Presidential Election 2019 - Expenditure Analysis Exercise

On 13th November, the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) released the following datasheet on their facebook page showing how much money has been spent by five of the identified presidential candidates. CMEV has done a good job estimating below which involves a lot of effort by monitoring all the popular media and social media promotions. Since it is not an easy task to track all the promotions that happen on various platforms, it is important to note that the amount of money spent by the main two parties could be much much higher than this.




Based on the above data (and the final result of course), I made a data matrix thinking I would be able to get some sense out of it.

As the x-axis, I chose the budget spent on a single vote by each candidate
As the y-axis, I chose the total vote amount received by each candidate

Simple!

Apparently, the matrix had four distinct clusters which I named from 1 to 4. 


1 - Politicians !. Those who understood the behaviors and minds (good or bad) of the majority and adjusted their strategy/ communication accordingly resides here.

2 - These spent a very high amount of money per vote and got a relatively high amount of votes in return. The amount of money they spend seems to decide everything. But, in this election, no one appeared here. hmmm...... Maybe, if we have access to actual amounts spent by the main two parties, things could have been different. Anyway, let's keep our focus only on available data.

3 - These have spent a relatively low amount of money per vote and also received a relatively low amount of votes. 

4 -  Those who spend a hell lot of money per vote and get nothing as expected in return. It looks like the parties here are highly inefficient in delivering their message to the public.




Ok, I admit that this game is not fair. The main two parties can afford billions of rupees while other alternative parties can only spend a few million.

Let's assume, for the sake of fun (I repeat), that the money you spend for the election is proportional to what you get as votes. I'm going to adjust the budget of all the 5 candidates so that they all have the same amount (which is the budget of  SLFP) to spend on the election.

Here we go...





Now let's find the size of the minimum budget required for each candidate to defeat SLFP.

NDF	1,769,566,442
NPP	2,646,930,735
JSP	3,497,392,878
NPM	278,894,573

Remember this whole exercise is based on the assumption that that the money you spend for the election is proportional to what you get as votes.

So I repeat! this number game doesn't work like this in the real world. 

Post your comments below.