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Max's election maps and assorted others

Queensland 1995/1998
The 1995 general election saw the Goss ministry reduced to the narrowest possible majority, suffering losses in Brisbane as a result of unpopular transport projects that led the Greens to withhold their preferences from Labor for the first time ever. The so-called "Koala Belt" in southeastern Brisbane, where the Government planned to clear rights-of-way for a new motorway, saw five seats flip from Labor to the Coalition, mainly the now-suddenly-a-thing-again Liberals, and along with two seats in north Queensland and an independent winning Gladstone, the threat of a hung parliament loomed.

Then, the Court of Disputed Returns threw out the Labor win in Mundingburra.

val-au-qld-1995.png

The resulting by-election saw the seat (in southern Townsville) flip to the Liberals, and the result was a Coalition minority government led by National leader Rob Borbidge. The Borbidge ministry served through some of the most tumultuous years in recent Australian history, with a change of government at the federal level closely followed by the Port Arthur massacre and the resulting passage of sweeping gun control legislation. Gun control getting passed by a Coalition federal government posed a massive headache to the Queensland Nationals, who had traditionally been the party of guns, land (for white people) and freedom (again, for white people). Against this backdrop came Pauline Hanson, a chippy owner from Ipswich (just west of Brisbane) who won the traditional Labor safe seat of Oxley in 1996 despite having been disendorsed by the Liberals for making racist comments about the Aboriginal welfare system (which she argued was racist against white people, in an ironically racist line of thinking). Hanson initially sat as an independent in the House of Representatives, but in 1997 she formed the One Nation party, which promised to stand up for "traditional Australian values" (such as racism against Asians, racism against Muslims, racism against Aboriginals, and the right to own guns to keep wildlife and Aboriginals off your property).

One Nation polled as high as 15%, which had the state Nationals running scared for the first time in their lives - here was someone who could challenge them in their heartland. In the end, One Nation would outperform the most optimistic polls, scoring 22.7% of the vote, but their vote was more spread out than feared, and also Queensland has preferential voting, so they only ended up winning eleven seats. It was enough, though, to knock the Coalition down a peg or two, whereas Labor essentially stayed put in its mostly-urban support base. Wayne Goss stood down in this elections, and so it was Peter Beattie who would lead Queensland into the new millennium. Beattie had previously led the oversight committee for the ongoing crime and corruption investigations, in which he became popular for siding against his own party on matters of principle, and it was easy enough for him to get one independent on side and inaugurate a narrowest-possible-majority government.

val-au-qld-1998.png
 
Tokyo Metro 2020
Remember the Tokyo subway map? It's back, in Yamanote form.

de07zx4-647c3074-bd52-4a2d-8445-996f8ea3b382.png
 
England 1830 (H)
England's administrative structure as of circa 1830 - in case anyone thinks France and the HRE had a monopoly on weird boundaries.

england-hundreds-1832.png

Black lines - county boundaries
Darkest grey - highest-level county subdivisions (ridings in Yorkshire, Parts in Lincolnshire, the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, the Lathes of Kent and the Rapes of Sussex)
Medium grey - boundary of hundreds or equivalent units (wapentakes in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, wards in Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland and Westmoreland)
Lightest grey - boundary of sub-hundred units where available (divisions in most counties, parishes in Lancashire)

Lightest colouring - hundreds or equivalent
Medium colouring - liberties (basically special areas where the local landlord had jurisdiction instead of the quarter sessions)
Darkest colouring - boroughs
Red - counties corporate (boroughs administratively separate from their counties, most of which also had their own lords-lieutenants and sheriffs)

Now, a couple of big, fat asterisks should go with this. I've based it on whatever maps Wikimedia Commons has of the relevant county's ancient subdivisions, some of which are full dated maps with boroughs as well as hundreds, and others not. So for about half of this map, I don't know what the boroughs were or if the hundreds are actually accurate for circa 1830. I do know they're not in Wales, which is the fattest asterisk of them all - the map I've based it on shows hundreds/cantrefs during the Tudor era, just after the counties were established. It also doesn't show any boroughs, so I've based those off Wikipedia's list, which I suspect isn't quite exhaustive. For one, I doubt a majority of Welsh boroughs were in Ceredigion.
 
England's administrative structure as of circa 1830 - in case anyone thinks France and the HRE had a monopoly on weird boundaries.

