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Post by uthacalthing on Jul 21, 2023 22:49:05 GMT
This is perhaps the best thread to consider the merits of xenon- uthacalthing fractional voting. You create any seats you want irrespective of the size of the electorate then the MPs who are elected sit, speak and vote in the House of commons but their votes are weighted to the size of their electorate If for example quota is circa 80k, then the MP for the Isle of Wight has about 1.25 votes, and the MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar has about 0.25 of a vote. So it is entirely possible that the main opposition party will have more seats than the government, but fewer votes. We can now have smallish Inner city Labour seats for those quasi social worker types with loads of case work ands large (or small) Tory shires that the residents actually identify with. We have no need for a boundary review, merely a recalibration And its electoral reform so Lib Dems will love it. |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jul 23, 2023 0:12:09 GMT
Question for the crayonistas: has anyone tried drawing compliant boundaries that take, as a starting-point, a "Cities of Manchester and Salford" constituency that covers the city-centre of Manchester and also the historic city-centre of Salford?  No ward splits apart from that weird one which is already proposed between Leigh and Makerfield |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jul 23, 2023 0:14:33 GMT
Fuck I just noticed Cadishead. Can we move that to Warrington?
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jul 23, 2023 0:26:13 GMT
Fixed it  |
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Post by owainsutton on Jul 23, 2023 8:19:59 GMT
Fixed it Bonus points for keeping my neck of the woods nice and familiar 🤣 |
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Post by mattb on Jul 24, 2023 18:31:58 GMT
couldn't resist having a play, tried to do it without a 3-borough seat and with fewer orphan wards   |
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nyx
Non-Aligned
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Post by nyx on Aug 28, 2023 11:01:15 GMT
It just occurred to me that it would be quite feasible to naturally draw a map which ends up with both "Camborne and St Ives" and "Cambourne and St Ives" constituencies.   |
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Post by jamesdoyle on Sept 2, 2023 19:51:36 GMT
I'm quite pleased with this. Using one rule, a West Sussex of nine constituencies, with 8 within quota and the other only 110 votes from it. All wards of one colour are in the same constituency. What's the rule? Haven't worked out who would win each yet, but working on it!  |
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Post by johnloony on Sept 2, 2023 19:57:42 GMT
I'm quite pleased with this. Using one rule, a West Sussex of nine constituencies, with 8 within quota and the other only 110 votes from it. All wards of one colour are in the same constituency. What's the rule? Haven't worked out who would win each yet, but working on it! Are they in alphabetical order? Or something similarly arbitrarily daft |
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Post by jamesdoyle on Sept 2, 2023 20:00:59 GMT
I'm quite pleased with this. Using one rule, a West Sussex of nine constituencies, with 8 within quota and the other only 110 votes from it. All wards of one colour are in the same constituency. What's the rule? Haven't worked out who would win each yet, but working on it! Are they in alphabetical order? Or something similarly arbitrarily daft Yes they are. It is that daft! I wasn't sure if it would work within quota limits, but with that one tiny exception, it does. I've tried East Sussex but it didn't work anywhere nearly as well. |
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sirbenjamin
IFP
True fame is reading your name written in graffiti, but without the words 'is a wanker' after it.
Posts: 4,979 
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Post by sirbenjamin on Sept 2, 2023 21:48:34 GMT
A pointless exercise for creating evenly-sized seats.
- take the 650 most populous wards in the country as the basis for 650 different seats.
- starting with the largest ward/seat, add the smallest ward to it, then proceed to do the same for the next 649 smallest wards.
- Reorder the seats in large-small order, then add the next 650 smallest wards to each of them in turn.
- Repeat until all wards are allocated.
It *feels* like this would create seats very close to quota. I'd be interested to see exactly what it would come up with.
It might be more workable and slightly less batshit daft if done on a regional, rather than National level.
