What if you were going to vote BNP? That is what you have been leaving out of your statements that makes them incorrect.
Now I know and you know that nobody around here is actually going to vote BNP, so there’s a certain element of pedantry about all this. But if you can’t be pedantic here, where can you be?
The discussion was over this sentence:
The possibility of people voting BNP does not make this incorrect. In fact, for it to be a realistic political comment (which the results show it was), it requires that some people are voting BNP.
So what does it mean for the BNP to have two MEPs? Just that they can make inflammatory speeches in EU Parliament proceedings? Or that they can actually affect policy?
The effect on policy will hopefully be negligible. The European Parliament isn’t actually very powerful compared with other EU institutions (it’s all very complicated and you’d be best checking Wikipedia for more info) - I can’t remember the last time I saw a European Parliament debate or decision featured on TV news or the first few pages of a newspaper.
People are more worried about how it will effect things like community relations and future elections to the UK (and Scottish and Welsh) parliaments where the BNP would get much more attention.
Crap - affect!
One advantage is that they will get money from the taxpayer to help set up their office, hire some staff etc.
This will help the fascist fucks grow their organisation and increase the level of bile they can vomit on the people of the UK.
I don’t like fascists BTW 
Hopefully this will have the opposite effect: that of making people realise how despicable they are.
Never overestimate the intelligence of the voting public. As long as they stick to a (small c) conservative message and don’t mention the darkies too often they might even pick up more voters.
I didn’t get around to voting, and I feel slightly guilty about it. Not enough to give up my table in the pub garden though, obviously.
The trouble is, I really didn’t want to vote for any of them. I know you are supposed to vote for the ones you hate least in these situations, but as a lifelong Labour supporter, I am so pissed off with them for being such a complete and utter patronising slimy failure of a government (shutting down my local hospital, no less - party of the people and all), that I wanted to send a message. I didn’t dare vote Tory in case they privatised the pavement and sold it off to their mates before I’d had the chance to walk home, and I couldn’t be arsed to look into what the Lib Dems’ message was, since they didn’t seem to have any interest in pushing it. Bob Crow is a twat and that ruled out the No2EU nonsense, and the BNP are turds. That left the Greens who annoy me for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, but is probably related to my recently turning 30 and starting to develop an interest in lawns and people not being on them. That left that Christian party with the ridiculously long name and laughably amateur party-political-broadcast (why for the love of God don’t we call them adverts?) and then all the independants, each and every one of whom appears to have just escaped from that hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Oh yeah, and I could be wrong here, but as far as I can tell, the UKIP’s cunning plan to rid Britain of the the curse of European meddling appears to revolve entirely around bankrupting the EU through expense claims and big lunches.
What happened to the Monster Raving Loony Party?
They looked at the other parties and decided they couldn’t compete in the silliness stakes.
Exactly.
Whatever the effect of not voting may be deemed to be, it pertains equally to all parties that are vying for election. This is why to assert that ‘not voting is effectively a vote for the BNP’ is factually incorrect, which is all I was pointing out. There may be some people who have difficulty either understanding this or accepting it, but what I said remains true nonetheless.
I’m not getting much sense that you actually understand the voting system that was being used, especially with respect to the importance of a party’s share of the vote. I’ve explained myself at length in this thread and yet you haven’t even acknowledged that the system has radically different effects from the one that is used for Westminster elections.
You’ve just quoted a post from Ximenean which made a point that I took apart in the following post. Ximenean hasn’t come back with a response, so what’s your response to my post number 22? Also, what’s your response to what I wrote in number 20 about your failure to distinguish between not voting BNP and actively voting for another party? To recap, in this election, there is a crucial difference between abstaining and actively voting against a party you dislike. You have not acknowledged this, which suggests you don’t understand it.
