Today is the general election in the UK. I love the way they run elections: you announce the election with as little as one month’s notice, campaign like hell for 30-odd days, and then the nation votes. People vote for their local ministers in the House of Commons and the party that wins the majority, in turn, selects the Prime Minister. It’s simple, effective, and truly representative.

BBC news has a great site with up-to-date news on the electoral happenings. And The Guardian has a wonderful, if phallic, graph (PDF) that shows what’s at stake for the three major parties.

In fact, in many ways it’s much more democratic, in the classic sense, than the farcical circus that is the U.S. electoral system. In fact, Columbia University professor Simon Sharma wrote a great piece to this effect in The Guardian.