The electoral map

From figures "leaked" to Telegram political reporter Scary Novelty Name, herewith a map showing the variation — and there's impressively little of it — in the rate of provincial Liberal supporters signed up by electoral district, expressed as a percentage of the 2011 list of electors.

[Click to enlarge.]

The deeper the red, the larger the percentage of people signed up as supporters. Numbers in the legend show the number of districts in each percentage cohort.

Even if only 5% of the voting population had signed up to vote in the party's leadership process, it would have been an impressive achievement. In fact, the vast majority of the 48 electoral districts have seen signup rates between 5% and 15%. The level of signups is surprisingly even province-wide: the experience of other parties in other Canadian jurisdiction has usually been that supporter signup rates are geographically "lumpy".

The "lowest" rate is found in Labrador West, with "only" 6.2%, a rate that is high in comparable leadership votes. A few districts, including the two held by the candidates who are sitting MHAs, as well as historically fertile Liberal ground in coastal Labrador and Bonavista Bay, exceed that 15% mark. In Cartwright–L'Anse au Clair, the leadership signup is nearly 1/3 the size of the district's population of eligible voters.

The nearly 38,000 people signed up as supporters or members, and thus eligible to vote in the leadership election, make the 2013 NL Liberal leadership, in raw numbers, one of the largest such exercises in Canadian provincial history. On a per-capita basis, given that Newfoundland and Labrador is the second-smallest province by population, it may well be the most broadly-based one-member or weighted-one-member party leadership election in Canada ever.