IP: Tactical Voting in the UK National Election

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> 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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