You wouldn’t think there would be anything complicated in voting in an election. You just turn up at the polling station and fill in the ballot, right? Well, yes, as long as you have a stable home.
Currently my official residence is here in Darkest Somerset. As of next Monday, if all goes according to plan, I shall be resident in Wiltshire, in a different constituency. However, the deadline for registering your eligibility vote is tomorrow. As I’m still legally resident here, I can only vote here. Only I won’t be here on election day. So today I have been into the council offices and filled in a postal ballot request form. My ballot paper will now be posted to me, and I can post it back. Except I’m not 100% certain where I’ll be when they post it out. Contracts haven’t been exchanged yet. So I’m having the ballot sent here, because I’m fairly sure I’ll be back at least once between the ballots being sent out and polling day.
Yes, I’m being dogged about this. Voting matters.
Of course it doesn’t matter as much as it should. The BBC has an interesting web page that calculates how the election will turn out if the current polls are an accurate representation of how people will vote on election day. Using today’s Poll of Polls figures, this is what we get:
Labour: 28%, 280 seats
Conservative: 33%, 247 seats
Liberal Democrats: 29%, 94 seats
Others: 10%, 29 seats
Guess which of the main parties is most keen on electoral reform.
Note that the “others” are primarily Welsh and Scottish nationalists and the various parties unique to Northern Ireland, though the chart appears to show one seat in England going to an “other”.
I see also that even today’s YouGov poll, which gives the Lib.Dems. 33% of the vote, is not sufficient to topple to Conservative candidate here in Darkest Somerset. Therefore my vote on matters in as much as it will help show how unbalanced the system is.
The “Other” in London is actually George Galloway. The BBC model seems to assume that he keeps his seat regardless of what happens between the three main parties. Not strictly true, but a reasonable simplification under the circumstances. Likewise Dr Richard Taylor, the Independent MP for Wyre Forest is the grey dot on the border with Wales.
Ah, thank you! I was trying to explain for non-UK readers who might worry as to what those “other” parties were.
A lot of English people who suddenly got very excited about the democratic process are about to get suddenly very disappointed in it again in a couple of weeks… But they’re Lib Dem voters, so it’s not as if they’ll/we’ll actually go outside and smash something.
So are these percentages of the overall popular vote, and the seats the number of districts (or whatever the UK term is) where each party gets a majority of the local vote? Or are there further complications to this electoral process which I can barely begin to imagine?
It’s ‘first past the post’ in every constituency = electoral district. Winning candidate in each constituency goes to parliament, votes for non-winners in every constituency count for nothing at all, then whichever political party has a majority gets invited by the Queen (!) to form the next government. No proportional representation, or direct election of the PM, or anything sensible like that…
A good first step would be the replacement first-past-the-post voting with Instant Runoff Voting. (The “Hugo Award voting” system often inaccurately named the “Australian Ballot.”) Then you wouldn’t have winning candidates who are actively opposed by 65% of the voters in the district.
My worry is that I’m not going to be able to vote if I remain stuck in Japan for much longer. I applied for, and was granted, postal votes for the foreseeable future earlier this year when it became obvious that an election was due and that I’d be out of the country for much of the year. But to use that vote, I need to get home for long enough to get home and fill in the form. Our constituency is a Labour marginal, with the LibDems second at the last Westminster election, so my vote actually means something and I would like to use it.