Sunday, 9 May 2010
Saturday, 8 May 2010
Profiling at polling stations
Buried deep in the article linked below is an interesting tidbit, polling stations in Sheffield Hallam forced student voters into a second queue to prioritise other voters. My guess is the argument used was that a lot of students had not brought their polling cards, something mentioned every twenty minutes or so during the BBC's election night coverage, but it's very hard not to see this as profiling.
The student electorate tends Liberal more than pretty much any other group and in Sheffield Hallam, Nick Clegg's seat, it must have come out in force. Contrary to the approach taken here, the right to vote is supposed to be universal. I can understand asking voters without polling cards to join a second queue, it takes longer to process a voter without the card, but that isn't what happened. A demographic group was singled out basically told that they weren't going to get to vote whether they had their polling card or not.
It's not as if Clegg was likely to lose his seat but these minor inequalities are indicative of the system as a whole.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8666338.stm
The student electorate tends Liberal more than pretty much any other group and in Sheffield Hallam, Nick Clegg's seat, it must have come out in force. Contrary to the approach taken here, the right to vote is supposed to be universal. I can understand asking voters without polling cards to join a second queue, it takes longer to process a voter without the card, but that isn't what happened. A demographic group was singled out basically told that they weren't going to get to vote whether they had their polling card or not.
It's not as if Clegg was likely to lose his seat but these minor inequalities are indicative of the system as a whole.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8666338.stm
So I lied
Nice article on the BBC website about New Zealand's approach to PR;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8665835.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8665835.stm
Some Basic Electoral Maths
Watching the media coverage of the election results in the last few days has been interesting. The narrative emerging seems to be the rejection of the Labour government of the past 13 years, David Cameron's almost victory, and the failure of the media buzz around Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems to translate into seats in the Commons. The story now, how Cameron, the 'victor', chooses to move forward.
All that is fine and dandy if you take a surface reading of the electoral results; actually dig through the numbers and the picture starts to fall apart. Take the Lib Dem result, down from 62 seats to 57, a ropey performance in anyone's book. These 57 seats came from 6,827,938 votes across the UK. That's a fairly big number and totally incomprehensible out of context, so here's some context courtesy of the BBC website;
Conservative Party - 10,706,647 votes, 36.1% of all votes (up from 32.3% in 2005), 306 seats, net gain of 97 seats
Labour Party - 8,604,358 votes, 29% of all votes (down from 35.3% in 2005), 258 seats, net loss of -91 seats
Liberal Democrats - 6,827,938, 23% of all votes (up from 22% in 2005), 57 seats, net loss of -5 seats
The Lib Dem's gained votes. 1% of the electorate decided that they'd rather have a Liberal Democrat representing them in the House of Commons and as such they gained an extra -5 MP's. First Past The Post just failed maths. Not that you'd know this from reading the papers, or the BBC website, or by watching the television; the narrative is stuck on the lack of impact of the 'Clegg Surge'.
Now let's see what would have happened if the Liberals had gained seats at the same rate as the Conservatives. 97 seats for 3.8% of the vote. My calculator puts that just shy of 23 seats, at a total of 84. About what they were hoping for.
Let's run this example out to its logical extremes. And for the extremes we need the data for a couple of the minor parties;
Democratic Ulster Unionist Party - 168,216 votes, 0.6% of all votes, 8 seats, no change despite a 0.3% loss of votes
United Kingdom Independence Party - 917,832 votes, 3.1% of all votes, 0 seats, no change despite a 0.9% gain
That little cluster-fuck perfectly sums up the British electoral system. If UKIP gained seats at the same rate as the DUP then they'd have 5.45x as many seats, 43ish in total. FORTY FUCKING THREE. If the Lib Dem's did, they'd have THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FOUR. A vote for the DUP has the same effect as 5.7 votes for the Lib Dems or an infinite number of votes for UKIP.
I could go on. And I will, at length. In the coming weeks you're going to be hearing at least a bit about electoral reform. I'll be here explaining the maths.
Coming up next :- How First Past The Post works (or doesn't).
All that is fine and dandy if you take a surface reading of the electoral results; actually dig through the numbers and the picture starts to fall apart. Take the Lib Dem result, down from 62 seats to 57, a ropey performance in anyone's book. These 57 seats came from 6,827,938 votes across the UK. That's a fairly big number and totally incomprehensible out of context, so here's some context courtesy of the BBC website;
Conservative Party - 10,706,647 votes, 36.1% of all votes (up from 32.3% in 2005), 306 seats, net gain of 97 seats
Labour Party - 8,604,358 votes, 29% of all votes (down from 35.3% in 2005), 258 seats, net loss of -91 seats
Liberal Democrats - 6,827,938, 23% of all votes (up from 22% in 2005), 57 seats, net loss of -5 seats
The Lib Dem's gained votes. 1% of the electorate decided that they'd rather have a Liberal Democrat representing them in the House of Commons and as such they gained an extra -5 MP's. First Past The Post just failed maths. Not that you'd know this from reading the papers, or the BBC website, or by watching the television; the narrative is stuck on the lack of impact of the 'Clegg Surge'.
Now let's see what would have happened if the Liberals had gained seats at the same rate as the Conservatives. 97 seats for 3.8% of the vote. My calculator puts that just shy of 23 seats, at a total of 84. About what they were hoping for.
Let's run this example out to its logical extremes. And for the extremes we need the data for a couple of the minor parties;
Democratic Ulster Unionist Party - 168,216 votes, 0.6% of all votes, 8 seats, no change despite a 0.3% loss of votes
United Kingdom Independence Party - 917,832 votes, 3.1% of all votes, 0 seats, no change despite a 0.9% gain
That little cluster-fuck perfectly sums up the British electoral system. If UKIP gained seats at the same rate as the DUP then they'd have 5.45x as many seats, 43ish in total. FORTY FUCKING THREE. If the Lib Dem's did, they'd have THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FOUR. A vote for the DUP has the same effect as 5.7 votes for the Lib Dems or an infinite number of votes for UKIP.
I could go on. And I will, at length. In the coming weeks you're going to be hearing at least a bit about electoral reform. I'll be here explaining the maths.
Coming up next :- How First Past The Post works (or doesn't).
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