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Cheers, Chris, useful links. I've also started a Mayoral election thread here:
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Hang on, we invented gerrymandering over here before you lot even fell in the sea. Will you try to claim credit for anything? :)
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Lol wot no we invented it when we intelligent-designed democracy in 1776, obvs.
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This is simply unbelievable:
This is partly down to the maths of making sure each constituency contains the same number of voters. To ensure that, many small, urban constituencies (which are more likely to vote Labour) will have to be merged, losing Labour seats. Others will be expanded to draw in suburban and rural voters from surrounding areas (more likely to vote Conservative), handing Labour seats to the Conservatives or making them more marginal.
This might seem reasonable. If we want votes to be more or less equally counted within the constraints of our current electoral system, it makes sense that constituencies should be the same size.
But there’s a catch. Constituencies will be the same size not in terms of the number of people who live in them, but in terms of the number of registered voters. And the number of voters will be based on the number of registered voters on 1 December 2015 – just after the Tories deleted hundreds of thousands of names from the electoral register by rushing through changes to the voting rules, orchestrating what Hope not Hate calls “the biggest single act of electoral disenfranchisement in our history”.
Completely illogical and wrong.
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So here we go:
This is what May and the Tories have been waiting for before calling a new election. (It's also what May should have waited for before calling a new election.)
No timescale is given in this article, and I can't remember what it was if one had already been announced.
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Lest we forget that all of this is still ongoing--an update on 'voter ID':
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A longer article about how bad things are in the US:
Obviously, as above, the Tories want to force the introduction of these kinds of measures in Britain, too.
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Someone's still fighting the good fight:
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Ah, the joy of this 'Government' (or 'gurning claptrapocracy', as I've just seen Séamas O'Reilly call it):
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/28/mps-may-have-been-misled-over-bame-voter-id-claims
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Not entirely unsurprisingly, now they're going after the Electoral Commission, which has too few powers, not too many:
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This includes the case where they openly admitted to gerrymandering:
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The Good Law Project seem to be the only people trying to confront some of the shit that is going on at the moment. If you can support them, make a donation.
Read about their work here:
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Going back to more FPTP when we very obviously need a lot less of it:
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Gerrymandering continues in boundary redrawing and voter ID:
From casual reading about it, this bill is as scandalous as expected:
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Let's by all means go backwards, shall we?
First-past-the-post must be abolished entirely.
Polka_Dot
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About
Gerrymandering
Posted by
@Oliver Schick
Judging by what has been announced, there'll be quite a lot of this going on in the near future. One of the current concerns is the much-too-fast introduction of individual voter registration:
(London)
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/hundreds-of-thousands-disappear-off-register-ahead-of-mayoral-election-a3187951.html
(countrywide)
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/31/electoral-register-loses-estimated-800000-people-since-changes-to-system
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/24/nearly-800000-names-axed-from-voter-register-officials-figures-show
There will also be boundary changes and playing around with other aspects:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/12/the-guardian-view-on-changing-constituency-boundaries-unfair-and-undemocratic
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/01/labour-may-need-bigger-swing-than-in-1997-to-win-next-election
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/14/conservative-power-grab-stay-in-power-permanent