On February 28, Great Britain held a special election to fill the vacant House of Commons seat in Eastleigh. The Liberal Democrat Party won the election with 13,342 votes; the U.K. Independence Party placed second with 11,571; the Conservative Party placed third with 10,559; Labour placed fourth with 4,088. There were also ten others on the ballot. See this story for the full results.
This is the first time the U.K. Independence Party had placed as high as second in any Parliamentary election since before 2005.
Eastleigh is in Hampshire, on the south central coast of England. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.
I wonder how many votes the BNP would have polled if they had contested this constituency?
#1, I wouldn’t think they would have done well in that part of England. They do better in the northern part of England.
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V. in ALL regimes
– esp the EVIL Brit regime having NO written constitution and its many safe seat rigged gerrymander seats in the House of Commons and its appointed robot party hacks in the House of *Lords*.
Note the plurality percentage in the vacancy election for the winner = 1 more plurality extremist — who votes the robot party hack line in the regime.
BNP probably wouldn’t have received more than 1.5%.
The English Democrats are like the BNP with better haircuts. They did extremely poorly, getting about 70 votes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastleigh_by-election,_2013
The seat was held by a Lib Dem who resigned on February 4, 2013 after admitting guilty to perversion of justice.
The by-election was held 24 days later with no need for any primaries. Had it been a Top 2 election it would have been between candidates of the 3rd and 4th parties.
And this justifies your favoring of “Top Two” how?
But the takeaway from this is that the Tories lost many votes to the UKIP. If something like this happens in the next general election, the Conservatives will lose their majority (in coalition with the Liberal Democrats) badly to the Labourites.
So the fourth-place party in this by-election is the true winner.
The other takeaway is that if you are an MP or any elected official, when you are speeding in your car, don’t pressure your wife to say she was the one driving and take the blame, especially when you’re having an affair with another woman.
#7 If you have a simple ballot access scheme, where all candidates are placed on the ballot, the election can be held quickly, even if a runoff were needed.
#8 The Labour candidate got about 8% in both elections.
The Lib Dem candidate dropped 15%, the Tories 14%. So the voters simply wanted to slap the coalition parties a bit. The two parties won’t be running as coalition partners in the general election.
#9 Hell hath no fury (like a woman scorned).
Jim Riley @ 10… that is what parliamentary elections in the UK are. It is relatively easy to get on the ballot and there IS no primary. The election is the election. That is a huge difference from the US system.
#13 It has nothing to do with parliamentary elections, other than with only one office being contested, the notion of “party ticket” is meaningless.
The placement of party names on ballots in Britain is fairly new (1969) and was actually a slogan chosen by the candidate who ran as an individual. It didn’t mean that parties could not back candidates. It just meant that a candidate was not placed on the ballot by the party.
It is how elections used to be done in the US, before political parties took control of the ballot, placing candidates of a party in columns or rows, sometimes even permitting a voter to vote for all candidates of a party with a single mark.
But in (non-partisan, and even some partisan ones) city elections voters have no problem with simply voting for a favored candidate for each office. All candidates file, and all are on the ballot. The same was true in the one-party south where one the party primary was decisive.
When ‘Foster v Love’ was being argued before the Supreme Court, the lawyer for Louisiana argued that their election system was so novel, that the time regulations by Congress did not apply. If they wanted to have the primary in August and the general election in September, it could be quite all right. It was just coincidence that the election might conclude in November.
The lawyer for Love correctly pointed out that the system used by Louisiana (the Open Primary) was how elections were conducted everywhere in the US at the time Congress set the uniform election date.
The Open Primary/Top 2 are simply a return to candidate-based elections.
In Great Britain, as in every place else in the world except Louisiana, California, and Washington, political parties control the use of their names on the ballot. No party label appears on British ballots unless the party approves.
#15 That is quite recent in Britain. Before 1969 there were no party labels on the ballot. And until fairly recently, there were no officially registered parties.
In California and Louisiana, candidates are restricted to using the name of the party that they affiliated with in the government registration books. Washington has no such registration.