I think it's worth noting that in the 2019 election, Binface stood against Lord Buckethead who was representing the Monster Raving Looney party, thereby splitting the "nobles wearing receptacles" vote and allowing a third joke candidate to win.
Don't throw away your election leaflets. Send them to the University of Bristol who have an archive of materials from elections. Post them after the election with a note of the postcode where the items were delivered to: Special Collections, Arts & Social Sciences Library, University of Bristol, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol BS8 1TJ. They check and redact any personal information before adding to the archive.
Sorry @@dariusftw3378, I don't understand what you're asking. I've received leaflets from five parties here in Bristol, but who is/are the "they" you are referring to?
@@dariusftw3378They are sending way more leaflets to Matt than to many others. This will be because (a) his MP is the chancellor and (b) the results will likely be close. If you are optimising campaign spend then you won't spend money trying to influence a seat that is already a foregone conclusion. You'll do it in important/closely fought seats like Matt's
@@jpdemer5 I go back and forth on Hanlon. If we define malice as a mindset similar to sadism, i.e. actively wishing others to suffer, there is a surprising amount of that when you really drill down on what people think of certain groups. On the other hand, is that really malicious or are they too stupid to recognise the humanity of those they wish ill?
@@Normal_Boii and he doubled the estimated result, which means he got double of the infinite growth that was predicted. Only Count Binface can double an infinite improvement.
I imagine these graphic designers back in their political headquarters all talking together, "so, did prof. Parker grade you pamphlet yet? What did you get?" "He docked me points for the arrow" "I got extra points for the dog!"
At this point it's starting to feel like the current candidates are the only ones who have ever run, and have been running since long before any of us were born. I almost hope that whichever one wins promptly loses their marbles and pushes the big red button because _at least then this groundhog day repetition will end._
The short timetable may be easier for the voters but not so much for the candidates who are in quite the hurry. That said, never ending election season can probably also be taxing on the candidates (in addition to the voters).
3 месяца назад
No wonder Count Binface is so into graphs, after all, the German word for count is Graf!
Well as Labour's candidate in Richmond and Northallerton, and a long time Stand-up Maths fan, this is a crossover of my interests beyond anything I could have ever dreamed.
Do you think you should withdraw to let the people's true representative, Count Binface, have the best possible shot? (You shouldn't. Go get'em. Good luck tomorrow!)
First order of business for you, have Northallerton actually included on the constituency map. I mean, I've been there and its easily missed, but even as an expat Geordie who dislikes anything further south than the river Wier, ( and frankly, I'm pretty ambivalent about much of South Tyneside) this seem a pretty egregious omission.
This year I had the bright idea to print out business cards with a built in ruler (for NSBE, an engineering convention). Dealing with the dimensions and print bleed was so unintuitive I had to correct a mistake in the parking lot of the print shop!
@@digitig if temperatures can go negative (not in those stupid units but real units like Kelvin, negative temperatures are really hot btw), and -1 can have a square root, I see no problem with Count Binface getting over 100%, Russia got over 100% in the vote in Sevastopol for Crimea to become Russian, and I am sure anything Putin can do, Count Binface can do too.
Figuring out if a sitting Prime Minister has ever lost their seat in UK history requires answering the surprisingly controversial question of when the UK first got a Prime Minister
Walpole is generally considered to be the first Prime Minister, but it is true that British history is marked with soft transitions rather than hard borders, as things like Prime Minister evolved, rather than suddenly being decreed.
Technically if there's an election on, doesn't that mean there is no Parliament at the moment? If so, by definition a sitting PM couldn't lose or win an election, because they aren't an MP when the election happens.
18:37 A little misleading here, since there were not parliamentary elections in 1066 the denominator should be 0, which means BF's share of 0/0 should be undefined rather than 0%
@@Nxck2440 Though the was no parliament, the Anglo=Saxon kings needed the witan, basically meetings of the powerful lords of the country (which could include religious leaders), to agree with his decisions. The witan ratified the succession of king which was not decided on a "first born" basis. Edward the Confessor did not specify a successor and on his death bed gave an ambiguous declaration that Harold Godwinson (the Earl of Wessex) should protect the kingdom; the witan decided that Harold should be king. Parliament itself comes out of the witan and subsequent councils of the nobility called by post-1066 kings
This is a Moot point. There were regular parliaments as people were called forth at various levels to chinwag stuff over. It is often thought that William turned up because it wasn't exactly clear who was supposed to become the new King and those who were selected by the then electoral franchise to send representatives had different ideas and some may (or may not) have selected William sadly making a tapestry graph of how many people have approved you to be King takes too long so about 4 people arrived in Kingdom to take on the job. Count William made his army Count and became boss of Normandy and King of England... a lesson to be learned. Your propaganda is best not done by tapestry...
