On Saturday we wondered whether the all-postal voting experiment had been an own goal for Labour. Certainly it attracted a lot of bad publicity and this might have had an impact on the overall result.

But it is clear that Labour’s performance in the Euro Elections would have been substantially worse if it had not been for the experiment.

Looking at the relative performance of Labour in the nine English regions that were declared last night the party’s shares dropped on average by 26.13% compared with 1999 in the five regions where normal voting procedures took and by 20.65% in the regions where it was all post voting.

The figures are slightly distorted by the extraordinary performance by Robert Kilroy-Silk for UKIP in the East Midlands. The Labour share there dropped by 26.65 even though it was in the experiment. Taking that region out takes the average fall in the Labour vote in the postal regions to 18.69%.

Drop in Labour share on 1999

East 34.9
South East 30.5
London 29.4
East Midlands 26.6 POSTAL
North West 20.6 POSTAL
South West 19.4
North East 19.2 POSTAL
West Midlands 16.4
Yorkshire & Humberside 16.28 POSTAL