Looks like election fraud (but isn't)

Trump and Trump supporters have claimed that election results like this indicate election fraud:

In-person votes, counted first:
Trump - 39,200
Biden - 30,600
(A solid lead for Trump on 56%).

Postal votes, counted next:
Trump - 9,800
Biden - 20,400
(A massive lead for Biden on 71%)

Add them together and you get:
Trump - 49,000 votes
Biden - 51,000 votes
(A modest overall win for Biden on 51%).

The postal votes look a bit suspicious at first sight, but the actual explanation for this is that Trump advised his voters to vote in person. In his addled mind, he thought that postal votes for him would be deliberately lost in the system somehow, which is nonsense if you think about it for half a second. If corrupt election officials are prepared to shred postal Trump votes, why wouldn't they also be prepared to shred in-person Trump votes?

Biden did the sensible thing and told his voters to vote by post if possible (because of Covid) or in person if they preferred. Thus maximising the likelihood of any potential voter actually voting for him. There must have been some potential Trump voters who couldn't vote in person and didn't get round to voting by post either. Biden hedged his bets; it was a good strategy, regardless of Covid.

I can't find a breakdown of in-person and postal votes. It looks to be about 30% postal and 70% in person. So (let's assume), because of the candidates' exhortations, only 20% of Trump voters voted by post against 40% of Biden voters. Multiple those numbers up, assuming an overall narrow 51%-49% split in this particular area, and you get the results shown above.

It is not at all unusual for the Democrat candidate to win an election - they won four out the previous eight (or six out of eight if you go by popular vote and not by electoral college votes!). It is less usual for a sitting President to be voted out after one term, but it does happen i.e. Jimmy Carter (Dem) in 1980 and George H.W. Bush (Rep) in 1992. Hillary Clinton and Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college vote and were prepared to take it on the chin, rules are rules, so Trump is being a pathetic bad loser IMHO.
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The only conspiracy theory that I will subscribe to is that Pfizer weren't too happy with Trump's suggestion that drug prices be capped, which is why they delayed the announcement that their vaccine works until a few days after the election. Had they announced it shortly before the election, Trump would have got a real boost, seeing as it was his government which funded the research.

A similar thing happened to Julia Gillard in Australia, go figure. Rent seekers appear to have undue influence in elections; they have a lot of spare cash to spend on lobbying to make sure the rents continue to roll in. It's a Georgist thing, not a left-right thing.

New Labour Funding Plan

As the unions are getting itchy about funding, this is the new plan:-

1. Allow anyone to vote for the Labour leader for £3.
2. Hundreds of thousands of Conservatives pay to put the worst candidate in the job
3. Election is lost
4. New leadership election
5. Repeat

UKIP and The Election

From the Daily Echo

Ukip is well placed to replace Labour as the natural party of the north, its only MP has said.

Douglas Carswell told the BBC Sunday Politics programme the party's success in winning more than 100 second place finishes at the general election showed where its future was.

OK, everyone's been talking about this point. Paul Nuttall's 2020 strategy is based on winning lots of 2nd places, to be the rival party for the next election. In many seats, there's some wisdom to this strategy. Under FPTP, people group around the top 2 parties in a constituency. If you're running say, the Labour party and you can get above the Lib Dems in a seat, next time, you'll be the non-Conservative party that people will vote for. You'll be the rival that can win the seat. Amongst all the crap in party election flyers, this is one thing that's emphasized: "we're the only party that can stop the Tories" with a chart showing them above the Lib Dems.

So, using the Guardian's map, I'm going to pick 20 constituencies at random that have UKIP in 2nd. 10 Labour, 10 Conservative:-

Rother Valley: 7,300 Labour majority over UKIP.
Liverpool Walton: 28,000 Labour majority over UKIP
Doncaster North: 11000 Labour majority over UKIP
Oldham West and Royton: 14,800 Labour majority over UKIP
Rotherham: 8400 Labour majority over UKIP
Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford: 14,500 Labour majority over UKIP
Houghton and Sunderland South: 12,900 Labour majority over UKIP
Blyth Valley: 9,200 Labour majority over UKIP
Heywood and Middleton: 5,200 Labour majority over UKIP
Liverpool West Derby: 27,300 Labour majority over UKIP
Dorset North: 21,100 Con majority over UKIP
Surrey South West: 28,500 Con majority over UKIP
Worcestershire Mid: 20,500 Con majority over UKIP
Hereford and Herefordshire South: 16,800 Con majority over UKIP
Rochester and Strood: 7,100 Con majority over UKIP
Surrey Heath: 24,800 Con majority over UKIP
Wiltshire South West: 18,000 Con majority over UKIP
Christchurch: 18,200 Con majority over UKIP
Rutland and Melton 21700 Con majority over UKIP
Cambridgeshire North East 16800 Con majority over UKIP

Of the seats randomly picked, there's really 3 that have any hope of swinging anytime soon. Swinging by more than 7,000 would require a Lib Dem level meltdown or New Labour level victory in that seat. Which might happen, but doesn't look likely any time soon.