The main takeaway from these bar charts for me is that voting under a first-past-the-post system seems just terrible... Do they just serve to remind you to vote strategically? Edit: Should not have commented before finishing the video! Matt of course touches on this.
@@JdeBP What a wonderful country. So many choices to throw your vote away. So many ways to have your voice completely ignored. How do other countries cope with the pressure of having their votes actually matter?? So stressful!
Well, it's only terrible in causing this kind of strategic voting when there are multiple competitive parties like in the UK. If you look at the US, where there are functionally only two parties, you'll find first past the post is terrible in completely different ways!
@@TymberJ The other way around. In the UK many vote unstrategically where as vast numbers of Americans vote strategically every year. They just never need to be told which two candidates have a hope. "I might vote for a third party candidate. go ahead throw your vote away Don't blame me I voted for Kodos."
@@neilbiggs1353 At least in theory asking people how they're going to vote ought to be a better indicator of how they're going to vote. than how people in the area voted 5 (or 50, or 500) years ago is. "Er, Yes, our voter data shows a strong preference for the Plantagenet party."
@@ptorq It's a theory that doesn't survive contact with stats lessons unfortunately! Biased sampling is a classic trick of political parties, and that's just the beginning. Running 4 samples and picking the best one is not unheard of either! Unless the survey has been carried out totally independently (like say the local newspaper doing one), they should be treated with minimal trust
Bar in mind that 15 of those were Lib Dem ones - where they win, they work hard for their constituents. I loved in St Albans most of last decade and the difference between having a Tory vs Lib Dem MP after they won last time is extraordinary.
Well, see, the UK has election seasons of a sensible length, so the day before the election is a non-negligible portion of the season. Unlike certain other countries whose media start speculating who’s going to win the next primary the day after the winner is known.
My interpretation of his statement here is its a quick video from his perspective, time spent recording and editing the video is probably much shorter than his usual projects
The biggest takeaway from all this should be how messed up the British electoral system is, and how absurd it is there is not a greater push for proportional representation of some kind.
You are absolutely right about proportional representation. In fact, it might have happened when the Lib Dems were actually in the nearly-only coalition government the UK has had, in 2010-2015. Instead they wasted their entire political capital into a referendum on instant-runoff voting, which *would not have helped them* if it had passed. That was one of the most stupid political moves of all time.
While I do think your voting system is one of the worst on this planet (alongside the US-American), let me guarantee you, that the voting system does not protect you from duchefaces who ruin your lives by making stupid decisions and sitting out problems, that should get addressed immediately (just look at Europe as a whole)
4:00 both posters clearly show their source at the bottom, so good on them. Also, love the passive aggressive "It's not 2019" bubble on the Labour poster.
They both show their source, but one shows a complete lack of messaging competence. Why make the chart show it as you vs the Lib Dems if the idea is to get Lib Dems to vote for you to get the Tories out? If the Tories are on to come 3rd anyway, then I might as well vote for the Liberals I was going to anyway!!
Here to point out the typo on the leaflet: 2024 Richmonmd & Northallerton Prediction. Graph accuracy: 100% Spelling of Richmond on the leaflet accuracy: 83.3% (if we exclude the Richmond sign in the photo)
I thought you were going to go for a Reform UK style line graph showing Binface's results as a similar curve. Still lost it at "Let's see the R value.... Let's not see the R value."
I just love this. As someone who has designed leaflets for local elections I basically "start" with a close representation, but then you tweak it to make the design layout feel better, sometimes it is with the intention of directly manipulating perceptions and other times it is really just an aesthetics choice. The reason Green and Labour are over sized on some probably has more to do with layout and font spacing and visual appeal than any attempt to manipulate perceptions.
As an American it took away too long to get the "Bindependence Day" joke. Side note: I would have roasted the 1066 chart for the position of the 1997 label. Seems too far left!
They also missed the irish immigration of roughly 1mio people during and directly after the irish famine. Or all those people who immigrated from europe literally all them time(Jews, Flemish, Hueguenots, Eastern Europeans, ...). Or all those who immigrated from british colonies or the commonwealth.
Some people argue that Binface running could hurt Labour's chances of taking the seat. At least with including this accurate chart, people will be able to see that Labour is the clear tactical voting option.
As someone who does not live in a first-past-the-post system the style of ads is crazy, I've never seen anything like it. The fact that they all want to give you an extremely biased math lesson instead of actual party ads would be amusing if it wasn't so sad that that people don't really have much of a choice.
