{"id":22619,"date":"2019-05-23T23:23:40","date_gmt":"2019-05-23T22:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/?p=22619"},"modified":"2019-05-23T23:23:40","modified_gmt":"2019-05-23T22:23:40","slug":"european-elections-2019-in-abingdon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/?p=22619","title":{"rendered":"European Elections 2019 in Abingdon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"European
\nPolling stations in Abingdon have been open for the second time this month. Three weeks ago they opened for the district and parish elections, and this Thursday it is the European elections, which were supposed not to happen as the UK should have left the European Union on 29th March 2019.<\/p>\n

Abingdon is part of the South East of England and we were given the following choice of parties and Independents:
\nChange UK (10 candidates)
\nConservative (10 candidates)
\nGreen (10 Candidates)
\nLabour (10 Candidates)
\nLiberal Democrats (10 Candidates)
\nThe Brexit Party (10 Candidates)
\nThe Socialist Party of Great Britain (10 Candidates)
\nUK European Union Party (2 Candidates)
\nUKIP (10 Candidates)
\nIndependent – Jason McMahon
\nIndependent – David Round
\nIndependent – Michael Jeffrey Turberville<\/p>\n

We each had one vote.
\n\"European
\n10 MEPs will be elected to represent the South East of the UK. MEPs are elected by proportional representation. The number of MEPs each party gets is calculated using a formula called d’Hondt after the Belgian mathematician Victor d’Hondt, who dreamed up the formula in 1878, long before the days of computers. According to Wikpedia….
\nAfter all the votes have been tallied, successive quotients are calculated for each party. The party with the largest quotient wins one seat, and its quotient is recalculated. This is repeated until the required number of seats is filled. The formula for the quotient <\/i><\/p>\n

quotient = V \/ (S + 1)<\/i><\/p>\n

V is the total number of votes that party received, and<\/i>
\ns is the number of seats that party has been allocated so far, initially 0 for all parties. <\/i>
\n\"European
\nEuropean elections do not usually enthuse people as much as national elections but on this occasion they are being treated by some people as a protest vote. In the UK there are two new parties. The Brexit Party has been created to allow people who voted Leave to show their discontent with parliament’s handling of Brexit. Change UK has been created by people in parliament to challenge the referendum result.<\/p>\n

The UK should still leave the European Union (EU) on 31st October 2019. If the UK and EU ratify the withdrawal agreement before then, it would be earlier. So these elected MEPs could be in post for a very short time. But parliament has not managed to agree the withdrawal yet so it could be longer.
\n\"European
\nPolling has finished and we will know the results on Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Polling stations in Abingdon have been open for the second time this month. Three weeks ago they opened for the district and parish elections, and this Thursday it is the European elections, which were supposed not to happen as the UK should have left the European Union on 29th March 2019. Abingdon is part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}