Nit-picking Democracy

I bet most of y'all in Nepal haven't given these data a close look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Nepalese_Constituent_Assembly_election,_2008

Although this is a Wikipedia page, the same results can be found at the Election Commission's website. Understandably, the site is shit.

Still, a closer look at the numbers can be quite instructive. For instance: I was stumped by how it was possible for the average of two numbers to be larger than the larger of the two numbers. how is (a/2+b/2) <>

If you look at what political parties are included in the MKN government, and tally their FPTP votes, you can begin to appreciate that this is actually the *true majority*, and not the faction led by the Maoists. NC and UML are an unholy political union--they have nothing to distinguish from each other anymore, they are entrenched, and will fight simply for possession over reform. But, it is undeniable that together, they share 44.42 of the FPTP votes, and 41.47% of proportional representation votes.

It would be more instructive to include the various Terai parties to this calculation, but the data here don't suffice: Sadbhavana Party has broken up into 3 groups, MPRF significantly into two factions, etc.

Election observers like EC and JCF should look at the number of total votes cast under the FPTP and proportional systems, because there is huge evidence within that of the massive irregularity that must have taken place: (Prop - FPTP) = 0.04(Prop) Or, 432,958 people who cast the vote for the proportional system didn't cast the vote for the FPTP system.

That is a huge number of people! You had to cast your FPTP votes first, then only were you given your second ballot for the proportional representation vote. Either over 4% of the voters were totally disillusioned with the system and didn't cast their FPTP votes, or, the proportional representation ballot boxes were stuffed.

Look closely at the difference between the FPTP and proportional votes for the top five political parties.

NC, UML and Terai Madhesh Loktantrik Party (TMLP) have more FPTP votes than they have proportional votes. These were the status-quo parties, TMLP being a shadow of NC and UML. It was a popular sentiment at that time that people would give their old leaders from NC and UML their direct vote, but would give their proportional rep vote to the new, revolutionary parties: UNCP-Maoist, and MPRF (Forum).