Do you understand why I used the word “effectively” in my first post in this thread? Sure, not voting was also effectively a vote for the Green Party - you’re right about that, but so what? We were talking about the BNP and the dangers of them getting a foothold. Perhaps in your world a vote for the BNP is no different from a vote for the Green Party, but if you check the BBQ Pit you’ll see that not everyone agrees with you.
Just to sum up, you publicly asserted or implied that abstaining in this election did not increase the chances of the BNP getting elected. Perhaps some people in NW England read that and didn’t vote. Thanks to the drop in turnout the BNP got elected. You were wrong.
Thanks, this is what I meant. I hadn’t come back to this thread until now because I thought the hamsters ate my post and I couldn’t be bothered to re-write it.
Regarding the current debate in this thread, I think the argument centres on whether or not it is correct to assume that the absolute number of people voting BNP will be similar no matter what the overall turnout is. I think it is reasonable to assume this, in which case G. Odoreida’s argument is correct.
Yes, it is true that not voting might possibly have given a slight advantage to the BNP. But not necessarily.
You see, I’m not getting much sense that you understand the voting system either. Mind you, as these elections were using the D’Hondt method, that is perhaps excusable. What mattered was not the share of the vote, but more the ratios between the votes cast for the larger parties. There is a subtle difference.
Wrong. And, in this context, perhaps irresponsibly so.
Although the votes for the smallest parties are counted, in the sense that the totals are tallied, they are never actually used in the calculation to determine the allocation of the seats. Thus, voting for one of the tiniest parties would make as much difference (albeit infinitesimally small) to the BNP’s share of the vote as voting for one of the largest ones. Yet that same vote would play no part at all in how the seats were allocated. It is entirely wasted, even as a vote against the BNP. A vote for one of the very small parties only makes a difference under a D’Hondt system in the sense that voting for them might help them become a bit bigger. Just like the BNP, in fact.
Not every vote against the BNP was equal. It also depends on how the votes for some of the other parties were distributed. This is why knowing how to maximise a tactical vote against them was impossible to predict. Even if you had a rough idea of what the shares of the votes might be. In Yorkshire and the Humber, the optimum tactic would have been to vote Labour (the second largest party), whereas in the North West it would have made more sense to vote UKIP (the third largest party). But had the votes been distributed slightly differently between the big parties (this being particularly true in the North West), voting Green would have been what made it more likely that the BNP would be deprived of a seat.
OK, lets say there’s 100 voters: 30 Labour, 30 Tory, 30 Lib Dem, 8 UKIP, 2 BNP. If everybody votes, BNP get 2%. If one of the BNP voters doesn’t vote, they get 1/99 = ~1%. This contradicts your claim that “if you don’t vote you are effectively voting BNP”.
Now, I think you meant “if you don’t vote and would have voted for one of the other parties, you are effectively voting BNP.” So let’s say one of the Labour supporters abstains. Labour then get 29/99 = 29.29%. Tories and LibDems get 30/99 = 30.30%, etc. BNP get 2/99 = 2.02%.
So it is more accurate to say that by not voting you effectively spread your vote among all the other parties. And in absolute terms, you actually help the bigger parties more. In proportional terms, you help all the other parties equally.
I do know what you were getting at, with the threshold and the concern that a lower turnout helps the BNP because their voters appear to be less likely to abstain, as Dead Cat said. Although I’m not sure that they are completely unaffected by low turnouts. Just less so than the big parties.
I admit I don’t fully understand how the allocation of seats goes (I did ask for clarification in my 2nd post). I found it difficult to find information on the net about exactly how voting works in each UK Euro constituency. In this thread I was completely ignoring the question of how to actually push the BNP down the finishing order, which was silly. However I was aiming my words at people who had not already decided to vote; I would not have expected them to try and work out the intricacies of tactical voting even if that were possible. Getting them out voting was more important.
