Voting systems

[susanreads]

The British election system is broken.

The system we'll be asked to vote for or against on May 5th is AV, Alternative Vote, also known as Instant Runoff. It's the system used (with added bells and whistles) in voting for the Hugos and such fannish elections as TAFF. You rank the candidates in order of preference and the ones with fewest votes are eliminated until one candidate has more people-who-prefer-that-candidate-over-the-rest than all the rest. In fannish elections it's referred to as STV, Single Transferable Vote, but apparently in politics that's the name for something more complicated.

The No campaign want to keep FPTP, First Past the Post. Their main argument seems to be the supposed extra cost of AV, which is a blatant lie.

Here's the Yes campaign's list of problems with FPTP.

My favourite reason as a voter for preferring AV is that I wouldn't have to tactical vote. I could put my preferred candidate first and the tolerable-candidate-most-likely-to-win, whose party constantly pisses me off by saying that only they can keep the Tories out and ignoring certain alternatives entirely, second.

Under FPTP millions of voters are often faced with voting with their head or their heart; if they vote for who they really want they risk letting the candidate they least want win by default.

With AV voters can vote for what they really want without having to worry about this. If their favourite candidate can't win in that seat then they can support them whilst knowing that their vote will transfer and still count.

A major reason as a citizen for preferring AV is that it would make it harder for fascists to get elected. Instead of having to beat the most popular of a splintered opposition, they'd have to beat all the alternatives added together. The BNP know this and are campaigning for No.

Most of us have MPs most of us didn't vote for. Because First Past the Post enables candidates to win with the votes of 1-in-3 people in a constituency, extremist parties such as the British National Party have more chance of being elected under FPTP despite most people in an area opposing them. They've snuck into town halls across Britain and they'd like to repeat the trick at Westminster.

With AV, no-one can get elected unless most people in an area back them. The risk of extremist parties being elected by the back door is eliminated; that's why the BNP are campaigning vigourously for a "No" vote in May.

Comments

[trouble]

As I understand it, this is the system they use in Australia. Not being from Australia, I was in love with the concept. They tried to implement it in a couple of provinces here but it keeps getting voted down, often because the campaign for it is poorly run.

[sami]

They seem to be working on a slightly different system from ours, in that we have all-the-way-down preferential voting, where in order to be legitimate a ballot must rank all candidates, while the UK seems to be looking at optional-preferential, I think. I could be wrong though.

Frankly a quick look at the arguments is kind of enraging to an Australian, between British "historians" essentially arguing that Australian democracy isn't a proper democracy, comments noting that very few countries use a preferential voting system like it's somehow a fate worse than death to be Australian, and just lying outright about how the system works.

Australia, which has had preferential voting for over eight decades, has a robust democracy where election results consistently reflect the general will of the nation at large, and is not exactly a pit of ruin and despair. Our preferential-voting-system-elected governments navigated the last decade in such a manner that we avoided recession in the global financial crisis, we have low unemployment, a strong dollar that we actually like being strong, and we're on good terms with pretty much everyone, in terms of international relations.

Our last election resulted in only the second hung parliament in the last fifty-odd years, and this was not an unreasonable result, given that polling also showed that the nation was pretty evenly split - and the minority government that resulted is doing pretty well, actually.

Look upon our democracy, ye anti-AV bastards, and despair.

[trouble]

I didn't realise it'd been 80 years! Wow! For some reason I thought it had been recent.

[jesse_the_k]

Oh, AV would make a big difference in U.S. politics, too. Thanks for inspiring me to find out about U.S. supports of Instant Runoff Voting, FairVote dot Org.

[sami]

I followed your link, and then one to that no2AV page.

Lies. Such lies.

And, seriously, there are people you are allowed to smear, but Antony Green is not one of them. Antony Green is AWESOME and brilliant and is adored nationwide every time we have an election, and he knows what he's talking about Better Than You, for ALL values of You.