Have fun.

Lat time I did that was in 1997 and we all fell asleep and missed the Portillo moment.

Interesting, it does go some way to explaining the disconnect between the Betfair markets and the polls - markets extremely bullish on the Tories' chances, polls giving the Tories a slight edge, but not enough to overcome electoral geography or Labour + SNP = Ed is PM.

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Will be very interesting to see if this gets split in to a shy UKIP factor as well.

Shy UKIP factor very interesting for two reasons:

1) Theory that shy Kippers say they'll vote Tory, thus distorting their poll figures
2) Theory that the effect is more palpable in phone polls, thus explaining the repeated trend for phone polls to favour the Tories.

I was in the car last night and I caught the tail end of a discussion with 3 'political commentators', each with different political leanings, and was quite surprised to hear every one of them predicted a Tory majority.

Lol wtf? Were you listening to TalkSport?

Radio Scotland.

As an aside, I'm just back from my polling station and was told that this is the biggest turn out they've ever seen, apart from the referendum last year. Was told that there has been a lot of talk about tactical voting and up here that tends to mean people voting for parties to try to keep out the SNP so I think talk of a SNP whitewash may be greatly exaggerated.

Time will tell.

There's not a chance anyone walks away with a majority, are you sure it wasn't the largest number of seats?

Civil War on friday imo.

Typed that post kinda quickly, I should've clairified, they actually meant a majority in partnership with the Lib Dems again.

Ah okay cool that makes sense. Reckon Labour should offer PR tbh and try and lock the Tories out.

PR?

Proportional Representation. The LD's have been strongly in favour for as long as they have been under represented in Parliament

So is there much vote trading going on?

For example, a UKIP supporter in a close constituency would agree to vote Tory in exchange for a Tory in a safe constituency voting UKIP.

Most commentary I am hearing doesn't expect trading to be a thing, tactical voting on the other hand is likely to

Yeah, this.

The issues I have with PR is that it makes getting a majority so much harder. And how do you determine which representatives get certain constituencies? Like I feel UKIP is getting screwed more than anyone but if they don't hold majorities in the area they represent. That would seem to me to be a significant issue.

I like the idea of PR, I think it can help contribute to more grown up less partisan politics though my experience in Ireland differs.

There are a variety of mechanisms, you can have multiple representatives of larger constituencies or you can have electoral lists, there are options none of which are ideal but are more representative on non two party countries

Lol at giving away so many future seats for the chance of a little near term power getting number ten in an unstable coalition.

Not to mention they will never get in power again if they offer to change the electoral system without a referendum.

Any kind of meaningful voting reform would require at least one group of turkeys to vote for Christmas. I suspect an SNP whitewash in Scotland, and the resulting absurdity in terms of votes/seats ratio, might start the ball rolling though as both Labour and Conservative would see a benefit in redressing the balance.

I'm not sure how PR would work given the four nation state we have, surely it hurts the nationalists?

SNP box crossed. looking forward to tonight. nice comedy election night on c4 and then watch the numbers come in after. as a side note anyone that is a fan of Charlie Brooker should watch his Election Wipe which was on last night. some comedy gold in there

That is generally the argument against PR, but we're about to enter our second hung parliament and the party that wins most seats is going to be even further away from an absolute majority than in 2010. I suspect that if it happens a third time then that'll be it. Also, it's previously been only left-wing parties that have suffered. After this election it'll have broad bipartisan support.

With regard to your question, the most popular form of PR (backed by UKIP, the Lib Dems, SNP) is Single Transferable Vote, which is generally done in regions, rather than a party list system. So for those of us who like the idea of constituency MPs, it's very easy to get around.

Since when did tactical voting in Scotland tend to mean keeping out the SNP?

Total rubbish man. Tactical voting in Scotland 'tends to mean' keeping out the Tories.

To be fair, the Tories are so dead in Scotland that it probably doesn't even enter most people's minds. I can see a lot of the 15%ish of Scottish Tory supporters voting Labour to try and keep the SNP out.