have somebody photoshopped his dick onto the parliament yet?

so they got some votes but not enough to win a seat (of the 46 that had been declared at the time of posting).

Your point is?

The point being that this system does not do a good job of representing the people's opinions/wishes.

which is bad.

I'm raged too.

me3

boss had his laptop streaming sky news whole day too

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that woman from sheffield was the most annoying. "i came at 6 but there was a queue so i came back at 7 and there was still a queue so then i thought it would be a good idea to come back at quarter past 9, it's disgraceful that i couldn't vote"

YOUR FUCKING FAULT MORAN

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Elections should be on a Sunday at any rate.

We have ours on a saturday. I don't think I've ever had to wait longer than a couple of minutes to vote.

I've never waited at all!

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Except for people who work odd hours or are forced into double shifts/overtime etc.

Minority sure, but Sunday would make much more sense than a fucking Thursday. They'll be plenty of people who didn't vote due to being in the wrong place (e.g. students).

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still voting on sundays makes much more sense...

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/arti...iasco.html

third world country

Yeah, we go about telling others how democracy works and how great it is, even forcing it upon people, but we can't even run a proper democratic system ourselves.

The problems have been blamed on an unusually high number of people going to the polls.

rofl

Your first post that doesn't suck.
Well done.

ha, thanks :)

1 out of 15192 aint bad!

beats 0 out of 15000 !

Majority/plurality systems aim to make it easier for the winning party to govern.
A proportional system reflects better the votes as they were cast, but usually makes it less easy to govern because larger coalitions are needed.

Two different aims. I don't see what's particularly shocking about either of them :)

When you have 23% of the vote but less than 10% of the seats, something is wrong. (And let's ignore for a second just how many more people would've voted lib dem had they not believed it was "impossible to change anything" in their constituency.)

Electoral reform is desperately needed and Clegg won't get that with the tories. I, like many in the lib dem camp really hope he declines Cameron. The system puts everyone except the two main parties at a major disadvantage; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8609989.stm

Like I said, two different aims.

Yeah, one is dual-despotism and the other is democratic.

Plurality systems allow the largest minority ("winning party") to impose their will over the majority.

PR systems allow the majority to work together ("evil back room deals") to decide what is acceptable to the majority and provides a stable long-term platform for progressive change.

If you don't see what is wrong with Plurality I'm guessing you're also fine with dictatorships?

Damn, you got me. Since I don't find the plurality voting system to be particularly shocking as far as its aims are concerned, it must mean that I'm fine with dictatorships.

make it easier for the winning party to govern

A dictatorship is wear disproportional power is vested in a single person, making it easier for the leader to govern.

Plurality systems vest disproportional power in a single group of people, making it easier for the group to govern.

Both create systems where the incumbent regime force their policies upon the population regardless of what the majority want.

Plurality governments are effectively just short of being "party" dictatorships (e.g. USSR, NAZI Germany) just not permanent ones.

Either way you effectively get the same result, I'm surprised the USSR didn't implement it.

Since you brought up nazi Germany.

It is said that haing too many splinter parties in the Weimar Republic lmaking it difficult to govern is one of the causes for the NSDAP's rise to power.
That is a reason why we know have a 5% hurdle. Which again is somewhat undemocratic.

I just say this to show that deciding on a system is not an easy choice and that having "undemocratic" restrictions can actually help maintain democracy in a strange way.
But I do agree that the proportional system is better.

My memory is sketchy and no doubt you learnt this in more detail but from what I recall it was the DNVP and Catholic Centre Party that gave Hitler the chancellorship and a coalition out-right majority (In order to keep out the left-wingers).

Sudden rapid change (e.g. monarchy -> PR Democracy) is never advisable, which is another flaw in plurality systems, causing rapid switches between right/left wing economics every 10 years or so.

So I disagree, you don't need a cut-off, just a strong constitution and party registration system.

as far as I remember (school was 12 years ago, I'm getting old :P) the problems was more that the republic lacked a strong government in the early 30s to solve the problems in those years, that in turn let the voters turn to more radical parties. The in turn led to several votes in a row where no solid majorties and therefore government could be found. The left and the conservatie parties didn't vote for Hitler for several years despite his party having the most seats.

In the end it was the president, Hindenburg, who gave Hitler the power even though there was a vote where all parties except the SPD voted for Hitler, the KPD politicians had already been captured or murdered.



It is also important to note, that if Weimar Republic had had a plurality system in it's last years the NSDAP might have won the absolute majority!

Plurality would have been the perfect system for Hitler/Stalin, it's pretty genius as you can have two parties that are virtually identical "take over" and mostly keep discontent regarding choice to a minimum.

Democratic regimes that use the plurality voting system (or derivatives) have many institutional characteristics/features/mechanisms/rules which separate them from autoritarian & totalitarian regimes and which clearly show how limited your comparison is. This is very basic political science stuff that I frankly cba to develop here. The literature on the subject is enormous in case you're interested.
Sorry to give you such an answer but I honestly do not have the time to start a massive discussion on the subject, your way of calling that voting system "just short" of a party dictatorship tells me a lot about how a discussion on the matter would go.
I'm not fond of the plurality voting system as it is found in the UK, I was just pointing out the reasoning behind it.
edit after you posted: like I said, your criticism of the system is valid (and I'm not defending the system!), but again your comparison is not. You're misrepresenting/incorrectly singeling out/simplifying the logics behind the different systems to make them seem comparable.

I didn't say they were identical systems, obviously plurality systems are far superior to dictatorships but the principles and reasoning behind it are the same; "Strong, decisive government".

The fact that nations using plurality systems "have many institutional characteristics/features/mechanisms/rules which separate them" is pretty irrelevant.

