Count Binface

I have actually voted for Count Binface in the 2021 mayoral election. He did very well, beating UKIP and the SDP.

Back then they had a supplementary vote system. So basically you could vote for your first choice and second choice, the top two would go into a second round and if your candidate gets knocked out your vote would be transferred to your second choice.

It was much better because you could vote for who you actually wanted knowing that if they didn’t win, you could still transfer your vote to Sadiq Khan to stop the Tories winning. So voting for Binface wasn’t a risk or a wasted vote.

They changed the voting system this time though… back to FPTP… fucking joke. Binface would never have let that happen.
 
SkyBlueFlux said:
I have actually voted for Count Binface in the 2021 mayoral election. He did very well, beating UKIP and the SDP.

Back then they had a supplementary vote system. So basically you could vote for your first choice and second choice, the top two would go into a second round and if your candidate gets knocked out your vote would be transferred to your second choice.

It was much better because you could vote for who you actually wanted knowing that if they didn’t win, you could still transfer your vote to Sadiq Khan to stop the Tories winning. So voting for Binface wasn’t a risk or a wasted vote.

They changed the voting system this time though… back to FPTP… fucking joke. Binface would never have let that happen.
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Yeah this is why I have a slightly complicated opinion of binface. On the one hand it’s funny, I fully support people holding a spotlight up to the stupidity and absurdity of our electoral process and voting options, but on the other hand the “both parties are the same” thing isn’t true any more in the way it was when he started getting attention 15 years ago - one party is openly courting centrists and the other is openly chasing the far right. We’re actually a bloody long way from Cameron centrists vs Blairites, and the consequences of a satirical candidate are very different when he’s getting 100 votes vs. 24,000.

The electorate disengaging from the political debate is something that always benefits those who want political power to be held by as few people as possible, and so ultimately who is benefitting from this? Which part of the political spectrum did those 24,000 voters come from?

At the end of the day Khan won by a landslide so it doesn’t matter, but the polls all thought it would be very close, and you wonder how people would view the Count if Susan Hall had won by 10,000 votes - or more likely all this extra publicity means Binface gets 50,000 next time and suddenly starts effecting election results.

I dunno….Reminds me of all the people who in the aftermath of Brexit said they only voted leave as a protest vote and didn’t expect it to actually happen.
 
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domalino said:
Yeah this is why I have a slightly complicated opinion of binface. On the one hand it’s funny, I fully support people holding a spotlight up to the stupidity and absurdity of our electoral process and voting options, but on the other hand the “both parties are the same” thing isn’t true any more in the way it was when he started getting attention 15 years ago - one party is openly courting centrists and the other is openly chasing the far right. We’re actually a bloody long way from Cameron centrists vs Blairites, and the consequences of a satirical candidate are very different when he’s getting 100 votes vs. 24,000.

The electorate disengaging from the political debate is something that always benefits those who want political power to be held by as few people as possible, and so ultimately who is benefitting from this? Which part of the political spectrum did those 24,000 voters come from?

At the end of the day Khan won by a landslide so it doesn’t matter, but the polls all thought it would be very close, and you wonder how people would view the Count if Susan Hall had won by 10,000 votes - or more likely all this extra publicity means Binface gets 50,000 next time and suddenly starts effecting election results.

I dunno….Reminds me of all the people who in the aftermath of Brexit said they only voted leave as a protest vote and didn’t expect it to actually happen.
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I agree entirely. It obviously says more about our voting system than it probably does about Binface himself. I would only ever vote for him in a FPTP system as a more "fun" version of spoiling my ballot, and only if all the serious candidates are so bad I was resolved to not vote. Which, despite some good efforts from Westminster, has not actually happened yet. It would be very contentious if he actually ended up splitting votes for a candidate (probably one on the left, let's be honest). I worry that with enough publicity, him running in Sunak's seat at the GE might actually save him. He only got 0.5% of the vote when he contested Boris' seat, but seats have been lost by much finer margins.

Fun facts - there's a whole lore behind Count Binface going all the way back to 1987. Originally, the character was Lord Buckethead, ripped straight from the 1984 Star Wars parody film Gremloids. A different comedian ran under the pseudonym Lord Buckethead in 1987 and 1992 elections. Then in 2017, Jonathan Harvey revived the Lord Buckethead character. In 2019 he started to get notoriety and there was some apparent copyright dispute with the creator of Gremloids, so somebody new started using the Lord Buckethead moniker and Harvey re-branded to Count Binface.

As a result, there is now actually two of them - the original Lord Buckethead currently played by David Hughes who represented the Monster Raving Loony Party at the 2019 GE, and Count Binface played by Harvey, the far more successful spin-off act.
 
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