Election

The result:

• Disappointing compared to what I was hoping for 24 hours ago. But compared to what I was hoping for a month ago? Well, I’d been hoping for a hung parliament, and here we are.
• I think FPTP is a crazy system, and Timetric neatly illustrate why.

The hanging chads:

• I found (with some help l-) the EC rules that say close at 10pm, but haven’t yet found a statute defining this. Anyone?
• Modest proposal #1: Move elections to weekends. Far less people have to wait until evening due to being at work.
• Modest proposal #2: Extend the limit on exit polls, or ban them entirely. Then there’d be less of a problem with extending polling station hours if something went wrong. It’s not like they actually add much, after all.
• What we should NOT do: change (“modernize”) the technological basis of the electoral system.

General principles - by all means change things to reduce the chance of it going wrong again, but keep the changes as simple as possible so it’s obvious they can’t themselves go wrong; and accept that perfection is unattainable and instead have the system degrade gracefully when the wheels start to come off.

Cambridge:

• A scientist for an MP seems like an excellent thing to me.
• The Greens did pretty well, which I’d guessed would be the case.
• I’d expected it to be a two-way Lib-Lab fight here, but Nick Hillman just made it into second place. Those graphs¹ have got to go, in Cambridge at least although they weren’t provably wrong they do seem to have been over-optimistic, and evidently didn’t work l-)

¹ You know, “The Tories cannot win in Cambridge” with a dubiously accurate bar chart implying it’s a two-horse race.

The Media:

• Prognosticating about an exit poll for an hour because there’s no real results yet is pretty pointless. (See also above.)
• Uniform swing is an over-simplified measure of what’s going on to the point of being useless and misleading (even in the absence of disorienting computer graphics). e.g. Witney is reported as a swing “from LD to Con” but to me it looks more like a collapse in the local Labour vote is biggest effect.

Some nice quotes during the evening:

• “The bar’s still open, which means there’s a lot of journalists still around…”
• “…pronouncing on questions way above my pay grade”
• “We’re not Greece… for a number of reasons…”
• “I’ve no idea really” (I wish more politicians would say this)
• “When the British constitution goes on heat” …huh?