The other day I explained the UK FPTP voting system to my nephew but I used a "pizza party" analogy. Say you are hosting a pizza party for yourself and 6 others. You take a vote on what kind of pizza you are going to order. Two people want plain cheese pizza, two people want pepperoni pizza. Then there's your weird friend Kyle and his two gym bros who don't want pizza at all and just want raw eggs and protein powder. Four people want pizza, three people don't want pizza and unless the pepperoni and the cheese people come together nobody gets pizza. The lesson? IDK don't buy one pizza and call it a party or smth.
I'm surprised you don't use the same system we use in Australia: instant runoff, or preferential voting. So you could vote for party B, with party C as your preference, which is counted if no party gets a clear majority
Brexit weaponised this in reverse by never defining Brexit, so we ended up with cold pizza, with pineapple on, that had fallen off the back of the delivery bike and been run over a few time by the cars behind. But the 52% who voted for "pizza" got exactly what they voted for.
It depends what the aim of the voting system is. If the goal is to most directly reflect the aggregate opinions of the electorate about the various candidates, then, yeah, there are much better systems than first past the post. If the goal is to have a simple system that's going to tend to give one party a clear majority even when the country is more divided, then first past the post does a pretty solid job. The big weakness of more democratic systems is that they're more likely to produce coalition governments.
@@Petch85increases bureaucracy (as in time and money) if parties in government disagree on an issue and reduces the amount of government action taken, see Lib Dem’s + conservative coalition as example. (This is me playing devils advocate)
I (Dutch) feel that our coalition government has gotten an awful lot done in the past 14 years. They haven't fully dismantled our welfare state yet, but we're quickly catching up with you guys.
All the parties sent me leaflets ... Notably the Reform Party told me about their leader, and biggest shareholder, and biggest supporter, neither of whom are standing here .. and incidentally mentioned in passing who was actually standing for them ... but said absolutely nothing about the candidate at all ... All the others told me about the candidate first, and what they are standing for, and then something about the party ... I will be voting for one of the parties who are actually promoting their candidate for being my MP
Notably as a new party given 6 weeks to organise that elections were 6 months early they probably have a good reason to not be able to tell you too much about all their candidates.
@@ribbonsofnight everyone else managed, they are currently being investigated as several have now said they were paper candidates, who had no expectations of being elected
@@davidioanhedges the majority of candidates have no expectation of being elected. Count Binface got more votes than 7 candidates in the electorate he contested. That's 8 candidates that knew they have no chance of being elected. Reform was 2nd in 90 electorates. It is much easier to have 600 candidates who have a history in politics if you've been a major party for decades or centuries. Many of the other parties only contest a fraction of the seats which makes it easier for Sinn Fein etc. to be ready for an election.
Reform is the Nigel Farage party and everyone knows it. . This isn't the first time Nigel Farage has ran a party, and he generally is the only thing holding it together. When he stops, the party collapses.
Man I am so glad I live in Australia, while our voting system has its problems at least it lets us vote for whoever we want without our vote going to waste or actively working against our interests. We simply number the list of candidates in order of preference, and if our first preference can't win then our vote goes to our second preference, if the second preference can't win it goes to the third, and so on. This lets us vote for parties that best align with our preferences without risking a party we don't like getting an advantage. Everyone's vote always counts and it always works in your best interest (assuming you voted based on your best interests). The only down side is that it makes voting a little more tricky since you need to be somewhat aware of all the parties, but usually your party will hand out flyers at the voting locations with their recommendations for preferences and you can just copy or tweak that if you are feeling lazy.
I usually research the Count Binface style candidates 20 minutes before I leave the house to vote. I don't usually think that time was valuably used. It is good to know that "Science party" is anti-science I guess.
Easy decision, don't waste leaflet surface with useless information. And if someone complains and you know that they measured just the height and not the surface, you can first point out, that it wasn't done to delegitimize the greens and labour and then you can tell them to look at the area and win useless nerd points.
They're less than a factor of 2 off in height, but maybe a third the width, so the area is also definitely wrong (plus the two narrow bars are approximately the same width, but have significantly different vertical errors).
Yup and it's like that so they peep out above the text, and to buy some horizontal space for the layout. I'll forgive them the arrow as "indicative of trend", but then the CON column would have to be depicted as burning down.
i think they just have them bigger because otherwise they would look like they're were picking on those parties by using the accurate measure. their bars would be so tiny
Sorry that this doesn't help everyone but if you're watching on Android, you can turn on Live Captions at the OS level and they're pretty decent (depends on diction quality but Matt talks very clearly). You can access it from the volume controls and I _think_ Google added similar functionality to their Chrome browser on desktop.