As far as I can tell, all they really have is Farage in South Thanet, who is a couple of thousand behind.

Fun Online Polls: Most annoying phrases of the election campaign & The next UK government

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Most annoying phrases of the election campaign
Hard-working families - 56 votes
Let me be clear - 40 votes
Long term economic plan - 22 votes
The Great British people - 21 votes
What we've said is... - 16 votes
The economic mess - 13 votes
Up and down the country - 13 votes
Other - 8 votes

There were some excellent 'others':

EarthvsTheSlimePeople: Renegotiating the EU treaties
James James: Let me be absolutely clear...
Bayard: Paying off the deficit
Graeme: Companies and individuals needing to pay "their fair share of tax"
Evilc: Look...
Bayard (again): The housing crisis
Wigner's Friend: (Did/do/done) the right thing (to do)
Me: Any statement starting with "Well..."
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Continuing the general theme - the most likely outcome.

Going by reliable forecasts, the three least-unlikely possibilities for the next government are:

a) Labour minority government. I'd rule that out, John Major struggled along with that for a bit at the end and nobody thanked him for it (at the time - with the benefit of hindsight he was the best PM in my lifetime).

b) Labour-SNP coalition. Hmm, sounds a bit fractious...

So the Sherlock Holmes principle leaves us with only one workable outcome:

c) A Labour-Conservative 'Grand Coalition'.

Labour will abandon their Mansion Tax and 50% income tax ideas in return for the Tories agreeing that the 45% income tax will stay in place instead of being cut to 40%; the Tories will row back a bit on the Bedroom Tax but be secretly delighted not to have to hold an in-out EU referendum; the Tories might go halfway on tuition fees and cut them to £7,500; Labour will merrily join in welfare claimant bashing and persecution of under-25s; more bansturbation generally. Etc etc.

Apart from those relatively minor niggles, I can't really see any big areas of disagreement between Labour and the Tories.

They're 100% in agreement on increases to NHS spending (waste); the pensions triple-lock; replacing Trident; building HS2; VAT and NIC tax rates generally; crapola about 'helping first time buyers'; allowing mass immigration from the EU and elsewhere while promising to 'do something'; retaining the Union with Scotland; running masive bloody deficits; on no account ever liberalising drug laws. Etc etc.

If anybody is aware of any big disagreements on policy or direction or rhetoric which can't be solved with a quick back room compromise, then please leave a comment.

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Campaign Posters

Ah, so season of goodwill over, and we've got 5 months of electioneering coming now.

On the Conservative one, Fraser Nelson points out that:-

New year, new porkies from Conservative HQ. It has opened 2015 with a poster that involves a deception (above): ‘the defict halved’. It’s a relatively small deception: the deficit has been reduced by a third (see graph below) just as David Cameron was saying only a few weeks ago. But this poster makes a more important, and more depressing point: the Tory leadership is prepared to use dishonesty as a weapon in this election campaign.

Here’s how I suspect it all unravelled. George Osborne invented the porkie: that you can say ‘the deficit has been halved’ if, when challenged, you later claim that you’re referring not the deficit, but to a ratio: a deficit/GDP ratio. This is a valid metric, but it’s not “the deficit”.

On the Labour one, err Fraser Nelson points out that:-

So Labour’s poster is misleading. It uses share of GDP in language that makes the reader believe it’s talking about real money. But given that Osborne has just used precisely the same trick to pretend that he has halved the deficit, he is in no position to complain.

My own view of the posters is that both are full of the sort of distortions that politicians like to make.

I don't really think that the Conservatives are in much of a position to make bold claims about unemployment and businesses. There's very little that they've done in policy terms that seems to me has been either about getting people into work, or creating business. I suspect a lot of the recovery is just what would have happened, anyway.

One thing that you often see in companies is that things get stretched out a bit longer when there's economic uncertainty. A white van man might hang onto his van a couple of years longer, maybe. But you can only stretch things so far, things pick up slightly, the future starts to look rosier, and you buy the new van.

As for Labour's poster, well, waiting times were clearly being manipulated under Labour's era (such as having ambulances holding people outside A&E so that they didn't count as waiting in A&E), something the Conservatives put a stop to. And regarding privatisation, this was a process that was started under Ken Clarke as an internal market, dropped by Labour early on and later re-introduced and the extended by Labour to provide personal choice outside the NHS. The competition under the Tories is furthering what Labour already were doing.

