With another election just finished in America an old problem has reoccurred. Due to the publishing deadline of the morning papers coming before the final results were announced, they were unable to publish detailed analysis of the results. This undoubtedly causes disappointment to many people who like to read the paper in the morning and discover who is now president, accompanied by many nicely coloured graphs.

As this clearly illustrates...

However it is possible that a British MP has come up with a solution.

The Right Honourable Winston Smith MP announced his plan this morning that will revolutionise firstly the British electoral system and then every democratic country in the world and America. He proposes that in future the results of elections will be decided before hand to ensure the newspapers have the proper statistics in plenty of time. This will allow them to spend longer making more elaborate graphs with interesting colours rather than the rather shabbily things they use now.

A month before any election everyone in the country will receive a letter informing them how they will be voting. This will allow them to spend time campaigning for there chosen candidate, participating in various polls and all the other pre election shenanigans. None of the candidates will know who will win and poll results will be made up to maintain the air of excitementduring the elections.

On the day of the election nobody will actually have to vote as that will be done automatically. When the polling booth close (not that they’ll actually open, or in many cases exist) the result will be announced immediately with out any of that counting nonsense. This will give everyone plenty of time to design some really spectacular graphs for the next day’s papers.

We spoke to Michael Parsons head of the BBC’s Graph Making department. “This is a glorious day for democracy”, Parsons told us. ‘We’ve just got some new Graph making equipment here at the BBC and I think you can look forward to something quite spectacular come the next election.