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

The Majority of Scots people are not, according to polls, ready to vote for independence, so it don't bother them. As soon as the SNP gets a majority in the Scottish Parliament they have promised to hold a referendum.

Yes - but now that we have all but exhausted their oil supply, can't we become independent from them?

Cynic!

With regard to Dual Mandates (MP/MSP) and the two paycheck thing, the first salary is received in full, but the second salary is abated to one third. This is the same system as is used if someone is an MP and MEP and is the standard practice across Europe.

It is posssible to hold such a dual mandate because it is seen as a democratic right to stand for election - unless you are a peer, a royal, a convict, a bankrupt or insane . However a number of the parties have intimated that they will no longer select candidates for one election if that person is standing for or a representative in, another assembly.

Does it sound like I spout this all day long?

Going back to the dual-membership issue; the vast majority of Welsh Assembly members who are also MPs at Westminster will be standing down at the (Westminster) election.
I am a great believer in devolution, and believe we have been short-changed here in Wales with a large talking shop in Cardiff Bay.
As we have no tax raising nor law making powers the decisions taken in Cardiff tend to be treated with contempt by Westminster. e.g. the Welsh Assembly ruled that Wales would be GM crop-free, yet the Westminster government has yesterday, given licences to three Welsh farms to hold GM crop trials ...
This is why we still need Welsh MPs at Westminster UNTIL such time that we have law-maing powers in Cardiff.

On the subject of referenda and Regional Assemblies:
The areas that were mooted were never going to be popular as they did not follow the accepted regional boundaries. The London Government believes that the 'South West' includes everywhere from Cornwall to Wiltshire or Gloucestershire. The cultural, historical, social and political nature of this area is so diverse that it could never form a cohesive unit, aside from which the distances involved mean it is roughly equivalent to defining the entire area between London and York as a 'Region'. I imagine similar problems arise in other areas (imagine making Lancashire and Yorkshire a region!)

Incidentally, there is a reasonably strong movement for devolution in Cornwall, which sees itself as a country outside England, not a county (indeed it had never been legally defined as one until the 1890s). This is never reported in the national media, though, another example of how the Westcountry is dismissed by London and the North. Sadly, the issue rarely even gets coverage on local television these days, since we were all 'Carltonised'.

Cornwall at least retains a specific identity, but for so much of the UK any arbitrary division of regions is a problem (look at Northern Ireland, the 6/26 split is laden with historical and cultural problems, reagrdless of any sectarian issues). In The Scottish Parliament, East Lothian does not count as part of the Lothians, but is seen as 'South of Scotland' even though it's further north than Midlothian - go figure!

So where would you draw the lines then? London, the bits just outside that want to be London (Surrey, Essex), Cornwall, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the rest?

Please note, this is the extent of my English Geography, rather than any actual suggestion

Well, I can only speak with any weight on my own region, the Westcountry, in which I would include Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset. Other regions *might* be West of England (Gloucestershire to Cheshire), West Midlands (Warwickshire, Staffordshire etc.), East Midlands (Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Rutland etc.), East Anglia (Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire), Home Counties (those S.E. counties surrounding, but not including, London), South (Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire etc.), North West (Lancashire, Cumbria), Yorkshire (big enough to be a region in itself) and Northumbria (the far north east about which I'm ashamed to say I know very little!) As I say, as a Devonian I could be committing some terrible attrocities in that list!

Hmm - does 'Lancashire' in this case cover both Manchester and Liverpool?

I think South Cheshire (v. posh) would be happy with 'West of England' but North Cheshire (eg Warrington) would fit better with Lancashire. Northumbria would surely have to go in with Yorkshire or possibly Cumbria.

What do people think for about Derbyshire et al?

Do these have to follow county boundaries?

As always, at the risk of sounding impertinent (glib, facile, insincere, iconoclastic, etc) I must tell you, all of the above reminds me of Risk the board game - where, to an anal retentive like myself - the borders and boundaries seemed pretty iffy and unrealistic. The game always frustrated me because all my knowledge of geography and politics was rendered useless. The game-makers compounded true 'nations' together in a very arbitrary way so that the 'state nations' (as opposed to the real 'nation states') were of more equal size on the game board. A Mars version would have been more realistic and less confusing to someone hell bent on global domination...
(I think Risk inspired the EU concept)

The American political model, with representation by population in the 'commons' house of assembly, is balanced by equal respresentation (2 elected from each State) in the Senate. It actually makes sense.

Ooo, you might have a point there. If we split the UK up along the lines of some popular board game (Diplomacy perhaps) then no one can complain that political decisions have been made. Hmmm.

Don't know 'Diplomacy' - is that the UK version of 'Risk' (which seems a more American term) where you conquer neighboring state nations by rolling dice and moving army pieces to outflank and outnumber competitors. Less than a real 'war game' but more than Parcheesie...

Meanwhile, back on the subject of British elections - is there a universal franchise - or do the exclusions someone listed above for 'running/standing' also apply to voting? Is it a paper ballot? Hand marked? In a private booth?

