4May

It's the Welsh and Scottish elections, and they use the top-up member system. In turn, that gives us the excuse to put on our Mitchell and Webb masks and seeing if we can shout,

We discussed the prospect of Overhang seats in October last year. Very roughly, we take the party list votes, and work out who would have won the seats if that were the only method of election. Then we compare this to the actual result; if there's a difference, the extra seat (the one with the smallest constituency majority) is an Overhang seat.

(More: A worked example, and an exploration of this phenomenon - 1054 words)

The greatest probem is in South Wales West, where Labour won all seven constituency seats. In order to avoid an Overhangmandate, Labour would need to win approximately two-thirds of the list vote. In the event, they got about 36%, causing two Overhang seats, one each against the Conservatives and Lib Dems. Edwina Hart (Gower, 4.3% ahead of C) and Andrew Davies (Swansea W, 6.6% ahead of LD) are the lucky AMs.

So, were the Welsh Assembly to use the German Überhang rules, the line-up would be:

Labour 26
Plaid  15
Cons   14
LibDem  8
Others  1

C, LD have 2 Overhang seats each.

In Scotland, there's a Labour Overhangmandate in Glasgow, at the expense of a fifth SNP list seat. Pauline McNeill in Kelvin has the smallest majority, 5.1% ahead of the nationalists, and smaller than the number of rejected ballot papers.

Similarly, in West of Scotland, Labour has one Overhangmandate seat, again at the expense of the Nationalists. Jackie Baillie in Dumbarton (5.4%) has the smallest majority over the SNP.

The final result, including the two Overhangmandateseats:

SNP    49
Labour 47
Cons   17
LibDem 16
Green   2
Others  1

Without the Overhang, the SNP has still won, 47-46. By fixing the rules in this way, Labour has given itself some major advantages in the post-election fallout. If it were Labour in the 47-46 lead, we would be justified in crying foul. As it is, the deeply unsexy topic needs further examination before the next election.

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Psephology

5April

Time to wheel out the Swingometer, looking at transfers in local council by-elections this year. Here's how it all works.

Averaging out the swings during the by-elections over the last 13 weeks, we obtain the following:

When we last performed this exercise, in early February, Labour was losing about 9% to each of the other parties. The flow has now become from Conservative to LD, as it was during 2005, but reversed during 2006. Applied to the Commons, we get the following range of results:

The central figure, the one we would put our tuppence on if we were betting people, is for the Conservatives to be short of an overall majority by 8 seats.

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Psephology

17February

Iain Dale reports of a plot to oust Patrick Cormack. This would be a bad idea, for Mr. Cormack has been a remarkably good constituency MP. The Snow in the Summer was brought up in the heart of South Staffordshire, and was represented by this gentleman for over a quarter of a century. Whenever we heard him, Mr. Cormack was polite, tolerant of different views, and quietly persuasive. Whenever we wrote to him, we got the impression that he was going to do whatever he could to resolve the matter, or listen to our views. Richard Burden, the current MP for this blog, may be good, but Patrick Cormack is the master at nursing a constituency. Heck, he's been in parliament for so long that the one-nation Conservatism he espouses has been fashionable, unfashionable, and is now undergoing a bit of a resurgence.

Our previous post on the swingometer crossed in the blogosphere with Anthony Wells's take on the situation. He reckons that the Conservatives aren't doing enough in the national opinion polls to win an overall majority next time out; our analysis suggests they might, just, scrape that overall majority. If we were betting people, we would be piling into No Overall Majority for UK-2010, but with a small saver on a small (20 or under) Conservative majority.

(More on how the model works, and musings on how difficult it will be to obtain a hung parliament - 1016 words)

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Psephology

12February

Time to wheel out the Swingometer for the first time this year, to analyse the changes and transfers between the three leading parties at local council elections.

(More: A worked example and the latest projection - 561 words)

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Psephology

25January

Further to yesterday's article about the legal status of the Scottish elections, a closer reading of the Human Rights Act (you know, the actual law), makes it quite clear that a declaration of incompatibility does not affect the validity, continuing operation, or enforcement of the provision in respect of which it is given.

Though the Scottish court has deemed the legislation incompatible with the ECHR, this appears little more than a marker of judicial impatience at the way the Ministry of Justice has relegated the matter of votes for prisoners. It's on the back-burner in an unvisited alcove behind a locked steel door where no-one ever visits except to check that the building hasn't fallen down.

There is a potential conflict of supremacy between the provisions of the Human Rights Act, which enshrined the ECHR in statute, and the Scotland Act, the rules of devolution. The Scotland Act states,

* section 29 provides that an Act of the Scottish Parliament may not include provisions which are incompatible with Convention rights, as they are defined in the Human Rights Act; and
* section 57(2) provides that a member of the Scottish Executive has no power to make any subordinate legislation, or to do any other act, which would be incompatible with Convention rights.

The rules governing elections to the Scottish Parliament come from the Representation of the People Act, a law that's come from Westminster (a Reserved Matter, in the parlance of devolution) and hence not subject to the human rights provisions of the Scotland Act. Even the new laws instating STV for local elections depends on the ROPA, and hence its results are not subject to challenge in this way.

The Human Rights Act also states, quite clearly, that no unlawful act arises if the public authority could not have acted differently as a result of primary legislation. This section would extinguish any realistic possibility of setting aside the results of elections carried out according to the relevant rules. Unless, we suppose, the prisoners concerned wished to challenge this "status quo" stipulation as itself being incompatible with their rights. It's a line of attack, and probably something to leave eminent lawyers pining for the simplicity of the Schleiswig-Holstein question, but we reckon it's unlikely to succeed.

It is far more likely is that the election will continue. And it's more likely that a commentator will gratuitously invoke the catchphrase of a 90s game show than any of the results are vacated for reasons related to votes-for-prisoners. How much more likely? Over to John Anderson. Contenders ... ready! Swingometers ... ready!

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24January

A court has ruled that May's elections to the Scottish Parliament may be illegal. The ruling, delivered on Wednesday, follows a long-running campaign to enfranchise all prisoners. A ruling at the European Court on Human Rights in 2005 had deemed the UK's ban on prisoners voting illegal, but the Westminster parliament has shown no sign of legislating to remove this illegality; a slack timetable that would not see legislation introduced before the next session of parliament has already slipped. Now, a court has ruled that the election act is incompatible with the Human Rights Convention, opening the way for a disenfranchised prisoner to challenge the result in court, or even to win an interdict preventing the elections from proceeding in the first place. (With thanks to Love and Garbage.)

Psephology