All of this is from both parties is about trying to create clear water between them, the Indian Bicycle Marketing that Mark refers to. The "Tories cutting spending" talk favours both parties. It favours Tories who want their small government voters to vote for them and it favours Labour who want their big government voters to vote for them. The reality is that spending has increased over the past 4 years.

Both parties need this lie because both want their "core" vote to turn out. The people who want small government to vote Conservative because "otherwise, evil Labour will get in" and the people who want big government to vote Labour because "otherwise, the evil Tories will get in". If these core voters ever figured out how it really makes little difference either way, they'd vote with their instinct (for perhaps UKIP or the Greens). Neither party is ever going to call the other one out on this, because then it shatters the illusion for them too.

Nigel Farage & Exodus 20:3

Well done, Douglas Carswell in yesterday's by-election, but now comes the interesting bit and the reason why UKIP - with it's easily understandable manifesto* - isn't bigger than it is.

Exodus 20:3: "You shall have no other gods before Me"

Farage was always perfectly nice to me, but I was just a humble bean counter and form filler. It's people who show a bit of free spirit and possible rivals to share what little limelight is shone on UKIP who he can't stand (let alone people who seriously stand against him in leadership elections). I suspect that Carswell falls into one or more of those categories, so my money's on him standing as an independent in May 2015.

* "If you don't want all your taxes to be spent on concreting over the green belt with social housing for Romanian and Bulgarian welfare claimants, vote UKIP!"

UPDATE: The Stigler adds...

That's UKIP manifesto (South). UKIP Manifesto (North) is:-

"Note UKIP and we'll keep making sure you get lots of lovely benefits by keeping the Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants from getting their hands on them."

First-passé le poste de top-up sièges

J'ai longtemps pensé que le moins pire type de système électoral serait une combination du système majoritaire avec top-up sièges, afin que le nombre définitif de sièges au Parlement sont proportionnels aux suffrages exprimés (fourni une partie atteint un seuil de 5% ).

Au lieu de top-up sièges étant attribués par liste de parti (qui les gens on tendance à n'aimer pas), les top-up sièges pour chaque partie seraient attribués à ses candidats dans l'ordre de combien de voix qu'elles ont obtenus personnellement.

Je battu ce dans les deux sens avec Neil Harding, et il a découvert qu'ils ont exactement ce système dans l'état élections dans le Bade-Wurtemberg en Allemagne.

Donc, il existe, et cela fonctionne!

First-past-the-post with top-up-seats

I have long thought that the least-worst type of electoral system would be a combination FPTP with top-up seats so that the final number of seats in Parliament are proportional to the votes cast (provided a party achieves a threshold of say, 5%).

Instead of top-up seats being allocated by party-list (which people tend to dislike), a party's top-up seats would be allocated to its unsuccessful candidates in order of how many votes they achieved personally.

I batted this back and forth with Neil Harding, and he discovered that they have exactly this system in the state elections in Baden-Württemberg in Germany. So it does exist, and it does work.

"UK's concerns over Kenya poll"

David Millipede has expressed concerns over alleged vote rigging by Mwai Kibaki in Kenya.

Pots. Kettles. Black.

Calling The Brown Bottle's Bluff

Via Christina Speight:

"Dear C, On the BBC radio News at one they reported Brown making a sneering reference to something like only 20 odd signatures to a petition calling for an election, but later in the programme added that the number had increased to over 200. I just looked it up, petitions.pm.gov.uk/Election-year (may not have got it quite right but it worked for me) and I added my name. Total now over 600. T"

C'mon chaps, this has got to be worth a punt!

"Unions mobilised for election"

Journalists love this whole will-he-won't-he stuff, because it is all pure and utter speculation and rumour. I doubt whether even The Goblin King has made up his mind yet.

Anyway, to join in the fun, I think we have to look at this in the wider context: neither party really wants to win the next election.

a) If The Goblin King really wanted to win, he could just say "OK, we'll have a referendum and a General Election in November" and he'd walk it. But he doesn't want a referendum and he doesn't particularly want to be in power when economy goes tits up, which is the trap that Labour sprang on Major back in 1992 and why Labour are still in power now. So he has to hang a bit longer and, using Callaghan as an analogy, call an election in 1978 and LOSE, thus making sure Tories take the rap for the Winter Of Discontent.

b) If Tories really wanted to win, then surely they would have spent the last few years laying into Nulab sleaze and incompetence. But they never bothered. Because they don't want to fall into the same trap as Major either. Which is why they fanny about changing their minds about every topic under the sun. So when the Tories lose, whatever Nulab do, the Tories can honestly say that they said they'd have done the opposite. And I think the Tories will make a referendum part of their manifesto pledge, safe in the knowledge that their bluff will never be called (as the Tories are basically totally in thrall to the EU just as much as Nulab or the LibDems).