5:13 Extremely pedantic correction, since the dissolution of parliement on 30 May, there are no serving MPs, so technically Jeremy Hunt was the previous MP, and may or may not be the next MP, but is not the current MP
The people of Godalming and Ash will probably vote for Jeremy Hunt to ensure that people keep on mispronouncing his name and end up on Have I Got News For You. But look at the possibilities with Green Party candidate Ruby Tucker (who I hope loves a curry)!
I find it really weird with the yanks where their presidential election occurs several months before they change president. Historically that is the point where nothing matters any more, they don't have any electorate to woo and will just do whatever corrupt thing they feel like. So they'll appoint a load of extreme judges, pardon lots of people and poison the chalice for their replacement. The US President actually has insane powers, they are just by gentlemen's agreement not abused. That period between being voted out but still leading the country makes traditional respect for the office become null and void, they can make massive international actions that can't be easily undone by the new President.
The thing that confuses me the most as an American watching parliamentary elections is the idea that the party in power gets to decide when it would be most opportune to have an election (given that governments generally don't run all the way to the maximum length of time allowed). The part I am most jealous about is how short parliamentary elections are.
Well strictly Parliament decides, but when a single party has a majority that’s what happens. The reason for this is that Parliament (…again, mostly run by one party) changed the law a while ago - it might have changed again since then, I forget. In general elections have to be every 5 years, but they can happen sooner.
Looking on the other direction the thing that astounds me most about US elections is queues at polling stations. This is the first year I've seen anyone comment about queues in the UK and they've generally only been a couple of people long and due to the new photo ID requirements.
@@ChrisParr There's a lot of variation among the states - I've never had to wait in line for more than a few minutes despite living in multiple states. It's a choice by certain officials (spoiler, mostly Republicans) to suppress the vote, especially in areas where they think the votes won't go their way. But many states have early voting, easy absentee voting, lots of polling stations, etc.
I can already see the TED Ed video on this riddle about being an intergalactic trash can man and needing to find where a certain mathematician lives in order to get his help with your leaflet
The final leaflet was actually sent to him at exactly the right time so he would pick it up during the video, confirming that it was the correct house.
@@quintuscrinis8032 “exact combination” means he would have sent a different combination to each household, allowing an unambiguous identification of the correct address.
I am convinced, that the reason the graphs get messed up most of the time is people trying to fit them onto pages without the printers needed margin taken into account. Printers will regulary send back with edits done, due to space restrictions for margins. Which clients are usually oblivious too. When they receive the altered flyer to confirm they are happy. They never check it. I know its not a glamorous take, but having done some work with printers, I have seen this happen a lot.
Australia uses preferential voting-you rank everyone, and votes move around to avoid the problem described. It makes sense. But, because “politics” there’s always an argument for first-past-the-post reform, and I do not like it. We also have compulsory voting*, but that’s another topic. *You don’t have to vote, you have to go and have your name ticked off. You can donkey vote, or just throw the papers out, but it’s called “compulsory.”
Heretic! How dare you diminish Count Whats-his-face's losing tally! You'll be the first to toil in the garbage mines when his retribution never arrives!
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Let's not forget about the various Celtic tribes that came across the Channel on lots of small boats. And while we're at it, the Neanderthals and Stone Age humans immigrated here over the Channel before the Channel even existed.
Arthur Balfour lost his seat in Manchester East in 1906, but was re-elected in a by-election in City of London shortly afterwards. It's a very small club though.
Important context for the first stat of 1066 vs now. 1 in 6 people legally living in England and Wales today were not born in the UK. 2.5 million people immigrated to the UK in the last 2 years. So I think that could possibly still be far higher than 1066 even as a percentage.
0.56% migration in the norman invasion. By the population estimate of 1.25m vs 7000 Norman invaders. In 2023 there were 1.2m immigrants to the UK. Which is 1.8% of the population in a single year. There is no England specific data but we can assume England's population grew more than 0.56% that year. On a side note. Currently there are 10 million first generation migrants living in England and Wales. This is 16.8% of the total population of England and Wales. I doubt even in 1066 even close to 1 in 10 people living in England were first generation migrants. Let alone more than 1 in 10.
@@xylusirl1527 You are wasting your time in this comment section populated by conceited idiots who think it reasonable to compare 21st century immigration to Romans and Normans. And even those who will admit the sheer magnitude of the numbers are so persistent in their delusion that will go on pretending every kind of immigrant (or invader) is the same. Europe has apparently decided to stop existing as a distinct cultural and demographic region.
