What % votes do LIB DEM need to win outright?

hmm yes I agree with Scaryteacher.

Rather a change in tone from your OP.

If you are a genuine poster, cablepower, then do you not think that people who have bothered to research the exact tipping points for the various outcomes may be fairly well informed about the effect of PR and have considered the issue in relation to their vote?

And if you are not a genuine poster then please note that regulars are getting heartily sick of first time posters rocking up and telling us all how to vote as if:

1. we are so naive as to have not thought about these issues and
2. some anonymous proll on a website is going to suddenly make us slap our foreheads and reassess a lifetime's political affiliation.

These smug little lectures are doing the parties concerned more harm than good.

As a naive mum who claims not to know much about politics on the other thread, you seem well informed about political issues.

Politics is one section of a much wider website, so go and look. We can all make up our own minds about how we want to vote for without being prodded or patronised by the various politrolls appearing. We'll see how 'real' you are post election when you're posting in another section shall we?

Cablepower - if everyone thought that the Lib Dems were the best choice for government then I suppose that everyone would vote for them!

Seeing as there are lots that believe that either Labour or Conservatives are the best choice then it isn't going to happen.

The problem with PR is exactly what they have experienced in NZ - since it was introduced there has always been a hung parliament, never a majority government. Historically hung parliaments don't work very well in Britain.

All that being said, I believe we have more pressing problems at the moment than attending to electoral reform.

to clarify: your vote can be spread, but that very spread nature of it means that once you reach a certain point in the popular vote (the high 30s in this case) the spread nature turns into an advantage because you have a wider base for those new votes to pile up on. Does that make sense?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who loves that website!

The figures I've usually seen cited are 38% to gain the largest number of seats (although one analysis says 36), 40-41% for a majority and 42% for a landslide.

Once the Lib Dems get into the high thirties, seats start falling to them very quickly because of the positions they're in in the various constituencies.

damn everyone got there before me

It's good fun though - and very interesting to see how the % change if you take the seats away from labour vs if you take them from tory or other.

this website is fab and just what you need!

It shows you all the poll results and how votes translate into seats. You can twiddle the dial and see how each percentage affects the numbers of seats.

There is no clear answer to your question because it depends if the libdems are taking mainly labour seats or mainly tory seats, but have a play.

Essentially the lib dems need a lot more votes to secure a majority in the house because their votes are all spread out.

It kind of depends on where they gain seats as to what percentage they need to get an overall majority. If you click on

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8609989.stm

you can play with their election seat calculator. By changing the percentage of the votes cast for each party you can see the seats gained/lost on the right-hand side.

Hours of endless fun!! Yes I am sad and have no life

"The winning benchmark in this country is 326 seats in the house of Commons. The Lib Dems would need about 41% of the vote as said above but the Conservative and Labour's votes would have to drop to below 31% in order for the Lib Dems to win on that percentage of votes."

Taken from Yahoo answers

See here
You can move the percentages of the parties around and see how many seats this could translate into. It looks like the Lib Dems need about 42% to get a majority, with Cons 35% and Labour 17%. Not very likely.