London Mayoral Elections 2016: A site to help voters decide | Hacker News Reader

London Mayoral Elections 2016: A site to help voters decide

getagent.co.uk

25 pointssebpowell14 comments

This is nice - I hadn't even considered anybody but Labour/Conservative and this gave some flavour as to where their focuses lie. Disappointed that none of them want to expand LHR though.

> I hadn't even considered anybody but Labour/Conservative

See this: https://www.londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/how-vote

And note that "You have 2 choices for Mayor" so you don't have to confine your vote to the usual two big parties for tactical reasons. If you vote for a "small" party with little chance it's not wasted, you have a second choice as backup.

Preferential voting: It's a good thing!

https://www.londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/counting-votes

> If a candidate receives more than half of all the first choice votes they are elected immediately

There is far more choice on the centre and left than there is on the right. The two leaders in the polls are neck and neck.

If you are centre-left, you may wish to be defensive and put your vote for the most likely to win, and your second on the one you believe in.

It still sucks.

Sadiq Khan is outpolling Zac Goldsmith by about 10%

If a candidate of the x tendency gets more than half the first choice votes cast, I think it's pretty-much game over for the anti-x tendency whatever the voting system, or does the math disagree with me?

What?

What makes you think that one of the candidates will get 50% of the vote? And what makes you think that allocating the other voters differently will change that?

Very nicely done - wish there was something like this for the general election too!

Also checked out your main product (getagent) and it looked great - we're actually just in the process of selling our house but hadn't heard of you guys so have already gone through most of the process, but worryingly, the agent we're using isn't in the top 8 list that you guys recommended...

Anyway congrats, you successfully 'growth hacked' me :)

Is Tfl the focus of the election ? I would vote for anybody who decides to build more bike leans and pedestrian-only places instead.

The Green Party then?

The London Cycling Campaign should be more informed than I am, since I left London last year: http://lcc.org.uk/articles/sadiq-and-zac-wobbly-cycling-why-...

Can we get the same thing for the EU referendum?

Here Here!!

Great - made me question who to vote for!

Normally we'd bury this for being garden-variety politics, but it looks like it might be an interesting approach to helping voters decide, so we'll treat it as a possibly interesting website instead and change the title from "London Mayoral Elections 2016: Who Should You Vote For?" to emphasize that.

Sites like this have been around for a few years, or decades in the case of the Netherlands [1].

Unlock Democracy did a much better one — without any "opinion" after each statement — for last year's election: [2] (If anyone wants to try it, a valid postcode in England should be B94 5PJ, or make your own at [3].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Match

[2] http://election2015.votematch.org/

[3] http://www.doogal.co.uk/PostcodeGenerator.php

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