a landslide election win is one in which the winning candidate beats his opponent by at least 10 percentage points.
But I decided to look at it this way. What would have been required out of the available votes remaining to turn the election around. As we know on Thursday the electorate was engaged and apathy wasn't was a winner. We have to assume that everyone's vote was counted correctly, yes there may have been a few that somehow missed all the observers and the counters attention, but with the vote split 11 to 9 this would statistically have been an error that was have affected both sides equally.
So where there enough votes left that Yes could have won?
Yes finished some 383, 979 votes behind no on a 84.59% turn out.
Yes secured 1,617,949 votes which at 37.77% of the total registered voters would have won most elections in recent times. If it were not for the 2,001,928 votes that No secured which was 46.74% of all those registered to vote. That is astounding that they came so close to having 50% of all those who could have voted, but they didn't so more could have been swayed and persuaded to vote.
So lets look at those that didn't vote, there were only 663,515 of these in the whole of the 4,283,392 registered from the age of 16 upwards who could vote. Which in itself was 97% of those eligible to vote.
Therefore we can see there were still enough votes available that could have seen a different result.
But how well would Yes have had to do with that available number of voters?
To secure to 383,980 additional votes that Yes would have needed to win by a single vote would have required 57.87% of those that didn't vote to ALL vote yes. Which would have taken turnout up to a even more incredible 93.47%.
Even if all of those who didn't vote could express an opinion 78.93% of them or 523,748 of them would have had to vote yes. and that would have give Yes a majority of 2 votes as there was actually an even number of registered voters.
If we were to assume that the % of rejected ballots (0.0947%) in the remainder of the voters that percentage there would be 629 less votes available. They would then need only 523,433 of the remainder, however that is 78.96% of those that would be available. So even if there had been 100% turn out yes would have needed 4 out of every 5 votes from those that did not vote to win when they were achieving 9 out of 20 from those that actually did.
So therefore can we put the conspiracy theories aside. There was a 10 percentage point divide at the end. Some Yes campaigners are saying it felt closer than that. Opinion polls said it felt closer than that. But when you consider that some vocal Yes supporters were calling No voters cowards, traitors or whatever and calling for some of them to go home, saying those born elsewhere had no right to vote and some were threatening people that they'd have to move, face a day of reckoning etc is it not possible that some people who would vote no were scared to tell anyone that in public and would say they were voting yes.
As the last weeks polls seemed to suggest that it was withing 4% even if the margin of error of 3% on a individual poll would only take that to 7%. But that there were a large number of polls in that last week to a fortnight that showed it was that close there would appear to have been maybe a 1% margin in those polled, but certainly not all of them were possibly giving their true intentions and that could well have applied to Yes canvassers especially if those people voting no felt that the threats might come to something should there be independence.
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