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nyx
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Post by nyx on Oct 11, 2023 21:48:00 GMT
Posting here to avoid needlessly crowding the 2023 Review- South West thread when this is very much fantasy at this point- I thought I'd see what the Commission could have achieved with different county pairing arrangements in the Southwest. In reality Gloucestershire and Wiltshire were paired together, whilst Devon, Somerset, and Avon were paired together. Here's what could have happened with the counties standing alone more... Devon: 13 seats (+1) Somerset: 6 seats (+1) North Somerset and Bath and North East Somerset: 4 seats (=) Bristol, South Gloucestershire, Gloucestershire: 14 seats (+1) Wiltshire: 7 seats (=)  Starting with Devon, which only has about 12.6 quotas so requires smaller seats: South Hams local authority quite neatly fits its own seat, albeit its very western extremity has to be cut off to avoid a discontinuous constituency elsewhere. Successor seat to Totnes; either the name Totnes or South Hams works fine. South West Devon, losing all of its rural areas and gaining some urban areas, becomes Plymouth East Plymouth Sutton and Devonport becomes Plymouth West, taking areas from Plymouth Moor View to result in a far more natural border between them along the A38 Plymouth Moor View gains a few rural areas and Tavistock, becoming Plymouth North and Tavistock. Torbay moves slightly south, gaining Brixham which had previously been in the Totnes constituency despite being in the Torbay authority. In return half of Torquay has to go to Newton Abbot, including a ward split (this is one of the bits of the map I'm least happy with but no other option). Central Devon is the Devon constituency which probably changes the most, losing essentially its entire northern half to other seats whilst gaining a large amount of Newton Abbot. It could easily be renamed Teignbridge. And then in the east we have Honiton and Sidmouth, and Exeter East and Exmouth, similar to the BCE proposals, whilst the seat of Tiverton returns taking over much of Central Devon. The two seats in NW Devon stay much the same with only minor changes.  Onto Somerset drawing six seats isn't too hard. The five current seats remain relatively unchanged, each one only losing a small area to a new Central Somerset seat. Likewise, in Northwest Somerset/Northeast Somerset/Wiltshire I tried to do a least change map only shuffling a couple of wards around- it's possible something better could be done but I thought it made sense to focus on least change.  In Bristol, I ended up across a quite different arrangement to the revised proposals which is considerably less least-change than in reality and results in a new seat carved out of Bristol West and Bristol South. Whilst there's nothing wrong with it, in hindsight if I'd noticed it was easy enough to keep the BCE proposals for Bristol I'd have probably just done that. In South Gloucestershire you're obviously forced to split up Thornbury and Yate. One half can become Cadbury Heath and Yate whilst the other has to cross the border into the rest of Gloucestershire for, maybe, Thornbury and Tetbury. That seat would also be one of the weaker parts of the map, as mostly a leftovers seat. But it would allow the rest of Gloucestershire to stay largely as-is, with relatively far less change than the map we saw in reality.  Overall would this have been better than the map we ended up with? Probably not. But it would have had fewer county crossings; it would have allowed for most of the existing seats outside Devon to have far less change, but that is counteracted by the ones in Devon requiring more change. |
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nyx
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Post by nyx on Nov 23, 2023 2:12:38 GMT
What could have happened if the Welsh Parliament, instead of opting for a radical change to its electoral system, had done what Scotland did with the Scottish parliament twenty years ago, and retained the 40 constituencies but just redrawn their borders to minimize deviation (and not have a strict 5% quota)... It turns out only one seat actually needs moving significantly: the abolition of Arfon thanks to it and the neighbouring seats being too underpopulated, with the 40th seat being recreated in the Cardiff area instead. The result being South Wales having one more seat than currently, and North Wales one fewer. Admittedly the inclusion of Ely with the rural Vale of Glamorgan is not ideal from a community ties perspective- geographically it is fine but it is akin to pairing Windsor and Slough- but all other viable alternatives I could think of meant splitting Barry. None of these seats have more than 7% deviation from quota, which feels reasonable. Elsewhere in Wales, depending on how strict you are being with the quota, a few other seats may need border adjustments, but they would all remain mostly intact in their current forms aside from a few wards moving.   |
