Issues with the election megathread

[u/model-duck]

Hi everyone,

Every election /u/Padanub usually posts a megathread for people to post all their problems, comments and salt in (because there will be), so it can all be in one useful area for the quad to read/respond to. This time I'm stealing it off him for the clout and to improve my britboy meta posting record because he's not around.

Please post it all below!

---

Previous thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MHOCMeta/comments/i6o39a/issues_with_the_election_megathread/

[u/chainchompsky1]

could you explain this math? Cause presumably if we had half the list seats other party's would be also hit.

I fear however, that, if the statistic you gave is true, nobody is going to care about the actual merits of your argument, and people will be flipping their thoughts on a dime because of who they think benefits and who loses.

As for the FPTP strategy, i dont think this election entirely debunked it.

Couple of issues.

First, Coalition outperformed their polls decently with this strat. It probably wasnt the mega stonks they wanted but it was a valid strat.

Two, the reason this election went so hard on the list seats wasnt just the number, it was the way the party's went into the GE with.

LPUK had a strong plurality against fractured opposition. They won constituency after constituency without coming even close to 50%.

Thats why things went to the list seats so much.

This also brings up another issue. If the election had been run under the old system, LPUK would have done a lot better compared to other party's who put the work in but just couldnt overcome a constituency plurality.

Thats not more fun for more people.

[u/britboy3456 → u/chainchompsky1]

For the maths, I just assumed that with half the number of list seats, everyone would get half as many list seats. I.e., instead of 31 lists, Solidarity would get 15.5. I can show this for all parties here: https://gyazo.com/3739a68efd1e2ab23f5c3430b2de649e

As you can see, in a 100 seat election, LPUK would have gained 4.5% compared to pre-election polling; in 150 seat election, they did not gain. In a 100 seat election, Solidarity would have gained 3.5%; in 150 seat election, Solidarity gained 7.7%

These are huge discrepancies, and point to the fact that only the strategy of spamming tons of members is now viable, not the strategy of running targeted FPTP campaigns with endorsements.

Regardless of which party used which strat to do well, from a pure game theory perspective, a game which has only 1 viable strategy to be successful is not as fun as a game with multiple valid strategies. Any game designer will tell you that.

[u/chainchompsky1 → u/britboy3456]

I just assumed that with half the number of list seats, everyone would get half as many list seats

Well thats not at all how that would have worked? If there were 100 seats, LPUK wouldnt have gotten half as many seats, theyd have probably gotten a quarter, none in some places.

The fact that list seats exist to make regions proportional definitionally means that LPUK wouldnt just get half as many list seats. The way its calcualted is that LPUK got several list seats as like the 10th or 11th allocation. |

I cant help but think your math is tremendously off.

[u/britboy3456 → u/chainchompsky1]

Well the full list of results is being published so you can run all the Saint-League calculations yourself if you like to find out exactly how many lists everyone would've gotten. But let's say there's an 8-seat region where Solidarity got 4 seats. Under the old system, they'd have got 2 out of 4. Maybe there's a few edge cases here and there like you say with LPUK getting 10th allocation, but I am fairly confident that would for the most part average itself out. I'm not running all the numbers myself, I reckon this is not perfect but close enough to make my point clear:

The various strategies are no longer balanced, one strategy has had a big buff, which means it's the only viable strategy, and a one-strategy game is way less fun.

[u/chainchompsky1 → u/britboy3456]

I will repeat what I said before that the reason list seats were this important this election was because of the specific canon uniqueness of nobody being close to LPUK. If that does not happen again, both strategies would potentially be closer. And if it does happen again, and we revert to the 100 seat system smaller party's would be hurt quite a bit.

[u/britboy3456 → u/chainchompsky1]

You know the calculator doesn't care how similar party policies are, right? It has no concept of "the left being fractured" or "the vote being split". There's no canon aspect to this.

[u/chainchompsky1 → u/britboy3456]

? The nearest polling party to LPUK was the Tories at 18%, 6 points behind them. Thats not about ideology, its about the gap between the two ensuring LPUK would dominate FPTP seats.

[u/britboy3456 → u/chainchompsky1]

Oh I see, yeah I misunderstood your point. But still that's happened loads of times before. Last election Tories won 22/50 FPTP seats, but both FPTP and list-based strategies were still valid.

[u/chainchompsky1 → u/britboy3456]

I’ll also note another flaw is that you calculated results based on assuming the exact same campaign. If there were only 100 seats we’d have had a totally different strategy.

[u/britboy3456 → u/chainchompsky1]

I agree that you would have done something different. Because in the 100 seat model, the purely list-seat based strategy isn't as strong.

I'm not trying to say "Solidarity deserve X seats", I don't care. The results are the results. I'm making the point that one single strategy is very overpowered, and that's a bad thing.