Long Election Night

[davidn]

I think that this is the first time that I've stayed up to watch the results of the UK elections coming in - ironically, being five hours behind the country now helps with that, because they've been at it for about a quarter of a day now and one tenth of the available seats have been declared. The exit polls seemed to indicate that it was going to go pretty much as expected - the Conservative party getting a lot more seats but nobody having a majority.

Highlights so far have included:

• Just about everyone from the BBC News ever coming back for a gigantic sort of news end-of-series special
• Large numbers of people having been turned away because of not enough ballot papers or staff at the polling places - we were behind to America on this for many years, but it looks like we've finally reached their democratic standard
• The swingometer, which this year is being presented from the BBC holodeck
• Pax-Man being tough on everyone right from the start, from as innocent a question as just asking three party representatives what they thought of the exit polls
• One Labour politician almost managing to make it through an interview with him without being sneered at
• The reaction to Sadiq Khan retaining his seat

But most genuinely surprising was the complete non-appearance in the exit poll of the Lib Dem surge that was going to happen. They're still just about hanging on, but the numbers indicated it was far from a seat-grabbing bonanza and maybe even a couple of losses. We'll have to wait to see, but it looks like it's going to be a long time yet.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Wait, what? Turned away? How is that... allowed? Are those people going to be allowed to write in votes, or, does the constitution-or-whatever over there just say "listen, first come first served, oh well, democracy of the speedy"?

[davidn]

It's the same thing that we saw in America two years ago, with some places letting the remainder of the queue vote, and some of them just closing at the deadline and sending the ballot boxes off to be counted...

I have a postal vote, so I've never had these problems. Not that it ever turned up this year, mind you. Someone needs to come up with a reliably secure way to vote via the Internet...

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Alright.. I didn't even know that that happened in America. Dang. :x

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

David: there is no way to ensure you can vote on the internet, while preserving secret ballot, is there?

Between printing screen, inability to judge no one's in your room, it seems absolutely infeasible to validate that an e-vote is genuinely the wish, without coercion, of the voter.

[davidn]

Well, the method of making sure nobody's looking over your shoulder at the physical ballot box isn't exactly all that high-tech a solution either... postal votes aren't above being tampered with, and there's no way to tell that it was genuinely marked by the voter without coercion either. I can answer the simpler concerns like print screen, of simply never actually showing the vote on-screen...

But votes by Internet seem inherently more insecure to me as well, and I'm supposed to know the ins and outs of making things like this secure... I can't imagine anyone actually doing it because people still have the idea that anything that's on the Internet is just floating there out in the open waiting for someone to pluck it out of the airwaves and run off with it.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Well, you are supposed to have secret voting booths.

I've accidentally misclicked too many Go moves online to be sure of a particularly safe internet vote.

The fact there's nothing physical there makes recounts for confidence's sake a lot harder, too...

[pookatimes.livejournal.com]

YES WE KHAN!

[kjorteo]

Meanwhile, even if it's a very small minority (13 seats combined, now,) I find it amusing that there are no less than three secessionist parties that are large enough for parliamentary presence (and even came in 5th, 6th, and 7th place, respectively,) and the one for Wales actually gained a seat.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

I was linking people to this (http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/05/04/this-is-how-the-tories-plan-to-seize-power-in-a-hung-parliament/) on Wednesday night.

It is proving to be a frighteningly accurate prediction.

[kjorteo]

Damn you, now I've fallen into looking over the BBC's meticulously detailed and broken-down-by-region results in full political junkie mode even though none of it actually means anything to me. (As of the writing of this comment, Scotland has 41 seats for Labour, 10 for Liberal Democrats, 6 for the Scottish National Party, and a whopping 1 Conservative! This is a 0.1% swing from SNP to LAB! Surely this says... something!!)

Actually, I am a little intrigued that Northern Ireland apparently doesn't have any of the same parties as the entire rest of the UK, with their results currently being 8 for Democratic Unionist (-1!!), 6 for Sinn Fein, 3 for SDLP, 1 for Alliance (+1!!) and 1 for Others (+1!!) Really, though, 1 for Others? Would it kill you to name the other party at that point? There's only one of them!

Aeeeergh.

Edit: Also, I'm throwing this in because no one else has yet and someone has to.

[davidn]

That sketch is pretty analogous to what happened last night - there was at least one appearance by the Raving Monster Loony party. And I turned on the website coverage this morning to find the whole thing was still going! David Dimbleby must be an android. Nobody can win now - Labour has lost a huge number of seats (and totally deserved to), but it turns out that not everyone likes the Conservatives enough yet to put them into outright power.

The country is a lot more colourful than America :) At its peak, the main results on the BBC live feed showed five parties as close, but they then dropped off into the usual three. Northern Ireland is in an awkward situation... it's been going on too long for me to even know why the split even exists, now. Sinn Fein MPs tend to refuse to accept their seats in Parliament, but I don't know where the DUP stand on that.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

The Monster Raving Loony William Hill Party! This year with sponsorship.

Traditionally, NI parties don't ally with mainland parties, so the main parties can be neutral. Contraversially, it was announced early yesterday that DUP will be supporting the tories: it seems likely that SDLP will support Labour.