Just like TCN’s owner, Paul Bradbury, I too am very interested in statistics and the numbers that appeared after the elections like yesterday’s Croatian runoff of the presidential elections 2020.
But, unlike Paul, who was aiming to analyse the big picture of what the data was telling us about Croatian politics and the population, I was looking for the weird and the bizarre. It started yesterday evening when I was browsing around Croatia, looking at the State Electoral Commission site and the results that were shown there as the votes were counted. One of the things I noticed was that Lumbarda, a village on Korčula island, a municipality with just one polling station, was split right down the middle: both Zoran Milanović and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović got 271 votes in Lumbarda!
Then I was told an unofficial piece of information that Žrnovo, another village on Korčula, 10 kilometres away from Lumbarda, was also divided perfectly between the candidates! I wasn’t able to verify that right away, but as soon as I got my hands on the full spreadsheet of the results of presidential elections 2020, published today by the Electoral Commission, that was the first thing I checked. And, yes, they were right, polling station no. 4 in Korčula municipality, located in Žrnovo, had the result 303:303.
Of course, when you have 2 candidates, it’s not at all surprising that there will be situations where the number of votes per polling station would be exactly the same. But I had to go and find out, how many were there? Lumbarda is the only municipality in Croatia that really doesn’t know who they’d prefer for Croatian president. Other ties happened at the level of polling stations, and there were exactly 44 of them. About a dozen of those were in Zagreb County, a few in the City of Zagreb, a few in Bjelovar-Bilogora County and a couple in each of the remaining counties (the two on Korčula are the only ones in Dubrovnik-Neretva County). Oh, there’s another one: in the Croatian Embassy in Finland, in Helsinki, 5 people voted for Zoran Milanović, while 5 other Finnish Croats voted for Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović!
Most of the total votes were cast at several polling stations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zagreb and one in Kastav. On the other side of that spectrum is a polling station in Vladisovo in Brod-Posavina County, located in a private house, where two people voted: one of the ballots was invalid, while the other person voted for Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović!
To find out more about the results and see graphical representations of them, visit viborc.com, who also helped me handle the data for this article.
