h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Absolutely! Not at all! No problem! Thanks!



btw, off-topic, I've not heard back from job-bob, the Mao guy. I'll go ahead and splice in a few days if there's no word.

Was that cryptic for everyone else, or what!

Yes that should be fine, I mean we have told them and they have said they are fine with the entry being included.

Dumb American question: What is the 'first past the post' system? I could hazard a guess, but I'd like to hear it from someone who knows. Asking here seems quicker and easier than doing actual research.

'First past the post' is the simplest, but arguably not the fairest, electoral system. It means that the candidate who gets most votes in a constituency (voting district) wins, simple as that. There are no transferable votes, and there's no requirement for the winning candidate to get any particular percentage of the poll.

Crucially, there's also no requirement for the number of MPs a party gets to reflect the percentage of votes it got nationally. This has tended to work against the Liberal Democrats, whose candidates have often come second in a lot of constituencies. In recent years, they've regularly received around 15-20% of the votes cast around Britain, but ended up with only about 7 or 8 per cent of the MPs in Parliament.

So the alternate, 'PR' system mentioned in the Entry would be... 'Proportional Representation'?

Correct, although don't ask me to explain it or I'll start to whimper. It is a fairer system that works from the proportion of the votes cast in the country, but places MP's due to local voting.
Actually a form of PR is used in the UK european election, just to point it out.

Researcher PSG

I think you will find all the definitions and the fact that PR is used in the European and devolved governments is actually mentioned in the article. You gave me heart failure when I thought I'd left it out of the original article.

Hmmm, you're right. That was a bit daft of me, wasn't it? I've already sent it to the towers, but I'll get a note to Chris right away asking him to give me 40 lashes and take out the spurious footnote I added. The footnote explaining 'first past the post' can stay though, doncha think?

BTW, sorry about the heart failure.

Don't worry we used the wires from the video recorded to kick start it again.