Psephology for beginners

Here's some data from the Scottish Elections:

	Constituency%	List%	Difference%	Predicted seats (from list vote)	Actual seats	Difference
SNP	32.9	31.0	-1.9	40	47	7
Labour	32.2	29.2	-3.0	38	46	8
Conservatives	16.6	13.9	-2.7	18	17	-1
Lib Dem	16.2	11.3	-4.9	15	16	1
Green	0.2	4	3.8	5	2	-3
Total	98.1	89.4	-8.7	115	128	13

As you can see, tactical voting meant that for the constituency vote the larger parties were given a boost of a few percent. The Greens were the only party with successful candidates who actually got a boost in the Proportional part of the vote. In addition 11% of the population "wasted" their vote by voting for a party that didn't get any representatives at all. In fact as the total on the far right shows, 13 seats "should" have gone to other parties such as the Scottish Socialists, British Nationalists or Scottish Christians.

The system clearly favours the large parties. I'd be interested to know how the lists would have come out if they were country-wide rather than regional. I _think_ the end result would be more proportional, but I have other things to do tonight. Of course, depending on your opinions you might think that keeping the SSP,BNP, etc. out of government was a feature rather than a bug...

In other news

I downloaded NVu in order to make the table. Incredibly simple and it produced nice clean code. Next time I need to make a static web page I'll be playing with it some more.

More election thoughts

Because of the final result, and the fact that nobody is going to do a deal ith the Conservatives, whoever wants to form a government will need _everyone else_ to join them. You need 65 seats to reach a majority, which means either SNP + Lib Dem + Green or Labour + Lib Dem + Green + Margo MacDonald (ex-SNP, now only independent MSP).

The chances of Margo going with Labour are, one assumes, quite slim. The chances of her going with the SNP are presumably even slimmer, what with them having kicked her out. Luckily for them, they don't need her. They do need the Greens and the Lib Dems though, so one suspects there'll be an interesting series of discussions going on right now...