I was reading the analysis for your constituency, and it seemed pretty reasonable, identifying the five candidates mostly likely to win the four seats, and identifying the fifth as their marginal choice for the last seat. What they missed was the big turnout for Sinn Fein this election, which I'll get back to. But the main point to me is that STV elections are predictable. It's the best part of it.
When we used to run student council elections with the same system, I made predictions, and always got five of six, or all six correct -- and if I was one off, it was always someone I guessed as being eliminated in the last round. We didn't use paper ballots -- we had software maintained by university staff, and had the ballot file released. But you never actually doubted the election results because they were so predictable. (Also because hacking a student election is pretty high risk/low reward for any party involved.) Weird things happen in FPTP elections that just don't with STV.
On the other hand, I can't imagine doing a hand count of paper ballots for STV. It sounds painful, especially when you have fractional transfer. Ugh. Good luck with that.
I am a little sad to hear you left one blank box. I always rated down to the end. We invented a new award, Most Hated Person on Campus, for the person with the most last place votes. Of course, last place votes can never be counted, unless they do something really weird like add them after the candidate has been elected. This was a fun statistic, because you find out the people who are most polarizing. I'm on that list too, but only on the Mock Election software test -- as a grad student, I wasn't eligible to run for real office!
Oh right, back to Sinn Fein. I was thinking of relating that to something in US Politics (gomen ne): socialism. Bernie Sanders styles himself a democratic socialist, and that freaks the fuck out of some people. Even some long-time Democrats. But they're all older people. They tend to go on about Fidel Castro and how many people starved under socialism as a failed system. And all of the young people are like, so what? Denmark is doing fine. Anyway, I'm wondering if a similar dynamic is at play here. Dartz mentioned earlier on, "Sinn Fein are just that bit too sinister." Do younger people not really care about the past involvement of the party? They were involved with the IRA but that was like thirty years ago or three hundred or something.
Immigration is good. California is on the keeping a steady state population because of foreign immigrants; meanwhile domestic emigration is getting people really mad about Californians coming to their town in Texas. In Boise, Idaho, they want to trash their own city so Californians stop coming. I was once refused service at a Wyoming restaurant because I was Californian. And yet in California itself, only the shrinking right wing seems to mind immigration.
When we used to run student council elections with the same system, I made predictions, and always got five of six, or all six correct -- and if I was one off, it was always someone I guessed as being eliminated in the last round. We didn't use paper ballots -- we had software maintained by university staff, and had the ballot file released. But you never actually doubted the election results because they were so predictable. (Also because hacking a student election is pretty high risk/low reward for any party involved.) Weird things happen in FPTP elections that just don't with STV.
On the other hand, I can't imagine doing a hand count of paper ballots for STV. It sounds painful, especially when you have fractional transfer. Ugh. Good luck with that.
I am a little sad to hear you left one blank box. I always rated down to the end. We invented a new award, Most Hated Person on Campus, for the person with the most last place votes. Of course, last place votes can never be counted, unless they do something really weird like add them after the candidate has been elected. This was a fun statistic, because you find out the people who are most polarizing. I'm on that list too, but only on the Mock Election software test -- as a grad student, I wasn't eligible to run for real office!
Oh right, back to Sinn Fein. I was thinking of relating that to something in US Politics (gomen ne): socialism. Bernie Sanders styles himself a democratic socialist, and that freaks the fuck out of some people. Even some long-time Democrats. But they're all older people. They tend to go on about Fidel Castro and how many people starved under socialism as a failed system. And all of the young people are like, so what? Denmark is doing fine. Anyway, I'm wondering if a similar dynamic is at play here. Dartz mentioned earlier on, "Sinn Fein are just that bit too sinister." Do younger people not really care about the past involvement of the party? They were involved with the IRA but that was like thirty years ago or three hundred or something.
Immigration is good. California is on the keeping a steady state population because of foreign immigrants; meanwhile domestic emigration is getting people really mad about Californians coming to their town in Texas. In Boise, Idaho, they want to trash their own city so Californians stop coming. I was once refused service at a Wyoming restaurant because I was Californian. And yet in California itself, only the shrinking right wing seems to mind immigration.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto