LibDems should win election
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Gareth Moore of How2vote.co.uk would like to take Kieren McCarthy to task on his results fudging claims. Not that it matters much now, of course:

Sorry to bother you but since your website (theregister.co.uk) currently rather prominently says: "Yesterday, we ran a story on How2vote.co.uk. Since then we have had good reason to believe it is fudging the results (see bottom) in favour of the LibDems."

As the person who created that website I thought I would drop you a quick email since this is a bit of a strong aspersion against a site that exists purely to give policy analysis, in addition to the detailed one I sent your reporter two hours ago.

Your logic is a bit silly. The result shown is easily obtained by answering just one question in each of the sections shown as 'conservative' and then all the questions in the remaining section shown as 'liberal democrat', giving an overall result in favour of the liberal democrats simply because the majority of questions - all in that one section - were in their favour.

In other words, the overall score is a total of the per-question results, so if you answer more in one section it will take priority - as simple, and as non-biased!, as that.

You can trivially obtain the reverse result by selecting a few sections, picking one lib dem policy in each and then a whole lot of conservative ones in a remaining section, obtaining a lib dem win overall despite all bar one section showing conservative wins.

Anyway, since your comment is quite strongly worded I felt I should email you directly - your original writeup yesterday was much appreciated, however, so thank you for that! ;) However with all due respect it would be nice if you could apply a moment's thought before then being quite so damning! ;-)

Kieren writes: He's quite right of course (we checked it out). But our belief in LibDem bias was proven completely right in that the system is clearly run on a proportional representation ethos. Like it or not, we're first past the post citizens. How else would you get an abusive majority in the modern world?