Voting TaKtiX

I get confused following US elections, especially for the House. Mostly because of the weird borders they’ve gerrymandered in order to ensure as many safe seats as possible. Lovely. Also, they don’t seem to do a ’swingometer’ style analysis, at all. It’s all about current polling data, very little public psephology. Fortunately, blogging allows all of us to exhibit our random obsessions, and Iain Weaver has prepared a fairly good swingometer analysis for the US 2006 elections. Definately a handy resource to refer to on results night.

And yes, I keep forgetting to post stuff. Sorry about that, I seem to have lost my anger recently, which is weird given the amount of stupidity around out there at the moment. I have however been in contact with a few potential contributors, so when I get things sorted out we might actually see the site moving again. Also? I hate rich text editors, no idea how I managed to turnt eh damned thing on. Ah well.

The Boundary Commission has almost completed their review of constituency boundaries. Anthony Wells of UK Polling Report has run an analysis of the new seats and completed a very excellent guide to the next election, with target seat list for the three main parties and a breakdown of the notional 2005 results and swings needed for each seat in the country. Scary amount of work there, but very impressive. There’s a comment box for every seat, and he welcomes contribution from anyone with local knowledge or facts he may have missed. An excelent resource that I suspect will get a lot of use over the next few years. As for Tooting?

From the 214 seats the Conservatives notionally hold on the new boundaries they would need to win an extra 112 to get the 326 seats necessary for a majority. In order of marginality, the 112th most winnable seat for the Tories is Tooting.

Information, as they say, is power.

There are a large number of oft-repeated tropes about electoral systems and the impact of any change away from the Simple Majority system we use for Westminster. Most of them are either lies, fallacies or half-truths. I’ve written about electoral systems a lot over the last year, but I can’t cover anything. Fortunately, Paul Davies is paid to write about electoral systems, and he’s pretty good at it as well. He’s written a series of articles over the last week debunking the main myths, and they’re definately well worth a read.

A lot of these myths are based on examples from systems that no sane people are advocating for the various UK governments, and thus should be still-born. Unfortunately, they’re not, and it seems that there will always be people that think that shouting ‘look at Israel’, ‘look at Italy’ or ‘PR gave us Hitler’ are valid arguments against electoral reform.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a sensible, adult debate about crime, punishment and rehabilitation without it devolving to the mudslinging about being “soft on criminals” that we sometimes see stuck as labeled on anyone who thinks the current system is palpably failing?
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Well, that’s was a surprise; wasn’t folling too closely the cabinet formation, then this turned up in my feedreader. Carl Bildt talking about his appointent to the Govt oh his blogspot blog. He’s been quite a good read for sometime; although there are no comments, the posts can be quite incisive. Hmm, wonder if Milibland can learn from actually being interesting?

Unity mails me pointing to his latest article here:

The Police raid two houses. In one they discover “a record haul of chemicals used in making home-made bombs”, in the other the find “rocket launchers, chemicals, and a nuclear or biological suit”.

It’s a terrorist plot, right? It’ll be all over the national news in a shot?

Wrong on both counts, apparently… because the two men caught with this nifty little haul of equipment aren’t Muslims, they’re BNP supporters, one of whom stood for election in Colne only last May.

Um, rocket launchers and chemical suits? Leon, Jamie, Fridgemagnet and bat020 have more.

A politician says something not at all offensive about running his consituency surgeries, and a policeman gets reassigned, both are screamsheet headlines. BNP members get arrested in an apparent bomb plot conspiracy? Where’s the headlines?