Manifestos III

I am pretty burnt out of talking about the election results today, so here are some quick thoughts in lieu of anything better considered or articulated. Of the 38 candidates I voted for, 18 of them gained a seat. Obviously I had hoped all 38 would be elected, but I think my more realistic upper bound of expectation was 25. In general I am disappointed to see a low turnover of seats (most notably David De Lisle who voted against same-sex marriage in the previous assembly retained his seat), and am doubly disappointed to see fewer women be elected. The only new deputy who in my mind represents a meaningful departure from the status quo is Tina Bury - naturually I am glad that she got in, but would’ve liked to have seen fewer male middle-class WASP-types make the cut.

Island-wide voting as a whole seemed neither a resounding success nor a painful failure in my opinion. The fact that so few people seemed to have utilised all 38 of their votes is a shame in my eyes, but hardly unexpected - the amount of information people would’ve had to process in order to meet any kind of threshold of “informed” with regards to decision making was far too high, and should (and I expect will) be streamlined before the next election.

In short; it could’ve been better, but it also could’ve been worse.