Pirate Party Elects New Leader

At 10am this morning, Sunday 26th September, voting closed in the election for the new party leader after Andrew Robinson, our first leader, declared his intent to stand down.

The election initially had 4 candidates - Peter Brett, Loz Kaye, Graeme Lambert, and Eric Priezkalns, however Erc and Graeme withdrew before the end of the nominations period, meaning voting was between Peter Brett, Loz Kaye, and the Re-Open Nominations option.

The vote took place for a period of 2 weeks, and counting was done using Alternative Vote via OpenSTV.

We can now announce that as a result of the vote, Loz Kaye has been duly elected as the new Leader of Pirate Party UK, having received 105 of 142 first preference votes (73.9%).

Peter Brett received 25 first preference votes (17.6%), and Re-Open Nominations received 12 votes (8.45%)*

The full ballot file may be found here, along with the full count here.

If you requested a vote receipt, you should be able to verify that your vote is recorded and was counted as expected; you will also see from that the OpenSTV software shows all stages of elimination and vote transfer when using this voting method, although this time in any case the winning candidate received more than 50% of the votes cast from the first preference votes.

Loz is a 40 year old composer, musical director and has worked in the higher education sector for over a decade, and will be teaching at the music industry's high temple, the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, cofounded by Paul McCartney. You can see his ideas for the party in his nominations thread.

We look forward to seeing what the future holds for the party under the leadership of Loz Kaye, and would like to take this opportunity to reiterate our thanks to both the candidates, and Andrew Robinson for their hard work for the party.

Expect to hear more from our new Leader soon.

*percentages may not total 100% due to rounding.