UK Election Tech Handbook
electiontechhandbook.uk
electiontechhandbook.uk
Every one has a bias at least they own it. As long as they are not pretending to be unbiased I'm fine with it.
Free exchange of ideas is my ultimate goal but the average voter doesn't share this goal, they get their information from "authoritative" sources such as "their" party or the mass media.
We did have a vote to bring in the alternate vote but every major party (left and right) and media outlet (left and right) slammed it as anti-democratic.
We can't depend on the average voter to get informed and vote representatively because the system intentionally prevents this.
If you mean switch from FPTP to some form of RCV for executive positions or proportional representation (PR) for assemblies, then I agree.
For RCV, I strongly prefer Approval Voting, which best balances fairness and simplicity.
But we'll get the most benefits from PR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...
Approval Voting would be simple, easy to understand and a vast improvemnet.
Yup don't really care what the new vote is. I live in Northern Ireland where we have single transferable vote I think its great.
It hasn't fixed our two party system but I have noticed a dramatic change in the way people think about voting.
For the most part people no longer feel the need to vote against some one and now vote for who they want, I have also noticed people seem to feel their vote is worth more as a result.
Almost nobody gets into politics without a reason. Nobody is going to put effort into something without an objective to achieve. Nobody is unbiased. And trying to treat good and bad ideas the same way, or honest and dishonest people, is doomed to encourage the bad to drive out the good.
When all the belligerents, err aspirants, certify the results, then it's probably good enough.
(disclosure, I helped initiate the doc)
In this case - FPTP - the tactics are to identify the (usually two) candidates that most plausibly could win in your district and pick from those, ignoring all other candidates. If Apples win with 310 votes and Bears had 290 votes, those Apple-haters who gave Cheese 60 votes to come in a distant third are kicking themselves.
For many (millions of?) voters in the UK the idea is to achieve a specific outcome on a single issue (Brexit) which is not actually on the ballot at all, so tactics come into deciding how to vote so as to make your preferred outcome more likely to occur.
If something interests you, you could offer to help the developers involved.
(disclosure: I am involved in the project)
# Tech
Our site handled a lot of traffic at the last snap election. 2.6m unique visitors in the 5 weeks before the vote, a crazy number during the last 48 hours.
To accommodate this we have a static site builder, with our data in Google Sheets. We monitor github for changes, Sheets for changes, and auto-generate the site. The site builder translates the Google Sheet into JSON.
This then pushes a Cache Purge instruction to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is configured to cache everything at the edge for hours, but in the browser for minutes... meaning we serve virtually nothing from the origin server, and over 99% of reqs from Cloudflare caches.
Doing this meant we had to design everything to just be static HTML and JS. It works well.
We communicate in Slack, use MailChimp for email mailouts, and have a GSuite account with some alias emails.
# What is the org like?
No-one is working on this full-time, but we have a team of ~5 people who all do just a little. It's no burden for this to exist, and the costs are virtually $0 outside of the election period.
The only cost we have is MailChimp during the election period, so we will be crowdfunding to allow us to keep people informed about changes, etc.
We are very much a small group of individuals from wildly different backgrounds and political beliefs who happen to have a common goal but for different reasons. We aren't trying to convince each other about "why" to do this work, only that the goal makes it worth it even though different individuals have different goals.
# Why am I involved?
It is not as if I necessarily believe that the Tories are vile, Labour is better, etc. (Though some in the team do express this.)
What I personally believe is that we should have proportional representation, and that mass tactical voting is an important step towards progressive candidates and progressive parties before we can reach a full PR system. Mass tactical voting applies pressure and encourages progressive behaviour.
My contribution then, is towards fairer election systems.
I was about to pick up a new contract, but now the election has been announced I'm quite interested in joining up to help with some projects like this.
If I can find some interesting/impactful projects I'm happy volunteering full time up to the election.
By the way, how is your site promoted?
Purely organic for the most part.
We have 2 or 3 people on the team who work social media, and TBH this is what the majority of the work is.
They may draft a press release, and send it via email to a few contacts. But for the most part, this is extremely unfunded and independent work, with a few people manually writing all of the social media posts and replies.
This time they're discussing actually cut and pasting templates from Google Docs, so it's improving!
FFTP is biased in favour of the party with the largest share of the vote, or perhaps another way of putting is that the relationship between vote share and number of MPs is not linear.
And beyond this, the British electoral system has consistently favoured Labour for decades (as Boundary Commission changes fall behind demographic change and population movement)
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boundaries-review-bias-...
I can't see anything that disputes the claim "The Tories are the clearest benefactors" of the UK's electoral system.
The author makes a repeated assertion that boundaries are currently biased "15 seats" against the Tories, but I cannot tell where this number is coming from.
The fact remains that the Tories have won the last few elections by receiving a disproportionate number of MPs relative to their vote share. Moreover, polling suggests that they will continue to have the highest vote share.
Have you considered adding elections when the Conservatives didn't win the most votes to your data set?
1. The Conservative party has proposed some new boundaries.
2. The new boundaries would have given the Conservatives 15 extra seats, according to the 2017 vote share.
3. The current boundaries are very out of date.
4. The new boundaries follow stricter rules about constituency size variation.
5. The new boundaries lead to a reduced number of MPs.
6. 3-5 imply that the new boundaries are fairer than current boundaries.
7. 2 and 6 imply that the current boundaries are biased 15 seats towards Labour.
The hole is in statement 6; points 3 and 5 are irrelevant to the question of fairness and point 4 is weak as there are plenty of ways to gerrymander the boundaries whilst equalising constituency size. What's "utterly bizarre" is that Rentoul expects many people to swallow such a flawed argument.
I would say that not one person who is volunteering, giving up time and skill, or employed to work on anything listed on there... is without bias.
There is no person or group working on anything to do with politics and cited in that doc, that does not have an agenda of their own.
Of course the Conservatives claim that the evidence itself is biased. I am not joking.
If it didn't do that it wouldn't do anything. Unless I've missed the point.
> My contribution then, is towards fairer election systems.
if this is the case the site should allow you to select who you want to win, instead of being "UNITE AGAINST THE TORIES"
There are plenty of places where voting Tory stands essentially no chance of resulting in a Tory being elected, especially in this election. So then you need to figure out who could win, and what the effect on prospects for a future Tory government would be for those options - and vote for the one most likely to lead to overall Tory victory, not for the Tory on the ballot.
The institution is in some sense not partisan but I guess the political makeup of the people there is somewhat like HN (but applied to U.K. rather than us politics), maybe a bit more left leaning and less libertarian leaning.
If you’re interested in getting involved or using your skills but you aren’t really sure what you Gould go to one of their events. They’re in Whitechapel and are pretty friendly.
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"Talking Europe connects citizens having an opposing political view - and living in a different country!
Our mission is to create a European public sphere. We want to foster democracy and cohesion in Europe."
I'm also personally affiliated with https://ragtag.org/ which is a bunch of volunteers trying to make said resources and tools.
Yeah, sure, hand over all your political planning to Facebook.