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!)