Gerrymandering?

[BarmyArmy]

What do people make of the Labour Party charge that the Coalition is seeking to gerrymander its way to the next election, with its proposal to equalise constituency sizes and reduce the number of MPs by 10%?

How is it gerrymandering to say that all constituencies must have the same number of eligible voters?

Labour's nonsense about people not being on the electoral roll should be totally ignored - after all, they did nothing about it for 13 years.

If people don't want to register to vote, for whatever reason, it is their own problem - though of course the process of registration should be easy and easily accessible.

Only Labour believes it is the job of government to force everyone to register. That is their belief, and it is typical authoritarian statist rubbish.

I am concerned about the 2 or 3 special exceptions though - I can understand an exception for the Scottish islands, but then why not the Isle of Wight too? And there is no reason why Charles Kennedy's seat gets a special exception. So in these very few narrow cases, yes, there is some gerrymandering.

It was disingenuous of the last Government to ensure that those serving abroad could not get their postal votes back in time for them to count.

The US uses an electronic voting system for their troops abroad; why can't we do this for those in Afghanistan and other places?

I agree with the posts above - was just curious to see what other people made of it.

I suspect the last Government's failure to ensure that troops' votes are back in time had as much to do with the suspicion that they would mostly be Conservative votes as anything else.

I served in the Army for 10 years and know that this is not necessarily the case. Also, the military infrastructure is weak enough without polling stations having to be set up etc!

There is no reason why there cannot be electronic voting for those in theatre /at sea or those who are serving abroad if they need it. It would be cheaper than having lorries on standby in Brussels for instance to get the votes home. Once set up, the system could be used again and again.

There are plenty of reasons why electronic voting would be difficult to set up - 10,000 troops dispersed across dozens of disparate bases, with poor lines of communication between them and limited bandwidth back to the UK...plus a fragile airbridge and limited lift capacity with priority given the combat supplies and medical evacuation.