This is quite interesting, but it's worth noting in that case reforms' graph is still wrong. Having double the relative immigration is a lot less than the 20× or whatever is on the reform graph.
@@xylusirl1527 what are the statistics for second generation migrants? Here we have 28.7% of the population has at least one parent born abroad and 18.4% of the population who were born abroad themselves, according to data from 2022. But then, we need immigration to keep the population stable.
"Tens of thousands of people." On screen: *48,600. It's so nice to be dealing with someone who cares about the numbers; I recently argued with someone who claimed that k:1 (for some value of k, 2 < k < 9) is "multiple orders of magnitude".
@@OsirusHandleif you had 5 very similar parties that get a combined 80% of the vote and split it evenly, and one very different party getting 20 of the vote, the one very different party would sin with first past the post
In Australia we have preferential voting, including for the Senate, where you might have many tens of candidates to number. A while ago, the solution for this was a party would submit their preferences to the Electoral Commission, and a 1 in the party’s box “above the line” would count as a vote as submitted by the party. The problem was that a guy known as the “preference whisperer” would get all the minor parties to preference each other, and in the end one of them (basically at random) would get the final Senate spot for the state. My mini-campaign in those days was to get people to vote “below the line” so that you got your own preferences rather than what a party wants. Now you don’t have to fill out every vote below the line, only a certain number related to the number of spots to fill. Senate voting in Australia could make an interesting video…
If we use the numbers given at the start of the video then the Norman army would be 0.5% of the population. Whereas over a million people arrived last year which is 2% of the current population - - 4 times as much as a famous invasion that permanently altered the country forever. I can't help but come to the conclusion that their point probably still stands. Not that I would vote for them obviously. Especially when you add in the fact that most of the Norman army didn't stay
Yeah they really missed their own point with that graph. It is actually a rather persuasive argument; modern immigration is four times higher proportionally than immigration during the most notoriously influential period of immigration in the history of Britain. In an attempt to make a punchy, shocking graph, however, they just weakened the point by misrepresenting it.
@@tissuepaper9962 They didn't misrepresent it at all. With no context of the discussion around this graph (I had never seen it before watching this video), I immediately grasped the point, which is exactly what the dude defending it says: most immigration since 1066. You'd have to be either fairly stupid or extremely bad faith to read it any other way.
@@lawrencebarker4311 they did, though. Almost all of what you can see in the graph they showed can be attributed to the 100x growth of the global population since 1066 and has nothing to do with immigration. A more useful and informative (as opposed to inflammatory and misleading) graph would show immigration as a proportion of population and would appear much less dramatic.
Political commentators: "Rishi Sunak's count seems to be taking a while. I wish they'd get it done so we can interview him" (meanwhile) Matt Parker: Binface's vote count doesn't seem to have ended on a prime number, this ought to be a recount
The effect of rounding the projected figures from the polling data. If you have more than two options, it's pretty common for the total percentage to be something other than 100.
Well done to the BBC for making a piece about charts, then broadcasting it on the radio. Nice to see them prioritising technical accuracy. **sarcastic face**
You should come and observe at an Irish counting. My recent local one went to 14 redistributions of excess votes and eliminated candidates. It's a nerd delight, and we will be having a general election sometime late this year or early next. Nobody puts charts on their leaflets, as far as I know.
No one knows when the election will happen, unless you check the betting market. Then you might see a sudden spike for a specific date a few days before the announcement, because some tories like to use their inside knowledge to make a quick buck.
Which would be the proper way to do a histogram. The area of each of the bars should represent the COUNT of the data points in that BIN. Aha! Count Bin-face is clearly an intergalactic data visualizer! IIRC it's quite hard to make Excel™ draw a proper histogram, i.e. to shrink the inter-bar spacing to zero.
For the "errors" on the order of millimeters, is it possible that the bar heights are *more* accurate than the displayed numbers, as those are rounded to the nearest integer?
I just got 1 piece from Labour saying "Skylark, have you noticed an improvement in the NHS in the past 14 years?" turn it over "If 'no' vote Labour". I didn't get any graphs this graph season, but at least it was personalised (I'm a registered member of the Labour party, they didn't just steal my info). I'm in a fairly safe conservative area (our MP is a "one-nation conservative" so one of the worst kinds) so I'm not aware of any campaigning
Ah well a coincidence, based on being the earliest possible date for an election. It was pledged to be ‘in the second half of the year’, (not that keeping pledges has a strong track record) is always on a Thursday, and this is the first Thursday of July.
