a slightly lowered one - is anti-democratic. A 4% threshold goes against the principles of proportionality and of democracy itself. It says that votes shouldn't be counted if they are for parties outside of the mainstream. If you vote for a party that has 3% support, your vote is deemed not worthy of counting. Over at No Right Turn, Idiot Savant is no less scathing about the Commission's recommendation to reduce the party vote threshold to 4% (whilst also abolishing the electorate seat exception): At best, this is likely to work out to be roughly as representative as we are at the moment. But in some cases (e.g. 2002) it gives us a much less representative Parliament than we have at present. Given an opportunity to improve our electoral system and give us a more representative democracy, the Electoral Commission blew it. Whew! I'll bet the Commission members were squirming in their beds last night as the full magnitude of their betrayal of the very concept of democracy burst upon them! Why is it that they hate our freedoms so much? Invective aside, let's review what the Commission actually did. It essentially adopted a two-stage approach in coming up with its proposal for lowering the party vote threshold to 4%. (I'm going to put to one side it's proposal to abandon the 1 seat threshold, on the assumption that Bryce and I/S would accept this move provided the party vote threshold also was lowered significantly.) First, it worked out what