AV would be brilliant

Not so brilliant for the Lib Dems, but good for democracy. Not as good as STV of course, but let's face it, what is?

First Past the Post is the cornerstone of the brokenness of our politics. It has the power to subvert all your campaigning efforts for a good cause, making that cause weaker instead of stronger.

Support the environment? Vote Green where the Lib Dems could win and you do more harm than good.

Support Euro-nihilism? Vote UKIP where the Conservatives could win and you have the opposite effect.

Support socialism? Vote Socialist Labour, where Labour could win, and, well maybe the pattern breaks down there.

Want to stand as an independent? The problem is that whichever party it is you consider least bad, you will take more votes from them than from the others. So unless you can be very confident of winning, you will only make things worse.

AV fixes all this. It lets you stand and campaign for what you believe in without damaging the causes you support. It lets you vote for what you believe in without having to second guess what the result will be and support the lesser evil.

Sure, it's not proportional. That stinks. But proportionality is not the only important feature of an electoral system. If it were we would support list systems rather than STV. And this is the worst time of all to hold a referendum on a proportional system, when the BNP have just won seats.

If Brown and his few friends plump for AV, we will probably get it. We could even have it for the next general election - it is the only reform that won't require years of boundary commission work. And it may be a stepping stone to STV or AV+, but not towards party lists.

If they plump for PR, the whole thing will be quietly dropped, "after considered reflection", the next time Griffin gets some publicity. Or, even worse, we have a referendum on it after weeks of the Tory press giving publicity to the BNP at every opportunity in order to get a "no" vote. It would then be off the agenda for decades. This is the single worst time for a referendum on PR. Give it a few years when a couple more nazi MEPs won't have brought the world to an end.

See also: Anthony Hook, Mark Reckons, Himmelgarten Cafe, Jock Coats, Sunder Katwala, and Duncan Borrowman (already linked)

What you should have voted to keep the BNP out

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but too many people have been stupidly talking up the BNPs chances to the point of self-fullfilling prophecy - often in a genuine attempt to keep them out, but sometimes to frighten their own disillusioned supporters into turning out. The one thing the BNP had none of the resources to do - a get the vote out operation - was done for them by their opponents.

But what I want to do here is look at who, with the benefit of hindsight, the anti-BNP voter should have voted for. Mostly to shame everybody else who claimed it could only be them.

So in Yorkshire, that is Labour, who could have beaten the BNP to the last seat with an extra 10270 votes. The Greens would have needed 15684, UKIP 26528 and others more.

In the North West, UKIP would have needed only 2448 more votes to beat the BNP, the Greens 4961 more, the Lib Dems 28549 votes, and others more.

In regions where the BNP failed we can see who took the last seat, and see how many votes ahead of the BNP they were.

In East Midlands, this is the Lib Dems 45109 votes to the good of the BNP.

In East of England, this is UKIP, second seat 59947 votes ahead of the BNP.

In London, the Conservatives are 73259 ahead of the BNP with their 3rd seat.

In the North East, the Lib Dems are 50944 ahead of the BNP.

In Scotland, Labour (2nd seat) are 87779.5 ahead of the BNP.

In the South East, the Lib Dems (2nd seat) are 63401 ahead of the BNP.

In the South West, the Conservatives (3rd seat) are 95358 ahead of the BNP.

In Wales, UKIP are 50471 ahead of the BNP.

In the West Midlands, UKIP (2nd seat) are 28268 ahead of the BNP.

What can we learn from this? Mostly that it is guesswork, and you are best off just voting for whoever you actually support. But perhaps these things can be predicted. To vote otherwise just because somebody is only 50,000 ahead of the BNP seems unreasonable. But could the results in Yorkshire and the North West have been predicted and prevented? Not without vastly more accurate polling, region by region, than we had. Who would pay for such polling, and would we trust it? Based on the polling we had, my calculations suggested that the Lib Dems, Labour or the Tories would be the best bet to beat the BNP in the North West, not, as it turned out, UKIP and the Greens.

And the best tactical voting strategy in the world wouldn't compensate for another 0.5% vote going to the fascists.

So maybe instead our non-fascist political class just needs to get out on the streets and argue its corner a bit more. To make a case for liberty, tolerance and human rights. To think twice about adding more layers of distance, obfuscation and technocracy between the people and their public services. Not just to tell people that they don't have to be evil to have a voice and a stake in society, but to make sure that it's true. And when people choose to be evil anyway, to oppose and defy them at every turn.

Scotland's butterfly ballot

Much attention has been given, rightly, to the confusion that has been caused by holding elections under two different PR systems (one, a "mixed" system already) on the same day.

While this confusion clearly did exist, and many voters put numbers or Xs on the wrong ballot papers, most of the spoilt parliamentary papers I saw were not like this. A great many had two Xs on the list vote, and nothing on the constituency vote. And many had a single vote on the list, and nothing on the constitency - and so were valid votes on the list.

Why were the constituency and list votes on the same ballot paper at all? Because, I suppose, this makes the scanning process much more efficient. Obviously with hand-counting, two contests on one ballot paper would be more work, but with machine scanning, it is less.

The list contest was on the left half of the paper. This makes it the 'first' vote. The greens, for example, after successfully winning seats with the message 'second vote green' have had to campaign 'first vote green' this time. This is an acceptable strategy, but it is bound to lead to confusion between first vote and second vote, and first choice and second choice - and hence spoilage rates. The psychological advantage the greens had previously, that they may get second votes from people who considered them a second choice, has gone. This will have harmed them, but that was never an advantage they were entitled to keep. On the other hand, a lot of papers spoiled with two votes on the list included one for the greens or socialists, and so they do have a grievance there.

What must have aggravated the confusion was the way that the list options took the entire column on the left of the ballot paper, and the constituency candidates were at the top of the right column. This looks very much like one long list carried over into a second column. How many voters saw it thus, and thought they had one, or two votes to be used anywhere in the long list? Tens of thousands, it seems, that's how many.


On the question of the computer failures, I am looking forward to the conclusions from the enquiry. But I am rather less concerned here than I am about some of the systems used in England, that are completely paperless, and thus have no way for results to be checked, and, frankly, for which we have no grounds to trust the result. While scanning does have transparency issues, these are an order of magnitude less than they are for things like internet voting. Yes, it seems a fix had to be applied to a live election system, and this itself can be a security question mark. I hope the electoral commission has the know-how to ask the right questions here.