Phil O'Kane

Social Media and the Assembly Election

Phil O'Kane on May 4, 2011, 11:18 am

| Readers 12

A number of people have referred to this week’s Assembly Election as the “Twitter Election”. This can be looked at in a number of ways: the number of politicians and parties on Twitter/Facebook, the number of journalists now using social media, as well as members of the public discussing politics and election through these online methods. During the course of last night’s leaders debate 950 tweets were sent using the hashtag #ae11 and 660 sent using #ae11debate (many of those …

The AV Showdown – Belfast Skeptics Alternative Vote Debate

Phil O'Kane on April 19, 2011, 10:30 pm

| Readers 16

What is AV The Alternative Vote (AV) is very much like First-Past-the-Post (FPTP). Like FPTP, it is used to elect representatives for single-member constituencies, except that rather than simply marking one solitary ‘X’ on the ballot paper, the voter has the chance to rank the candidates on offer. The voter thus puts a ‘1′ by their first-preference candidate, and can continue, if they wish, to put a ‘2′ by their second-preference, and so on, until they don’t care any more …