Tactical Voting?

A new toy

A brief note of tactical voting: while it is true that an extra 5000 votes for the Greens in the North West would have meant Nasty Nick wouldn't have been off to Brussels, it is also true that 2500 extra votes for UKIP would have had the same effect. I also note that if the Green voters had voted for the Lib Dems, UKIP, Labour, or the Tories would have had the same effect.

Over in Yorkshire and the Humber, it's a different story: the greens would need an additional 16,000 votes. However, only 11,000 extra to Labour would keep the fascists out. If your're really prepared to do "anything"  to keep the Nazis out, Green is not obviously the way to do it.  

You can check these calculations and have some psephological fun of your own with this automatic d'Hondt vote counter that I've put on a Google spreadsheet here. 

I took the data from The Guardian's electoral maps. The spreadsheet is fairly easy to use: I've shown a couple of worked examples, and I've manually calculated the d'Hondt count for Yorkshire and the Humber to provide a check. Any bugs, please, to "a dot political dot scientist AttT gmail dot com", or to the comments section below. You are welcome to use it for any purpose you like, but if you found it useful, please would you let me know, or provide a link back to this post.

INSTRUCTIONS: You'll need to log on to Google Docs. Save a copy of the spreadsheet, so that you can manipulate in. All the data is in the first sheet ("Complete Voting Data"). Go to "Automatic d'Hondt counter" and clear the example data. Copy and paste the data you want to count in its place. After the calculation has gone through, you can read off the number of MPs the party has by going to the column marked "Round n" where n is the number of MPs the constituency returns. Happy counting!

[BTW, if you're interested in Nazi ecological policy, the classic study is "How Green were the Nazis?"]