Second paragraph of Chapter 3:
A total of 926 respondents completed and returned the presiding officer questionnaire in the pre-paid envelope provided. This represented a response rate of 77%.
I picked this up remaindered in a Belfast bookshop, with hopes from the title: The Combined Election: an analysis of the combined Parliamentary and District Council elections in Northern Ireland on 7th June 2001, by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. I had expected some statistical and in depth analysis of the actual election results – the Westminster and local government elections were held simultaneously that year, with two different electoral systems, Westminster using the primitive first-past-the-post system and the Northern Irish local councils elected by Single Transferable Vote.
In fact the book is not an analysis of the election results, but of a survey carried out among the general public, polling staff and polling station presiding officers, basically asking what went right, what went wrong and how things could be done better in future. The conclusions are that there are things that could be done better and things that don’t need to be changed. I have to say it was not as exciting as I had hoped! It’s well out of print, so you can’t get it unless you look very hard.
This was the shortest unread book acquired in 2018 on my shelves. Next on that pile is How to be Invisible: Lyrics, by Kate Bush.