Instead I have been focussing (perhaps too much) on the threshold issue; correct me if I’m wrong but I believe there is a percentage in each seat which a party needs to exceed in order to be eligible for a seat. This threshold seems to vary from seat to seat - again I found it hard to get information on this. I believe that in the 2004 Euro election the BNP failed to cross the threshold anywhere, though I don’t know whether they would have been elected if they had crossed it.
I thought that all eligible votes were added together, including those for tiny parties, when working out the total vote and therefore a party’s share of the vote. So when working out whether the BNP has crossed the threshold, I thought that a vote for a tiny party counted as much as a vote for Labour. You say that it would make an infinitesimal difference but then say the vote is completely wasted. I was hoping that if enough people got out and voted then the BNP’s share would be made to be so low that they would not qualify for a seat even if they finished in the same position, so lots of infinitesimal effects would add up.
The assumption I’m making is this: if an extra 1m (out of the 3m who did’nt vote) in NW England had decided to vote to keep the BNP out, then the BNP’s share of the vote would have gone down to around 5%. Even if the BNP still finished in 5th place I believe that they would not have got a seat because they would have been below the threshold, but I don’t know who would have got that seat. That’s if those 1m had voted for large parties - if they’d voted for small parties, the BNP would still have finished below the threshold but they would also have been beaten by some of those small parties, so they’d have been doubly defeated.
If I’m wrong about this then please let me know.
You’re right, it was the 2nd scenario I was going on about. In my opinion the fact that the 1st one is technically correct was not worth derailing my attempt to get people out voting for pro-democratic parties. I was not trying to mislead anyone into not voting BNP - as you say it’s unlikely that people here were planning to in the first place.
Of course the effect of not voting is spread evenly - I acknowledged that as long ago as my 2nd post. But IMO it is intentionally naive to imply that in this particular election an extra 1.5% share was as meaningful to the big 3 as it was to the BNP. The BNP crossed a threshold in more ways than one.
That’s where you’re wrong. There is no magic threshold fixed or knowable in advance which a party must cross in order to get a seat. The figure needed depends on precisely how the votes are cast for the larger parties. Now, it is true that there is a rough range of figures in which it becomes increasingly likely that a party will gain a seat. And everyone knew that the BNP was probably hovering around that. Hence the well-publicised concerns expressed in advance.
Well, if 1m extra voters had turned out in the North West and all voted for other parties, then there is no scenario in which the BNP (on the same votes) would have got their seat. But it will presumably surprise you that the number of voters who would have needed to turn out to vote for other parties to guarantee that would have been just over 985,000. Yes, 985,000.
That admittedly does depend on taking the worst case scenario. Basically, it would involve the smaller parties all not quite getting more votes than the BNP and the larger parties all not quite getting enough extra votes to gain the eighth seat. Remember, even if the independant candidate, who in reality came last with 3,621 votes, had persuaded 128,472 more people to come out to vote for him (which, on the increased turnout, would have given him a share of 7.4%), the BNP would still have got the seat.
But then, at the other extreme, it would have taken just 2,449 more people voting UKIP to have deprived the BNP of that eighth seat. Yet, equally, it would have taken over 100,000 extra Conservative votes to have had the same effect. Which is not at all unfair to the Conservatives, because that’s only because they had already gained three of the seats.
With only eight seats available, the allocation is necessarily imprecise. The point about this system is that it is an attempt to handle that imprecision fairly.
I wasn’t talking about a “magic” threshold, I was talking about a statutory one (which the wikipedia page you linked to discusses). Are you sure there isn’t one in the UK Euro election? I thought there was one in the top up part of the Scottish election system and I thought there was one in this election. It did puzzle me though when I read somewhere that the threshold varied from constituency to constituency - perhaps they were talking about a de facto threshold from the last election but they did not make it clear.
Anyway, if there is no statutory threshold then I apologise to Ianzin, Ximenean and Small Clanger for such a waste of a thread. But the fact that it’s taken 6 days for someone to clear up my threshold misconception suggests that the British public aren’t as clued up as they might be on this system!