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IP: Tactical Voting in the UK National Election
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2001 11:00:09 -0400
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 15:21:10 +0100 To: farber () cis upenn edu From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell () newcastle ac uk> Dave: Our long drawn-out national election campaign here in the UK, all four weeks of it, is at last nearing its end. One "innovation" which has had quite a lot of publicity here is a web-site to facilitate tactical voting: http://www.tacticalvoter.net/ You may recall that the system here is that the government is formed by the party that gets the most members of parliament elected. (I'm missing out some minor subtleties, the role of the Queen, etc! :-) Moreover, there are in England three main parties, two of which (Labour and Liberal Democrat) cooperate somewhat, at least in opposing the third party (Conservative). Lacking any form of proportional representation (at UK level), a lot hinges on the "marginal constituencies" - hence tactical voting (amongst Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters), a term and a concept which may or may not be familiar to you and your domestic IPers. Anyway, it's all explained in the above web-site, which provides means whereby people who want to vote for Labour say, but who live in a constituency where Labour has little chance of winning but Liberal Democrat might, can twin with someone elsewhere who has the opposite problem, so to speak. (The background agenda is a campaign to reform the election process.) The tacticalvoter.net site strikes me as a rather interesting application of the Internet to elections, though quite how large an effect it will have on the result of the election, and whether/how anyone will ever manage to quantify this, remains to be seen. Cheers Brian -- Dept. of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell () newcastle ac uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
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