View attachment 25290

Black lines - county boundaries
Darkest grey - highest-level county subdivisions (ridings in Yorkshire, Parts in Lincolnshire, the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, the Lathes of Kent and the Rapes of Sussex)
Medium grey - boundary of hundreds or equivalent units (wapentakes in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, wards in Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland and Westmoreland)
Lightest grey - boundary of sub-hundred units where available (divisions in most counties, parishes in Lancashire)

Lightest colouring - hundreds or equivalent
Medium colouring - liberties (basically special areas where the local landlord had jurisdiction instead of the quarter sessions)
Darkest colouring - boroughs
Red - counties corporate (boroughs administratively separate from their counties, most of which also had their own lords-lieutenants and sheriffs)

Now, a couple of big, fat asterisks should go with this. I've based it on whatever maps Wikimedia Commons has of the relevant county's ancient subdivisions, some of which are full dated maps with boroughs as well as hundreds, and others not. So for about half of this map, I don't know what the boroughs were or if the hundreds are actually accurate for circa 1830. I do know they're not in Wales, which is the fattest asterisk of them all - the map I've based it on shows hundreds/cantrefs during the Tudor era, just after the counties were established. It also doesn't show any boroughs, so I've based those off Wikipedia's list, which I suspect isn't quite exhaustive. For one, I doubt a majority of Welsh boroughs were in Ceredigion.
Please do not show this to anyone from the traditional counties movement or they might die from sheer orgasmic joy.
 
Please do not show this to anyone from the traditional counties movement or they might die from sheer orgasmic joy.

But it shows Norhamshire and Islandshire in Durham. Everyone know those are in Traditional Northumberland.

Please ignore the fact that the Traditional County Movement only actually want to implement the 1896-1965 arrangement.
 
BC 1969/1972/1975/1979/1983/1986/1991
Some BC stuff, then.

In 1969, W. A. C. Bennett had been Premier of British Columbia for seventeen years, leading a Social Credit Party that, unlike its cousin over in Alberta, had arguably never really been about Social Credit. Bennett was a fairly generic middle-of-the-road developmentalist conservative populist type, who disdained ideology and governed in the interest of making the people (including himself) richer. He was supported in this by most of the rural interior, which liked him because he was one of them and kept money flowing inland through provincial Crown corporations like BC Rail and BC Hydro. Especially strong Socred regions included the Okanagan, Bennett's home region, the Peace River Country in the far north, whose development was Bennett's pet project, and the Fraser Valley, then as now dominated by conservative evangelical churches. But the real key to Social Credit's standing in government was its support from the middle classes of Vancouver, who feared an NDP government and were prepared to vote for whoever provided the strongest alternative.

val-ca-bc-1969.png

Bennett would grow more and more erratic after his seventieth birthday (he was born in 1900), and the younger generation clamoured for change just as they did in all the other English-speaking countries around the same time. For the 1972 election, Senior Social Credit figures made it a tacit campaign promise that their leader would resign after the election, which as campaign tactics go is never a great look. The people were fed up, and gave the NDP a majority government for the first time in the province's history.

val-ca-bc-1972.png

The NDP hadn't actually come close to a majority of the popular vote - the old Socred vote actually went to the PCs, which ended up with fuck-all to show for it. When a snap election was called in 1975, those voters went back to Social Credit, now led by Bennett's son Bill Bennett. The younger Bennett was a fairly classic Red Tory type, with few of his father's eccentricities, and the Socreds received campaign advice from the "Big Blue Machine" of the Ontario PCs. The old winning formula was back.

val-ca-bc-1975.png

Four years of Bennett the Younger proved successful enough that Social Credit were returned with a slightly reduced majority in 1979, and the Liberals and PCs each lost their sole remaining seat.

val-ca-bc-1979.png

Bennett's government would come into some controversy during the early 1980s recession, in response to which it launched a massive austerity programme, cutting services and sacking government employees, which was unpopular enough to spark a general strike in spring 1983. The teachers' unions were particularly opposed, in keeping with the fine BC tradition of conservative provincial governments coming into conflict with teachers' unions. Still, though, the strikes were not enough to topple the Bennett government, which retained its broad popularity and was reelected that June with an increased majority.

val-ca-bc-1983.png

Bill Bennett retired from politics in 1986, after eleven years as Premier. His replacement was Bill Vander Zalm, a Dutch immigrant who had first come to notoriety as the right-wing, slightly authoritarian Mayor of Surrey in the early 1970s. Vander Zalm had served under Bennett as Human Resources Minister, in which role he became infamous as an anti-welfare-fraud hardliner, and he was generally known to be more of a confrontational right-wing politician than Bennett. Still, his election marked a fresh start in the eyes of many, and he capitalised on this by immediately calling a snap election, winning a large majority on an outdated electoral map that had been "updated" by adding second seats in many larger ridings.

val-ca-bc-1986.png

Vander Zalm's four and a half years as Premier were... strange. He was a deeply religious Dutch Calvinist in a province that was mostly irreligious, a small businessman with private business dealings who also held high political power, and a man who liked to surround himself with friends and allies even at the expense of his own party room. There was a constant air of low-level scandal around the Vander Zalm government, and moderate middle-class Social Credit voters began to desert the party on a scale not seen since the 70s. Vander Zalm would be forced out of office in April 1991 due to a corruption scandal, but the ensuing leadership election was won by Deputy Premier Rita Johnston, who was seen as a continuity candidate and, in any case, had no time to do anything to change that image before the parliamentary term ran out. The resulting election saw the Social Credit Party crushed, being reduced to its three old strongholds, and in their place the BC Liberals arose as the party of the middle class opposing the new NDP government.

val-ca-bc-1991.png
 
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