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Onchan or not


hissingsid

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I know people living in Lakeside who did not vote in the last election because they did not agree with the carve up of Onchan.   How can you pay your rates to Onchan Commissioners and yet live in another constituency?    Only in the Isle of Man when overpaid, underworked civil servants are constantly looking for ways to justify their existence and of course another committee for the MHKs to sit on and get allowances for.   It is ridiculous.

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32 minutes ago, Dave Hedgehog said:

Seems like a decent arrangement to me. All the benefits of living in Onchan without having Onchan's MHKs. 

They might have different MHKs if they were allowed to vote for their own MHK instead of the MHK of somebody else's parish.

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1 hour ago, Rushen Spy said:

It's a very obvious case of gerrymandering and should be fixed as a matter of urgency.

I suppose I'd better reply then ^_^.

No it isn't gerrymandering.  That's not what gerrymandering means (if you actually read the Wiki entry).  There's no evidence that Onchan was split to benefit any particular Party or politician and no one has given any.

What actually happens here is a fairly common clash between two principles of democratic representation.  One is that constituencies and therefore representatives should try to represent distinct geographical communities.  The other is that there should be roughly equal representation - that the same number of representatives should represent the same number of people[1].

The trouble is that all communities are not the same size.  So small communities can be grouped together to one constituency or a large community split into several.  But even then you will have problems and if you look UK constituencies you will find they are often made up of different parts of several local authorities or maybe all on one LA and a bit of another to make up the numbers.

 

[1]  Note that in the Isle of Man in the most recent boundary review the population (as in the US or Ireland) rather than the number of registered voters (as in the UK) was used to calculate this.

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12 minutes ago, Roger Mexico said:

I suppose I'd better reply then ^_^.

No it isn't gerrymandering.  That's not what gerrymandering means (if you actually read the Wiki entry).  There's no evidence that Onchan was split to benefit any particular Party or politician and no one has given any.

Of course there's no "evidence" for it that anybody could ever cite. There never really is for this sort of thing, though, is there? And why on earth would there be? Nonetheless, I stand by my comment: it is blatant gerrymandering.

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