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Tuesday, June 09, 2009

How the votes are distributed in d'hondt 

Looking at how the system actually works on real data - and it is clear what a narrow squeak it was in the Southeast of England with our second seat. We came very close to a Tory gain from us. Doing some calculations with a higher vote share for us shows we would need to raise our vote by nearly 60% to get an extra seat if other parties stayed stable.


Table shows the calculation. Method: top line is actual votes cast for each party that got a seat. Second line of table is this actual vote divided by two. Third line is the original actual vote divided by three. And so on. There are ten seats in Southeast England so we need to list out the ten highest numers in this table. That gives the seats allocation.





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# posted by Edis @ 1:00 pm
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Sunday, June 07, 2009

Still a lottery for tonights counts 

The basic thing to remember about First Past The Post is that it is a ‘party list system’ with the number on the list limited to one. The crude and rigid proportional system we enjoy for the Euro elections has a serious defect. When it comes to determining the last seat, one competitive name left on each list, it becomes in effect ‘first past the post’ with the winner being the party ahead relative to the others. By this stage normally nobody will have a full quota of votes so it will be the residues that decide it.

Something to remember if we are biting our nails as to whether one of our champions gets the last seat going in any electoral area. If there is a lot of scattering of votes including solid but not spectacular success ‘minor’ parties not quite making up a quota it could become as much of a lottery as a multi-competitive Westminster seat.

The last seat in a larger region could go to a party with a pretty low level of support.

Of course this could be mitigated if we had a transferable system…

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# posted by Edis @ 10:03 am
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