Euro elections in the UK

[djm4_lj]

I've seen remarkably little discussion of the Euro elections even amongst the budding psephologists on my friends lists, so here's a quick reminder that the elections operate a closed party list proportional representation system counted by the D'Hondt method. You get one vote - it's not Single Transferable Vote - and votes are counted in a succession of rounds where each party's tally is divided by one more than the number of MEPs they elected in earlier rounds. There's a neat video illustrating the concept here (I'm not endorsing their conclusion that you should vote Green to stop the BNP [1], but it's by far the best graphical representation of the D'Hondt voting system I've seen. Hat-tip to matgb - I also generally agree with his assessment of D'Hondt as "...one of the few electoral systems I've encountered I consider to be worse than the one we use for Westminster, when you get critics attacking 'PR', they're having a go at this pile of arse, which no one sane suggests for Westminster (and Labour had to force through the Lords after a lot of opposition)".)

In London, the party probably closest to getting an extra MEP is the Lib Dems, and that appears to be backed up by our canvassing, but Mandy Rice Davies applies. I would say that, especially as I know both our top two candidates personally (Jonathan Fryer better than Sarah Ludford, but I like and admire them both) and am a lifelong Liberal. I'd far rather you made up your own mind about who to vote for than decided based on who I told you to vote for - I'm assuming the vast majority of my friends list will do so anyway. I can however confirm that if you need and extra quiz team member, Jonathan Fryer's your man. ;-)

Assuming you haven't already voted already, polls open tomorrow at 7am and close at 10pm.

[1] Any attempt to vote tactically under D'Hondt tends to suffer from the assumption that almost everyone else will vote the way they did last time, and you're going to be the crucial tactical voter. In elections where tactical voting can be a high percentage of the total vote, this can seriously skew the result (it's a problem with FPTP, too). The problem for someone trying to stop the BNP (or any other party) is that you've no easy way of judging whether (say) the Greens will just miss out on one MEP or (say) Labour will just miss out on three. This is made even more complicated by the recent volatility in the polls, which means that all three of the main parties may have a vote substantially down on what they usually do. You only get one vote in D'Hondt, and you have to nail your colours to the mast and stick with them. Unlike in STV, if you guess wrong and vote for Labour when they don't quite make the third MEP, you don't then get to switch your vote to the Greens to help push them over and get one.

(Edit: - thanks hfnuala!)

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The movie I imagine for D'Hondt has the bar chart as shown, and horizontal lines showing "number of seats won". The lines start out very far apart, so it appears no-one has any seats, and get closer together until the right number of seats have been allocated.

[djm4]

So, if I've understood correctly, on the graph I linked to you end up with three horizontal lines, equally above the x-axis and with the bottom one the height of the BNP block (as the BNP block is just higher than the Greens). To count the number of seats for each party, count the number of lines that intersect a block - three each for Labour and Conservative, and one each for the BNP and Lib Dems. Is that correct?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yes, sounds exactly right. So each "round" is where a line crosses the top of a bar.

minor quibble

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

The tally is divided by number of seats won plus 1. As far as I can tell, all PR systems have to have a sneaky plus 1 in there somewhere.

And I'd urge people to vote Green because they want more Green MEPs, but I would say that :)

Re: minor quibble

[djm4]

Oh yes, I'm very much in favour of people and parties they support. That's certainly what I'll be doing; if the BNP gets a seat as a result, so be it.

Re: minor quibble

[steer.livejournal.com]

The reason for the "sneaky" plus one is that electoral officers find it hard to divide by zero.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

STV has many of the same weird tactical paradoxes.

[djm4]

Really? I know it has a few different ones (which as ciphergoth is always quick to point out is one reason for preferring Condorcet for single-member elections) but I don't find the same problems I see with D'Hondt.

I've also found that in STV elections I've much less desire to vote tactically. I generally feel that my vote's doing the best job it can if I fote, in preference order, for the candidates I want to see elected.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

... I find similarly with most STV elections - the tactical calculations frequently become effectively undoable in any robust way, so listing the candidates in order of preference is often your only rational option.

The exception is when I want to give some sympathy to a complete no-hoper candidate - say there's someone that I want to feel encouraged and loved, but don't want elected (this is not unusual in situations where I know the candidates personally, which is generally the case when I actually cast a valid vote). So long as I'm sure they will be eliminated early, I'll give them my 1, getting my vote to do a little extra work on the side before it goes on to influence who does get elected.

[djm4]

I have to admit, if you want a voting system that allows you to express a voting intention of 'I don't want to hurt my friend's feelings, but I wouldn't trust him to run five yards downhill without tripping over his own shoelaces so for god's sake don't actually elect him', you may be waiting some time. ;-)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Are you implying that there are some interpersonal issues which are not really amenable to resolution through voting, no matter what system you use? Mais, c'est l'anarchie! :-)

[djm4]

I'm not sure - maybe an LJ poll would resolve the confusion?

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Yes! That should work. My, but the Internet is so useful for sensitively settling polarised and highly-political issues!

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Here's one example (from a clearly biased source, but still reasonable).

[djm4]

Yes, that's the argument I know, too. I'm yet to be convinced that it occurs much in real STV elections (although I admit it's impossible to know for certain) because people's preferences cluster in a more predictable and transitive manner. STV in single-member constituencies is awful at delivering proportionality (although there are other reasons to like it), but works a lot better in multi-member constituencies. That site's claim that STV inevitably leads to two-party dominance is bogus, by the way - they cherry-pick elections where two parties always have dominated. It's never led to two-party dominance in any student elections where I've seen it run, nor in the Scottish local government.

They're a bit rose-tinted about their own system, I note. The Achilles heel of Range Voting is the candidate who gets a small (fsvo 'small') number of very high approval ratings. They try to address that with the quota system, but they're very hazy on how that's actually going to work, claiming to have an 'improved' system where they're not specific about the details. They treat this as though it were an insignificant detail, but it really, really isn't. The fine detail of the quota tells you how susceptible Range Voting is to the sort of attack they launch on STV - if it's based on a percentage of the vote, then it's trivial to construct an example where a few people declining to vote for a popular candidate they like lets in one with a much lower total vote but higher approval rating (who just achieves the now lower quorum).

Don't get me wrong - I quite like Range Voting and might even support it in the right circumstances. But the authors of that site aren't subjecting their own system to the same rigorous scrutiny they subject other systems to.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

I'm not actually partial to range voting at all -- I'm just convinced that STV makes it hard to figure out how to vote if a favored third party starts to have good chances of winning.