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Harry Hayfield
Green
Cavalier Gentleman (as in 17th century Cavalier)
Posts: 2,922
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Post by Harry Hayfield on Nov 23, 2023 6:02:43 GMT
What could have happened if the Welsh Parliament, instead of opting for a radical change to its electoral system, had done what Scotland did with the Scottish parliament twenty years ago, and retained the 40 constituencies but just redrawn their borders to minimize deviation (and not have a strict 5% quota)... It turns out only one seat actually needs moving significantly: the abolition of Arfon thanks to it and the neighbouring seats being too underpopulated, with the 40th seat being recreated in the Cardiff area instead. The result being South Wales having one more seat than currently, and North Wales one fewer. Admittedly the inclusion of Ely with the rural Vale of Glamorgan is not ideal from a community ties perspective- geographically it is fine but it is akin to pairing Windsor and Slough- but all other viable alternatives I could think of meant splitting Barry. None of these seats have more than 7% deviation from quota, which feels reasonable. Elsewhere in Wales, depending on how strict you are being with the quota, a few other seats may need border adjustments, but they would all remain mostly intact in their current forms aside from a few wards moving. The Assembly since 1999 has had 40 constituency members and 20 regional members (1 regional for every constituency) where as Scotland has had 73 constituencies and 56 regionals (1.3 regional for every constituency). If we had that in Wales from the start, then we would have 31 regionals (most likely rounded down to 30 regionals, 6 per electoral region) in which case at the last Senedd election the regionals in Mid and West Wales would have been thus: Labour win the first seat (30,867), Labour win the second seat (20,578), Plaid Cymru win the third seat (16,365), Liberal Democrats win the fourth seat (16,181), Labour win the fifth seat (15,433), Plaid Cymru win the sixth seat (13,092) |
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Nov 23, 2023 10:40:39 GMT
What could have happened if the Welsh Parliament, instead of opting for a radical change to its electoral system, had done what Scotland did with the Scottish parliament twenty years ago, and retained the 40 constituencies but just redrawn their borders to minimize deviation (and not have a strict 5% quota)... It turns out only one seat actually needs moving significantly: the abolition of Arfon thanks to it and the neighbouring seats being too underpopulated, with the 40th seat being recreated in the Cardiff area instead. The result being South Wales having one more seat than currently, and North Wales one fewer. Admittedly the inclusion of Ely with the rural Vale of Glamorgan is not ideal from a community ties perspective- geographically it is fine but it is akin to pairing Windsor and Slough- but all other viable alternatives I could think of meant splitting Barry. None of these seats have more than 7% deviation from quota, which feels reasonable. Elsewhere in Wales, depending on how strict you are being with the quota, a few other seats may need border adjustments, but they would all remain mostly intact in their current forms aside from a few wards moving. The northern end of Ely is in Creigiau/St Fagan's ward, so you probably want to add that. I'd suggest that rather than pairing Barry and Penarth (which should really be with Llandough, and which is an odd pairing without Dinas Powys) you strip out the northern rural wards. They can go with most of Cardiff West (awkward, but some of that is rural territory) whilst Canton and Riverside can go with Grangetown and Penarth. That then leaves you three seats east of the Taff and you can remove Cardiff North's weird salient into Old St. Mellons. |
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Post by johnloony on Dec 10, 2023 15:08:15 GMT
A rule for any future parliamentary boundary changes: if constituency A has grown to have an electorate of Mean plus Excess (i.e. "Excess" is the number of electors by which it is too big), find whichever other constituency (constituency B) that has an electorate of Mean minus Deficit (i.e. "Deficit" is the number by which it is too small) where Excess and Deficit are as close as possible to each other. Draw an area within A with an electorate of Excess, and transfer it to B (in most cases, this will create an exclave or detached part, unless A and B happen to be next to each other). Do the same for all constituencies, by combining them in pairs thusly.
Or: the existing electorates of the newly-drawn constituencies are defined to be the definitive ones. Not in terms of land area, but in terms of the electorate itself. Every time Mrs & Mrs Hypothetical move house from constituency A to constituency B, they take a bit of constituency A with them. Their new home address in B becomes an exclave of A.
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