You still end up with a system where the "winner", the largest minority, has easy governance over the majority.

Supporting plurality systems means that in principle you support the same reasoning behind a dictatorship or a single party state. The only difference is you want to reserve the right to swap your dictators every X years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Strong minorities bring change. You cannot convince the vast majority of the population even with pure facts and the smallest logical steps.

915 000/31 = 29500
660 000/15 = 44000

the more votes you have, the cheaper a seat gets ?
the first seat looks damn expensive
weird system, bit too extrem

that always happens in the plurality voting system, pretty much a thing of probabilty or variance to be more exact.

damnit i knew i shouldnt have backed the Christian Party

The people complaining they couldn't vote are mugs. Yes there should have been more booths/papers/people/whatever but who the fuck turns up 30 mins before the closing time?!

I went during the day whilst I was out anyway. Took 10 minutes if that. In and out. Sorted..




Whiny prats.

I was the only person near the polling station, let alone in it.

There were a few people around when I went at 3ish. Enough to form a very small line, but you don't just feck off and come back later and then when it's time to count the votes throw a hissy fit saying you didn't get your say. If a shop closes at 5pm, you get there at 4:50 and don't manage to buy what you want, you don't shit on the doorstep do you?


... well, actually...

South East:
CON- 75 seats with 2,140,895 votes
LIB- 4 seats with 1,124,786 votes
LAB- 4 seats with 697,567 votes
GRE- 1 seats with 62,124 votes
UKIP- 0 seats with 177,269 votes

The system makes no sense at all.

Conservatives win 71 more seats than the Lib Dems with only slightly less than double the vote...

Labour win the same amount of seats as the Lib Dems with only slightly more than half the vote...

London:
LAB- 38 seats with 1,245,637 votes
CON- 28 seats with 1,174,568 votes

How can less than 100,000 votes more result in ten more seats.

National:
UKIP the fourth biggest party in the UK gets zero seats but DUP gets 8 on 168,216.
Northern Ireland holds so much power it's ridiculous, fortunately some of them don't even bother to turn up.

"GRE- 1 seats with 62,124 votes
UKIP- 0 seats with 177,269 votes"

lolwut ? logic behind ?

The Greens leader won the Brighton seat but throughout the rest of the country would only get ~<1,000.

UKIP were getting a few hundred-a few thousands per seat.

The Greens finished first in one of the constituencies (Brighton Pavillon) and therefore got the seat for that constituency. The UKIP never finished first in any constituency.

Sure it's a democracy, it's just you can't vote anywhere because they're full. And if you can, it doesn't result in any seats.

yeaaaaahh

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8670002.stm?ls

I think this was to be predicted. If labour are smart they'll offer electoral reform to the lib dems which I'd hope stops them siding with the tories.

No they can't, labour benefit the most from the current system. It is more likely the conservatives and lib dems will come to some sort of half way deal between them to gerrymander the system against labour and then call another general election to wipe them out.

There are quite a lot of Labour MPs who do support PR.

I think the Lib Dems will take a referendum on STV vs FPTP, and go for the home office (Clegg) and one of the economic posts for Cable (Perhaps get a post for Laws/Huhne/Teather too as they seem to be the popular Lib Dems).

Labour have ruined their chance of governing, I expect purposefully, by shunning the SNP/PC/SDLP and apparently Gordon Brown was less than respectful in a phone call with Clegg last night. It seems they may have decided to let the other two become unpopular through the inevitable savage cuts.

As for PR:
The problem for the left in FPTP is that the left vote is split between them and the right doesn't have this problem at all.

Conservatives + UKIP are the only credible right-wing parties and UKIP got less than 1,000,000 votes (Actually they did enough to cause the Conservatives to not get a majority this time!).

Labour + Lid Dems + the Nationalists (and Green) would all see a bigger share and have far more common ground between them.

So PR would actually ensure the right wing is "permanently" out of British government while keeping Labour in.

They would probably see a drop in the vote (Probably to equal Lib Dems) but the nation is predominantly left wing/centre left and I think most Labour party members are more tied to the principles of the party than the party itself.

I'm not sure the country is centre left exactly. I mean in the way that most voters don't have any sort of intellectual or philosphical basis on how they place their vote?

I know several previously solid labour voters who voted for UKIP or the BNP this time. These are people who would never ever vote Tory, but then they vote for parties that from a leftwards pov are far far worse. But they don't see any contradiction in that at all.

I often think the political parties are not on a straight line from left ot right, but on a circle.

Political Compass(.org)!

yep, the left/right stuff is oversimplifying things.
Becomes very apparent in a place like here with 5 different parties in the parliament.

just wanted to say that sometimes the radical left/right parties have more in common with each other than either with the center.

The BNP are centre-left economically, they are just also a bunch of authoritarian fascists.

They take their politics straight from National Socialism. Hitler and the Nazi's didn't care about the economy and left it to a Keynesian economist (Schacht who wasn't technically a Nazi).


I didn't include the BNP and parties I couldn't say due to ignorance (Christian party!) but they all got pathetic shares of the vote anyway.

I think you'd see an even bigger turn out for centre-left parties in the PR since a lot of the Tory votes were anti-Labour votes, people were just fed up due to all the happenings in the past 13 years (not all of which are Labours fault, such as the expenses) and they were the incumbent regime.

The Conservatives also positioned themselves further to the left in Political speak (though not really in policy, what policy?).

There was another protest in Trafalgar Square at 14:00 (I think), the website had posters with pie charts!

Feudalism is the way to go ...

i own about 150 square meters of ground.

wanna be my knight? you get a shelter and fine potatoes.

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if we just killed the 6,7bn retards on this planet, democracy would work just fine