Swingometer

Paul's two dimensional three-way swingometer

This is still a draft version of the swingometer, posted here to get some feedback on how to make it more comprehensible and more useful. A three-way election is a rather challenging thing to illustrate on a diagram, so I hope you'll forgive this being a little harder to follow than a normal two-way swingometer!

• Point the mouse at the "2005" on the image and you'll see the result for 2005; the share of the vote for each party, and the number of seats they hold. Strictly speaking it's a projection of 2005's result onto the 2010 constituencies.
• Move the mouse around the diagram and you'll see projections for what sort of parliament you might see as the vote share changes. These projections are based on the very simple "Uniform National Swing" model, which has many failings but AFAICT more sophisticated models don't do much better in practice.
• The colour of each hexagon illustrates who has the most seats; a majority is shown in a darker colour. Larger majorities get darker colours. Where two parties are exactly equal, we use an in-between colour. Just compare the colour of the hexagons with the share of seats indicated for each one to understand the colour scheme.
• The straight lines across the diagram indicate the lead in points of the party with the largest vote share. Where the three lines meet is the point where all three parties get the same number of votes.
• A fixed proportion of votes are shared between the three main parties It would be better if you could change how many votes go to other parties, but it's much harder to do.

I have plans for updating this diagram during election night, but they're even more complicated, so I'll come to that later. Please let me know what you think - does it make sense?