What did Chad ever do to deserve this?

Someone said on Paco's blog the other day that the prevalence of hung parliaments/hanging Chads right across the Anglosphere is mathematically pretty unlikely. That sounds about right. (It's happened in the US, twice, in the UK, in Tasmania, and Western Australia, and now the Australian Parliament. I'm sure there are other examples).

Applying Occam's Razor to find the simplest solution, I think you'll probably find that there's no simplest solution to this. It's so damn complex. I mean, it's not as if the political situation in the US, the UK, Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia across the past decade are equivalent, though you might like to exaggerate the superficial similarities. (Not looking at anyone in particular...)

Really, what are you left with? You could argue that historical forces (whatever they are) caused it, and that this is just an example of cyclical history. Or you could postulate that it really is just sheer fluke of luck, an astounding historical coincidence. Or you could theorise that God caused it out of bloody-mindedness.

What's the simplest solution? I've no damn idea. Can we go for the most complex solution? Someone, give me a complex solution!

UPDATE! - Hang on, I've got it. A combination of the feng shui in the UK Parliament, and the alignment of certain astrological symbols over the United States, as well as the rise of the Jedi religion in Australia, the operation of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, and a large proportion of Higgs Bosons over the Pacific Ocean have resulted in a fundamental karmic imbalance which has in turn caused the hung parliaments.

So all we need to do to solve this dilemma is to get together our leading astrologers, Taoists, Jedi priests, Buddhist monks, engineers, and theoretical physicists, perhaps creating a government department to facilitate their operations. So complicated it's simple.