Share of the votes (only in Britain)

Last week Thursday I stood for The Green Party in the local county council elections. (You might recall there was also the piffling issue of a national election.) Because of border changes both local seats were up for election in the ward where I stood (Histon, Impington and Cottenham). On Friday the results came in, and I garnered an astonishing 949 votes. Of course, to boost my ego even further, I wanted to calculate what share of the vote that amounted to. And that's where I ran into trouble.

Here are the figures: I got 949 votes out of a total of 15,335 votes cast.

Method 1:
Simply, you might say, that's 6.2%. And in a sense that is correct, I received just over six percent of the total number of votes cast. But don't forget that everyone had two votes, so that does not correspond to the number of people who voted for me.

Method 2:
So, let's look at that. 8,372 ballot papers were issued, but 58 were rejected. You would assume that everyone who received a paper and didn't spoil their vote put their paper in the box, but from other wards (where people only had the single vote), it is clear that this is not the case. But the numbers were very small, so let's ignore them for convenience's sake. In that case 949 / (8,372 - 58) = 11.4%. That's the percentage of people who put a tick next to my name on the ballot paper.

Method 3:
But hang on, not everyone voted twice! There were 15,335 (valid) votes cast by 8,314 people, which means that 1,293 people only voted once. And if you use method 2, the total vote adds up to just under 185%, not 200%. At this point, my head starts to hurt. I am tempted to take method 1, and double that number, which gives me 12.4% of the vote. This method has two great advantages:
1. the votes add up to 200%
2. this gives me the highest share of the votes of any method

So unless you want to proof to me I am wrong, I got 12.4 per cent of the vote. Hurray!