Blame

[coalescent]

It's been a while since I felt so completely out of step with what polls and elections tell me is the national mood. A friend of mine just emailed the list of places that actually voted Yes to AV -- Hackney, Glasgow Kelvin, Islington, Haringey, Lambeth, Cambridge, Oxford, Southwark, Camden, Edinburgh Central -- which makes some sense of this,

Comments

[coalescent]

I hadn't seen that list but it gives me some small cheer as I'm Glasgow Kelvin.

Huzzah! I wondered.

there will be a referendum on Scottish Independence but by no means does it mean that it's a certainty that the Scots will vote to break away

Yes, from what I've been reading it seems fairly unlikely. Nervous-making all the same, given the other results yesterday. (The Conservatives gained councils! Which, I haven't looked, but I bet a bunch of them were due to good old FPTP vote-splitting effect...)

[surliminal]

It is devastatingly unlikely Sc will vote pro independence, this judged on anecdotal sample seems to me 100 & of the exLD and Lab voters in SC who voted SNP for first time this time, don't want independence. At All. They just didn't want to vote LD or Lab or Tory, and we had a viable alternative, which England lacked.

ALSo, as I said on Twitter, I am afraid you are vastly over compicating the issue here. UK mostly didn't CARE about AV (or, probably, PR), and those who voted, voted against it to annoy Nick Clegg. C;est ca.

[surliminal]

ps I remain bemused why peole under 30 or thereabouts seemed moved by this (AV) nd people over that age, and esp over 40 (like moi)cared very little. No pundit has explained this..

[lil_shepherd]

You mean the results of the last General Election didn't convince you that you (and I) are out of step with most of the people in this country? I've known that since the Thatcher days.

Not only are we out of step with most of the UK, but bits of the UK are out of step with each other. Scotland is turning its back on Labour, while Wales has turned towards it. The Conservatives remain very popular in England.

Peter Mandelson was saying last night that he knew AV would lose as soon as the campaign started because he, personally, figured that they would lose votes to 'No' negative campaigning and would need to start at least ten points ahead to stand a chance. 'Yes' actually started down on the polling and the situation just got worse.

[coalescent]

Last year, though, something like 60% of people voted in a way that I could understand, even if I didn't vote the exact same way. Which leads to a perception that 60% of people broadly feel the same way I do about things.

Plus, to the extent that I do recognise I and my friends are out at the end of a bell curve, most of the time it's an intellectual recognition. Sitting and watching the AV reports come in yesterday was visceral.

[strangedave]

As an Australian who lived under preferential voting for my entire life, I am also genuinely baffled. The faults of FPTP seem transparently obvious and huge, most of the claimed problems of preferential voting (people won't understand it! Too hard to count! too expensive!) transparently false (given we use it with no such issues), and the motivations of the major parties to oppose it for dishonest reasons obvious.

[coalescent]

Part of me would like to think, in a superior fashion, that in twenty years people in the UK will look back and perhaps understand what an enormous missed opportunity this was. But it probably won't happen, either because the understanding of electoral systems will never be there, or it will be overtaken by events and something will happen that makes the result seem sane, though we don't know it now.

[dalmeny]

Yes, I also found much of the UK debate to concentrate on bizarre cases I've never seen here in Australia.

But I note that when I did grow up in the UK, it was in or very near to Edinburgh Central.

[surliminal]

there was no sensible comparison to Oz because we don't have compulsory voting..

[kalorlo]

In my wider circle of acquaintances, there were a lot of people who abstained because they honestly didn't know what to vote for. And ones who voted no because they didn't understand the system or felt that the rest of the electorate just couldn't cope with the confusion.

(This included someone who was uncertain until they got to the polling booth - 3 voting papers and lots of confusion about how to fill them in and which box they were supposed to go in, not exactly helped by very bad lighting. So they voted no. Which I find incredibly depressing).

There were 800 votes in it in my constituency, which was pretty close. We were almost among the few and the purple. I did notice that the difference between for and against widens considerably as you move outwards from the centre of London.

I think Scottish independence would be a very interesting result, but I doubt it's going to happen.

[coalescent]

I did notice that the difference between for and against widens considerably as you move outwards from the centre of London.

Yes. It would be interesting to have more detailed demographic/geographical correlation with how people voted on this.

[celestialweasel]

This is the interesting map, you may have already seen it
http://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S191142AM2F

[andrewducker]

Thanks for that!

[kevin_standlee]

And you know, there are people I know who are regular Worldcon attendees and Hugo Award voters who have told me (approximately) that they wish the Hugos didn't have this complicated system so they could just mark an X because that's how voting is supposed to work. The fact that this means that you'd almost certainly get Hugo Award winners with only about 25% support, with 75% of the electorate disliking, means nothing to them. Elections mean One And Only One Choice and anything else is Too Complicated. Sigh.