan-democrats together another 100,000 votes. The numbers now add up cleanly but then the pro-establishment would have wasted their breath in encouraging people to vote for their camp. The pan-democrat supporters have a fresh choice of localists to vent their dissatisfaction and they remain stubborn rivals against the pro-establishment. This is an over-simplification and easily accepted by all.

CY did not fail to make use of the figures to evade when reporters asked him if the election results indicated the citizens' dissatisfaction with his administration. With his typical cunning grin, he said that citizens had instead voted the radical legislators out. He drew people's attention to only one section of the full picture, without mentioning the 6 newly localists who openly declared not to meet him and the officials from the Central Government. This is simple enough to refute.
Lastly, Mr. Ho also played with figures. He told reporters that he had to thank Mr. Eddie Chu and Mr. Cheng Chung Tai for ousting Mr. Lee Cheuk Yan from the Labour. Here, he was suggesting that Lee's losing margin of 5,500 votes all went to Messrs Chu and Cheng! Again, this is an oversimplification and easily understood by everybody. However, since the Central Liaison Office have been pumping votes to pro-establishment candidates, I would retort that the CLO must have pumped too little votes to him so that he could only win by an insignificant margin of 5,500.

Readers! Beware of Statistical Figures!

Acknowledgement:
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