I think the exclusions are most of those listed above (I guess bankrupts can still vote, just not stand). The ballots are still paper hand marked with a good old fashioned cross in ink - the only thing on the ballot being a list of candidates and box next to them to put your mark. Private booth, mark, fold and pop into the ballot box.
The count is still also done by hand usually at a town hall in the constituancy, mostly by people who work for the local council (volunteers but they'll receive a small sum for the work). As for the count, first job is tallying the ballots with the recorded number of voters for the area. When everyone is satisfied the number of ballots is correct then you've got to sort out the ballots - spoiled, non spoiled. Then you get to split the ballots out into the various party votes and start counting into piles of however many you've been told.
Eventually you'll get through the lot and the candidates reprasentatives will agree with the returning officer that the results are fair and accurate. At this point the result is announced and the counters can go home. (or at least that is my memory from when I did it).

None of your fancy punch-vote machines here boyo. The voting sequence...

A week or two before the election, you normally get a card through the door that says where your poling station is. If not, either you ain't on the electoral roll or you've moved recently. (You get the same card for general, local and european elections).
On voting day (always a Thursday, of course) you haul your lazy a***e along to the polling station. Usually this is a co-opted local school or town hall (I assume this is the same in most countries. One fun thing about June 7th - most school exams are on at that time. This is going to cause some problems).
At the entrance to the poling station there will usually be several party representatives, who generally act as greeters and tell you where the appropriate booth is. All terribly civil, donchaknow.
You go to the appropriate room (depends on where you live etc). Someone at a desk checks your card (if you have it) or otherwise gets your ID. Your name is scored off the list, and your ballot paper(s) is/are given to you. Security is, shall we say, lax.
You go into a small booth knocked up from some plywood. (Does anyone kno if these are made up each time or stored somewhere? They always seem to be terribly new-looking to me. Anyway.) In the booth will be a stub of a pencil on some string. You put an "X" in the box of your choice, after making sure you have spotted the difference between the Liberal Democrats and the Literal Democrats (to take a previous example). Try to resist the urge to write something rude in the boxs of the other candidates.
A variation of this is PR elections (Scottish Parliament etc.) Then you get to scribble numbers on the ballot paper, which got up to two feet long sometimes.
Take ballot paper(s) and fold them according to preference. Stick them in the slot in the battered black metal box on your way out.
Go home and watch election coverage. Pine for the days when Peter Snow illustrated the results by waving a big cardboard arrow about.
Realise that your vote probably counted for nothing thanks to the first-past-the-post system (General and local elections). Repeat after 4 years.

Franchise. Can't remember if prisoners have the vote. They can certainly be elected though. (Case in point, Tommy Sheriden, Scottish Socialist Party. He got elected as a Glasgow local counciler some years ago, even though he was in prison at the time for Poll Tax reasons).
I'm fairly sure the Monarch can't vote. I don't know if the exclusion reaches further down the aristocracy though.

You can have this conversation here at the moment, but once the general election is in full swing, we'll have to move you over to the BBC discussion areas. But full explanations, directions, etc will be given closer to the time, okay? The BBC have been flooded by spam campaigning messages in the past, and this is the way that we can avoid this on h2g2. More details closer to the time though.

Thanks. Peta.

Hmmm. Well that's us told then.
I wouldn't have thought that discussing election mechanics would have upset Auntie that much. And what happens if other threads start drifting onto this subject as well? Will they all be moved?
I think to hear a can of worms opening up on this one. Heigh ho.

I hope we can keep this conversation sufficiently politically neutral and prodemocracy to avoid the purdah period, but that will depend on all our fellow researchers.

To pick up on a few pints:

Thhe Additional member System, used for the UK devolved assemblies, avoids that complex number scribbling, which is a feature of single transfeable voting. AMS balances the votes on the second (regional) paper against the results of the first (consituency) election to provide an overall balance within the region. So, for instance in the first vote in the Scottish parliamentary elections, Labour received approx 70% of the seats with only 30+% of the votes (I'll post the exact figures tomorrow to be scrupulously fair). the result of the second vote was to close the votes/seats gap down to between 1 and 10% for all the parties or groupins.

Tommy Sheridan (Scottish Socialist Party) has been convicted and imprisoned for civil rather than criminal offences (eg arrested while protesting against poll tax and nuclear weapons, rather than mugging old ladies). This and the fact that not one MSP complained about him being so convicted means that he has not encountered any formal repercussion.

Standing for elction actually has wider crieria than voting - altough it may seem weird. Anyone resident in the EU, a Commonwealth country or the Irish Republic can stand in a UK election.

...just wind me up and off I go!

Freudian typo - make that a few *points*

Oh, and BTW, the plywood booths, like the ballot boxes, are aeons old and stored in a vault somewhere.

Oh yeah - there wasn't any number scribbling was there? Shows how good my memory is. Either that, or I really wasn't paying attention at the time. Oops.
Anyway, how complex is numbering your preferences anyway?
(thinks "Florida")
Actually, I see the point.

Rats, I was hoping to start a argument on the superiority of STV vs AMS, but given the Scottish governmental setup, AMS is probably better for this.
Anyone else got a view on this? *ducks anticipating hail of statistics*

You got STV in the elections for the London Assembley and Mayor.
Number the ballots in order of choice (1 highest preference going down). The thing with STV is that it's supposed to be fair in that over 50% of the voters vote for the winning candidate.
(Yet again having counted votes in a student election and seen how STV works...).