The Conservatives could form a government, with a majority, with the support of the Liberal Democrats. I think, and hope, that they won’t get that support without commitment to reform the electoral system toward proportional representation.

We still don’t have the details of the deal. When we do, I’ll post about them. If they include a firm step toward PR, then I for one will forgive Nick Clegg and the rest of the LibDem leadership.

I do have some regret that the LibDems couldn’t do a deal with Labour instead. But I think that the operative word is couldn’t. Such a deal would have required the support of all Labour MPs and of some of the other, smaller, parties, and that support just didn’t seem to be there.

Britain’s parliament has 649 seats, each representing a geographic constituency. Here, for each party, is the share of the seats and the share of the vote (the 10 missing seats are those for which we don’t yet have a result).

• Conservative: 300, 36%.
• Labour: 255, 29%
• Liberal Democrat: 56, 23%
• Other: 28, 12%.

So, the Conservatives have more seats than any other party, but they don’t have a majority of seats, and they were nowhere near a majority of the popular vote. The Liberal Democrats have a far greater share of the popular vote (more than a fifth) than of the seats (less than a tenth). That’s because of the UK system, in which there is a winner-take-all race for each seat.

The electoral system is bad at representing the popular vote. It’s usually “good” at making it clear who’s in power, in that usually either Labour or the Conservatives has a majority of seats. That hasn’t worked this time.

The Conservatives could form a government, with a majority, with the support of the Liberal Democrats. I think, and hope, that they won’t get that support without commitment to reform the electoral system toward proportional representation.

The Liberal Democrats did hope that this would be the election in which they gained a significant number of seats even without electoral reform. Now they hope that it will be the election after which they can bargain for electoral reform. In subsequent elections, their popular vote would be reflected in seats – and produce more “hung parliaments,” alliances, and so on.

Proportional representation is my hope also. For that, and for other reasons, I’ll be particularly interested in UK politics over the next few days.

So, Murray Hill Inc. for Congress, as we say on Facebook: and Reddit, and NPR. And Youtube as well, but I’ll embed the video here to save you the trip.

Maybe the above is rather too British for most of my readers. But, dear readers, if you ever see a candidate named Loud Viscount Watson, it will probably be me. That is the only name under which I will ever run for political office.

I was reminded of the Loonies by Moody. Glyn of that ilk posted about the UK Pirate Party. Said pirates hold the radical notion that “when creative works are sold, it’s the artists who [should] benefit.”

The Guardian decided to crowdsource the trawling, by setting up a web site with copies of expense documents and an interface allowing visitors to classify each document. Michael Andersen at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab presented four crowdsourcing lessons, based on an interview with Simon Willison, who developed the web application.

Two of the lessons are psychological:

• your workers are unpaid, so make it fun
• attention is fickle, so launch immediately.

The other two are technical:

• speed is mandatory, so use a framework
• participation will come in one big burst, so have servers ready.

Note that the technical reasons follow on from “attention is fickle.” The framework was Django, and the servers were in the cloud, at Amazon’s EC2. Glyn Moody remarked that open source made this crowdsourcing project feasible. I’ll be more explicit (or perhaps more glib) and remark that this is an example of open source serving the cause of open government.

Is this an example of citizen journalism? It’s certainly an example of investigative journalism, with much of the investigation done by citizens.

So most Americans would support bank nationalization? Not exactly: when Gallup used the n-word (nationalization) itself, support dropped to 37%.

If, in the search for political intelligence, we turn to our local Boston broadsheet, we find, in today’s Globe, new of Michelle Obama’s sleeves, or lack thereof.

I wondered about the algorithms for assigning specific dates to these days. I should probably have known, and maybe most citizens do, but I didn’t. An article that popped up on Yahoo News today told me that the 20th amendment moved inauguration day from April 30 to January 20. There were technological reasons for the switch to the colder time of year. A senate committee put it like this.

Under present conditions [of communication and transportation] the result of elections is known all over the country within a few hours after the polls close, and the Capital City is within a few days’travel of the remotest portions of the country.

That was in 1937. It’s somehow cool to juxtapose that with the thought that Obama is taking a train, rather than jet plane, to DC.

On the other hand, it’s somehow strange to see how white the world is this MLK day. I refer to the snowstorm that went on rather longer than the forecasters thought it would. MLK day is “observed on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King’s birthday, January 15″ (from Wikipedia).

Cartoon by Ed Stein, via Daryl Cagle and Johnny Drawn! It looks as though Alaska has seceded (along with Hawaii). Do Ed Stein and Sarah Palin know something we don’t?

But McCain and Palin have been talking about the concept of change just as much. It’s just that, while Obama has owned the word itself, McPalin have found other ways to refer to, and attempt to claim, the concept. In particular, Palin has used the word maverick almost as often as Tina Fey has.

A maverick is an unbranded range animal, especially a motherless calf. It can also mean a person who thinks independently, a lone dissenter, a non-conformist or rebel. There’s other good stuff at Wikipedia, but the point is that Palin associates herself and McCain with change by describing the two of them as non-conformists. (If you want to address the question of how each can be both a lone dissenter and the running mate of the other, please do so in the comments.)

Now, if you wanted the American people to associate you with change, which word would you choose? A one-syllable word, preferably change itself? Or a three-syllable word meaning a motherless calf? And, if your opponent has already claimed the C-word for himself, would you reinforce the central place of change in the discussion? Perhaps you had to, unless you wanted to campaign on four-letter words like Bush and same.

By the way, Changing Way makes no official endorsement of either candidate. But you can probably detect endorsements unofficial and subliminal.

As you’ll see if you follow the link (from the image to Zazzle), others have already been similarly inspired. I’m not even sure if I’m the first to refer to that one and to JtP on the same item.