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.

Scottish electoral mechanics are always interesting to watch. South of the border, most seats are either safe or two-way marginals. Three-way marginals are rare, and tend to disappear over the course of a few elections, the third party squeeze / ratchet effect caused by Duverger’s Law means that it becomes “irrational” as the economists put it to vote for the third place or below candidate. Yet in Scotland? They not only still have three way marginals, they also have some 4 way marginals. (more…)