Tomorrows UK council/European elections. How’s it going to go?

In My Humble Opinion
41

As indeed was I. That would have been a threshold ‘fixed…in advance’.

Which indeed it does and which are indeed a feature of some systems using the D’Hondt method. But not the UK Euro elections.

Which is irrelevant, as the elections for the Scottish Parliament use a completely different system (albeit another form of PR).

But the thing is that there is no need at all for any of the voters to understand how the seats are actually distributed. All they need to grasp is that the seats are allocated roughly according to how many votes are cast for each party. (‘Roughly’ here actually meaning by a complicated mathematical formula.) Trying to vote against any particular party is largely pointless; the sensible thing is to vote for the party that you think best represents your views, which is what most people do anyway.

The real problem, which is one only likely to increase, is that using different PR systems for different types of elections only confuses people.

42

I didn’t claim it was relevant, I mentioned it as being behind my erroneous assumption that there was a fixed threshold in this election (anyway I think I might also have wrong about there being a threshold in Scotland).

It’s misleading to say that the Scottish Parliament uses a completely different system: the UK European parliament election uses a regional D’Hondt system, and a regional D’Hondt system is used to calculate the top up to the first past the post seats in the Scottish parliament.

Even if there had been a fixed threshold I’ve now found out that it could not have been more than 5%. The BNP’s level of support might well have been way above that whatever the turnout, so I would still have been wrong to keep flogging this horse. Once again I apologise for being so argumentative with Ianzin and Ximenean.