In an ideal world, the events of the past election wouldn’t have happened, but they did so there’s no point in obsessing over what has happened. The calculator is, almost certainly, not broken, but we still need a strategy and a plan to move forward.

That most certainly isn’t a vote of no confidence in any Quad member. We all know that there are rumours of two of these going about, and I have seen one, but they are not the answer, the issues are part-personal, but they go further than that. To those of you who have written and signed these: I’m not going to name you but safe to say I am extremely disappointed in you, some of you more than others, and you know who you are.

I’m going to take you through some of the issues with the elections and then hopefully suggest some solutions so that we can move forward. This will not include rerunning any election, the calculator should not be broken.

The Published Results (County Antrim and Belfast)

It was highlighted on discord yesterday evening that the results in County Antrim amounted to theoretically 121% of valid votes cast. Unless I’ve woken up in Liberia circa 1927, this result is sufficiently wrong that it should be addressed.

The spreadsheet published overnight confirms this, and also suggests that 104% of votes cast were counted in Belfast. An error at this level is acceptable, this is only a game after all, but considering all the other constituencies sum to 100% exactly, we might as well fix this too. The results in Londonderry haven’t formatted correctly on the spreadsheet, but they look ok at a glance.

This shouldn’t be an issue looked for forensically in future elections - rounding could easily result in the published figures being 99.8% or 100.6% or something like that. This error, however, is egregious and the community has a right to expect new numbers published as promptly as possible.

Pre-election Polling (Scotland and Wales)

Taking Scotland first, as the most commented on disparities appear there, the final pre-election national polling placed the Lib Dems on 42%, the SNP at 28%, Labour at 27% and the SWP at 3%. The election results were an SNP win on 38%, Labour at 35%, the Lib Dems in 3rd with 23% and the SWP just under 3%.

Such large swings for the three main parties are obviously entirely unrealistic on one hand, but I am also doubtful that sensible grades being placed into the calculator would have produced these results. It has been suggested that “paper nuking” was the primary cause but this could not have been the only cause. Whilst Lib Dem losses varied across the country, the fact that they lost did not, this suggests that the national-level calculator also impacted them to some degree.

This should be explained a lot better to the community so that they can understand the causes of this, I’ll deal a bit more with the impact of “paper nuking” in a subsequent section.

In Wales the impact against the Lib Dems was even greater, falling from a solid third place to 4th and only 2 seats. This occurred even in the constituency in which they campaigned and so similar to the Scottish results “paper nuking” cannot be the only reason behind this. The reasoning of such a result must be better explained to the community, not necessarily reversed.

Paper Candidates

This is a discussion that we’d had as a community before, but I want to put on record that such a level of “paper nuking” produces results that the original move to simmed elections was supposed to end.

Put simply: the amount of destruction caused by paper candidates has effectively rendered any effort spent during the previous term as meaningless. This is evidently unfair and one of the main reasons for moving to simmed elections in the first place was making the game more interactive than a biannual election lottery.

The complete unrecognition of the election results with pre-election polling in Scotland and Wales is evidence to this, it's a long way back for anyone to build. Such a steep curve is not healthy for the game, and certainly doesn’t make participation fun and worthwhile unless you’re looking at two or three terms down the road.

This doesn’t mean “results are wrong” - this is a feature of the system used in this election, I’m bringing this up because I don’t really think this was a good idea.

If this is what the community wants then that’s fine - but this is a discussion that needs to be had beforehand. The fact that people were not expecting such a level of “paper nuking” makes this all the worse, frankly.

The Conduct of the Election

By process of elimination, it is now public knowledge that Sinn Fein and the SNP (alongside a Labour branch) received deadline extensions for their manifesto. In the abstract this is fine, but the manner in which this was conducted was deeply innapropriate and concerns were understandably compounded by two of these parties winning their elections.

If deadline extensions were going to be necessary this should have been communicated to the community beforehand, with appropriate reasoning attached. This reasoning should ensure that it does not become a party-political matter. I’d also suggest that fairness would entail any extension being universal.

The Absence of the Right

The right disengaging with devo was always going to produce a slightly odd set of results, and I hope people expected that. I would suggest that the existence of the TUV and C!ymru suggests that this isn’t as bad as some have suggested. The issue still merits discussion and thought.

This gap may fill itself, but I do believe that the role of DvS includes responsibility to grow the sims wherever possible. This may include a targeted campaign with the Conservatives (and others) to boost their membership and hopefully they can maintain some sort of activity level throughout the coming term.

I’d also suggest linking Westminster performance and polling with devolved polling (but not vice-versa). Even a small impact on Westminster polling would hopefully ensure that there is no complete disengagement and could be canonically explained by having the actions of devolved branches impacting voters’ Westminster preferences.

This would not be linked in the opposite direction (Westminster polling impacting devolved numbers) because the devo sims have been noted by many members as an excellent place for new members to cut their teeth in the game. This is something that we should be looking to preserve, and therefore not have their results influenced by the performance of others. This could be canonically explained by suggesting that as Westminster politics is increasingly related to English affairs, it is of little interest to voters in the other three countries.

The calculator would need to be adjusted for this, but this is technically possible and hopefully something the community will consider.

There is of course no requirement for anyone to participate in any part of the sim, if only leftist and centrist parties do then that is who will be elected. This isn’t a bug, its reality (although it may make the devo sims less interesting and engaging for participants).

Communication and Attitude

Much of what I’m stressing is that the Quad needs to have better communication with the community. This is absolutely the number one issue and would resolve most of what went wrong yesterday. They also seemingly need to communicate better with each other, and accept help both from within and outside the Quad when necessary, so that innapropriate results like Antrim don’t slip through the net. This is also seen through the canonising covid debacle.

Nevertheless, the community needs much better engagement with the Quad too. There is no use acting as if the quad is some mysterious orginisation decreeing unknowable edicts from Mount Olympus, question them, discuss with them, make suggestions. Talk before accusations, there has almost certainly been no grand conspiracy against you, what you’re worried about can almost certainly be explained. Likewise, the quad must take these concerns seriously.

Moving Forward

I would suggest that a committee of maybe three or so former quads who have run elections go over the calculator spreadsheet with Uin just to check nothing serious has befallen it and that the results are broadly correct. This may involve questioning human decisions, but I would caution against using the results of these questions as a pretext to amend the election results because of the precedent that this would set. That’s except in Antrim and Belfast of course. I highly, highly doubt the calculator is broken, there has seemingly been human error somewhere and it should be rectified.

I’d normally recommend that the Quad do this, but Frosty is going to be incredibly busy with the handover to PH and I wouldn’t want to burden them further. The other issues I’ve raised can be discussed properly once the new term has begun and there is a settled quad again.

~ mg