Election

[ewx]

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?

Comments

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Representation of the People Act 1983, Schedule A1 Part 1, Timetable:

Polling:

In the case of a general election, between the hours of 7 in the morning and 10 at night on the eleventh day after the last day for delivery of nomination papers.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Aha! I’d managed to miss A1 entirely somehow. Thanks.

[lnr]

Witney: even more obviously wrong in South Cambs. Described as a swing from Con to LD, which is daft when they both actually got a higher percentage of the vote than last time. Looking at the actual percentages there was a small swing Lab->Con and a bigger one Lab->LD.

(Erm, excuse me a moment for having done that from memory originally and got the figures wrong way round!)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

We also have a supposed swing, to CON from LD.

What we actually had was an increase in the CON vote (presumably, that's the 'swing to'), with LD coming second, also increasing their vote while last time's second place Labour vote collapsed.

The 1.2% value they supply is pretty inexplicable. It's not the increase in the Tory vote (which was 5.5%), or the difference in their votes, (20.1%), or the difference in their percentage changes (2.4%). It might conceivably be that last figure multiplied by the Tory total percentage ... nope, that's 1.3%.

Oh, it's 2.4 over 2. Riiight ...

I think it's pretty bogus when both are rising, to be honest. What we really have is two swings from Labour, one to the Tories and a smaller one to the LDs. They're trying to use a one-dimensional value to summarise a multi-dimensional situation. It might suffice when there's a two party race, but not here.

[twigletzone.livejournal.com]

The two best Colemanballs I heard on the Beeb were "fiddling around while Greece burns" and "it's a battle of two arguments". I love that one about the pay grade though :D

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I mostly agree with all that.

[fanf]

I suspect the increased Con vote in Cambridge is at least partly due to the addition of Trumpington to the constituency.

[(Anonymous)]

I suggested this to Julian a few weeks ago and he said Trumpington was usually fairly solidly Lib Dem.

(S)