So Boris won another term, but not because Londoners wanted Boris. Oh, no, it was because they were too stupid to understand the voting system.
What’s less clear is whether Londoners really intended to do so. The 62,538 vote margin of Boris’s victory may have been narrower than expected, but at 3% or so it is well past the point where doubt over counting or errors could be a concern.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
More than 1.1 million people cast their second preference for a candidate with no chance of being in the run-off for the final two. There are two ways to interpret the figures: a large portion of Londoners don’t fully understand the voting system, or they are using it in a remarkably sophisticated way to send subtle signals to minority candidates.
The latter seems unlikely…
Such is the Guardianistas’ contempt for the electorate who make the “wrong” choice.
Very strange. Weren’t the Guardian telling everyone who would listen last year that AV (or anything other than FPTP) was so very easy to understand that those who opposed it were promoting disingenuous myths?
Umm, the total votes for candidates 3-7 came to 347,000. OK, only 183,000 of those were redistributed to Boris or Ken, but many people may have just decided to vote the “straight ticket” and not express a second preference. And if you vote Green 1 and BNP 2, that is entirely up to you. I fail to see where the 1.1 million figure comes from.
And does the Guardian think folks are too thick to operate any form of PR?
WRONG
Lots of people wanted Labour, but could not stomach Ken (who crawls into bed with islamicists)
Simple.
Lots of people stayed at home.
UKIP didn’t have their name on the papers – in spite of having candidates (Now THAT really is stupid)
So if the Guardian thinks everyone should vote for Ken as a second preference, because he was the only candidate likely to beat Boris, why not vote first preference instead? Why weren’t they saying “don’t waste your vote voting Green”?
I think this is why they are so wedded to the idea of alternative voting systems, anything will do as long as it’s a little bit more complex than FPTP, that way they can always subject the figures to analysis and claim that there is obviously some kind of progressive majority. It’s the same sort of intellectual sleight of hand that you see with the constantly repeated claim that socialism has never been tried, no matter how many times self proclaimed socialists screw up, their failure, apparently, being proof that it wasn’t really socialism at all. If Orwell was still around he might add another slogan to 1984, “Failure is Success.”
Thornavis
I think you are confusing:
“socialism” – a left-wing political system
with
“communism” – a totalitarian religious movement.
They are actually, different!
They’re different in the way a Jackdaw is different from a Rook, different species same genus*. I used the word socialism quite deliberately because you regularly see this futile discussion about whether this that or the other government or nation is socialist or not and this political version of the No True Scotsman fallacy is regularly trotted out. I’ve been involved in such debates myself and utterly fruitless they are too, you just go round in circles trying to hold on to the soap in the bath concepts of the true believer just as you do indeed when discussing the existence of God or the essence of Christianity.
* My apologies to the noble members of the Corvid community for this analogy.
Still, better than Red Ken eh?
True, but that could be said of any of my cats as well.