We don’t want elected mayors either, that concentrates far too much power in one post.

You guys amaze me. The LibDems cry out for PR, and here you get a PR election. And when you lose badly, you blame …. er …. PR!

Nonetheless, I think my statements stand up for themselves regardless, and I hope those in a position to make changes will, well, make some.

And, Tinter, if you write in a less in-your-face manner then you might win more people over.

They had a sort of pact. Everyone was wondering what Berry would get out of the reciprocal transfer pact with Livingstone (other than a job?). But in the Assembly elections ignorance of how the voting system works has led to many voters treating the list vote as a second preference (and parts of the media calling it a “second vote” don’t help, nor does having it alongside another ballot where there is a second preference). So a Labour voter could think they were voting Labour 1, Green 2 for the Assembly and in practice they’d have boosted the Greens on the list.

Conversely someone who thought they were voting Lib Dem 1, Green 2 will have in practice voted for the Greens over the Lib Dems. There’s a lot wrong with this particular electoral system (much can and has been written about the potential of overhangs and the possibilities of both electoral pacts and decoy lists) and when the media are only focusing on one of the three ballot papers a voter is given confusion will not be resolved.

However, if you want to simply dismiss us a bunch of eccentric Labour-loving ideologues with nothing to teach anyone then that is absolutely fine by me. Carry on in your complacent bubble and leave it to us to attract the votes of thoughtful, left of centre, environmentally aware electors in the next round of PR elections in 2009.

By the way what has happened to all those posters on this site who were confident that “Darren Johnson is likely to lose his Assembly seat on May 1st”?

Darren Johnson AM
Green Party

Paddick’s second preference presents a difficult choice as he has consistently played on his openness so he can’t change now by refusing to answer an enquiry.
It would clearly diminish his platform to endorse his direct competitors and is impolitick to advocate abstention.
The resulting choice creates certain limitations, from which I fear he did actually make the most plausible vote – not that that says much about the quality of choice available.

The contrast between the tactics of the candidates is informative to the extent that it is clear all except the Greens and BNP dislike the fact that only two parties enter the run-off when second preferences come into play.

Because the complications of the voting system meant that much of the airwar was dominated by the Mayoral race many assembly votes will have been influenced by the fact it was a two-way run-off – I would be interested to be able to see the difference a three-way run-off would have had, and predict all LibDems would have benefitted and that Brian would have fared closer to the national, if not regional, average.

Decrying all the other choices doesn’t make endorsing the SWP anything more than a stupid decision. Its not that what you said is wrong- its that its obvious, and thus promising to reveal the second preference was a terrible error.

Further comments from me in the Members’ Forum.

The greens had no pact for the London Assembly- how could they? They focused their campaign on how they could make a difference in the assembly, we focused on why Brian should be mayor- which the voters knew full well would not happen.

I’m not blaming Brian, because he did not manage the campaign. Whoever did probably shouldn’t be allowed near a PR election for a while.

However, saying that the Socialist Workers Party were the group second best positioned to win London shows incredible political naivety- I can’t think of any other Liberal Democrat candidate who would do something like that.

If we face a close general election in 2009/10 the above will all be true then so we’d better work out how to deal with it. Saying “well we were bound to get squeezed won’t do us much good!

The Greens avoided the squeeze by effectively formed an electoral pact with Labour. Greens have been picking up ‘old’ Labour votes with their anti-globalisation campaigns; the pact legitimised this and gave a clear line to voters attracted that way Sian 1 Ken 2. Whereas any hint of an endorsement either way would have been fatal to us, given Lib Dem voters took genuinely different views on Boris vs Ken (and why not…).

Brian did not endorse any other party. He did tell the Standard at the Islington public meeting on Tuesday night that his 2nd pref, cast by post, had not gone to either Boris or Ken. He did not reveal where it had gone until after close of poll. Are the Labour party really so arrogant that they think they have a right to even their opponents’ votes?

The voting system was confusing. For example, we saw a lot of spoilt GLA ballots in London North East choosing both the Labour incumbent and Meral. I’m guessing some were Brian 1 Ken 2(or vice versa) voters who thought wrongly they had 2 choices for the GLA seat as well.

The real info will come from the ward breakdowns of GLA voting. That’s where we’ll know to what extent the ‘ground war’ was effective, and where our base vote is highest – and where those Tory and Green votes came from. Given that London NE goes from Chingford to Chiswell Street, the blanket results don’t tell us much locally; although we do know that our local GLA candidate Meral Ece outpolled the base Lib Dem vote.

Darren Johnson AM – Green Party Assembly Member/ Campaign Manager 2008 GLA Elections

BUT that’s not to say that we didn’t make plenty of mistakes and while of course we were squeezed there were things we could have done to avoid at least some of that. We can’t pretend that these aren’t awful results.

We didn’t articulate a clear enough message, we didn’t explain the SV voting system (even one of our local members voted Ken 1 Brian 2 because he didn’t understand how it worked), and we focussed almost all our energies on the mayoral race (which was unwinnable from the start IMHO) and didn’t give our supporters a reason to go out and vote for us on the assembly ballot papers – so they didn’t.

The greens have done well in these elections, increasing their vote in 11 constituencies. Have thousands of new dedicated ideologues appeared? I think not.

Its not a case of ideologues, but it is a case of them communicating a clear policy message which works better in PR than intense targetting- giving them reasonable results despite being a tiny, marginal party mostly around a single issue. Our campaign clearly did nothing of the sort.

The point about the Green vote holding up is not valid. Green voters are ideologues. They vote Green whatever the situation.

- Scylla and Charybdis.