Are we really keen enough on our candidate to support, for example, rigging the voting system against the others? This is the line we need to pursue to make the Conservatives pause for thought when they rightly observe that coalitions might be more common under AV, which is another way of saying that LibDems might gain seats at their expense.
We should consider the voting system on its own merits, and be cautious about how much we tweak that system to support one or another balance of power. At the end of the day, voting No to keep your party in is highly questionable. This is about what way we want to see democracy enacted both FPTP and AV are democratic, but in different ways ; be cautious about whether it is right to allow consideration of the outcome to influence us.
Vote Yes for a better voting system. I agree completely with Nicholas, the moral argument for AV is pretty compelling. I have even felt this with all the inaccurate! That is NOT democracy, it is edging towards a benign dictatorship by educated humanists. I have some secret sympathy for this position, obviously, but overall, the idea of a true democracy is more appealing than the idea of lots of BNP votes is unappealing.
I should point out here that when I said that Conservatives should vote no, I carefully preceded that by saying that I was talking about what people should do if they are voting out of narrow self-interest.
I entirely agree that a principled Conservative should vote yes, but am realistic enough to think that it is unlikely that many will do so. That is why my main target in this post is Labour voters who are planning not to vote or to vote no, and it is why I am mainly appealing to their self-interest.
The fact that FPTP is ludicrously unfair to the Lib Dems is a blight on our democracy, but unfortunately it is not one that many people are too bothered about at the moment. Gowers: 1. This assumes that support for particular parties is a matter of self-interest, whereas support for voting systems is a matter of principle.
However the effect of both election of parties and choosing a voting system is the same — determination of governments and policies.
So surely neither or both are matters of principle, or of self interest. Once the consequences of both are established. So they are not effective rhetorically. You are right to criticize those bad arguments. What is the underlying preference? In fact to answer the question whether AV is better, we need to know: 1. Tim — you are obviously frustrated and I sympathize. When we switched from FPTP to the German-style MMP system in the s, there were plenty of arguments made for the status quo, very few of which made sense.
A bigger issue than the current AV referendum is the meta-issue of why the level of public debate on such issues is so low. Your post, suitably sloganized, would surely have been much more effective a few months ago — it is getting a bit late now.
The traditional news media are almost beyond hope these days, but I would expect that the Electoral Commission or whatever you call it in UK would provide high-quality information. The missing ingredient probably even more so here, one of the few countries more in need of real public intellectuals than UK is contributions by people like you, and those with more expertise social choice theorists.
A related problem is the lack of an international perspective on such issues. The news is not all bad, but almost all is. For example, the voting rules in the European Council of Ministers have been revised several times. The last time, a petition by voting power theorists was disregarded. To conclude a very long comment, I urge you to think about how we as academics can best contribute to public debate on important issues. And of course, forming a group for the latter purpose of which you have some experience with Polymath will likely have much greater value.
However, for personal satisfaction, I would suggest ranking everyone except X — leave them blank. However, a simple modification to the rules would make it possible: allow voters to rank two or more candidates equally, by giving them the same number. In each round, set any ballots whose top two remaining candidates are tied aside for a round.
In the first few rounds, until either Lib Dems or Labour are knocked out, my ballot is ignored. Once one goes, my vote goes to the other. If both go, I support Tories. If all three go blimey! Chris, the problem with your suggestion is that, if your ballot ignored, the preferences that you HAVE expressed are ignored.
Say all but the three main parties have been eliminated, and voters have done the same as you. If you really have no preference between two parties, but want to rank them both ahead of a third, you may as well toss a coin. I was unclear, apologies. OK, Chris, but if those ballots are not counted for any party, it may result in the Tory getting through to the head-to-head when they should not. Apart from anomalies that may affect the result, you may well have to set aside ballots where numerous different numbers and combinations of candidates are ranked equal first by different voters.
Unless you are going to sort these out, either wholly or partly, into different piles for different combinations, you will have to review them all at every round of the count to pick out the ones that now need to be counted.
Whether you sort them or not, this could slow down the counting process considerably if there are a large number of ballots set aside. Logically, I think it would make more sense for those ballots to be counted as half a vote for each of the two parties. However, in a constituency with a lot of candidates, you could have various voters ranking various different numbers of candidates equally, so trying to use fractions could be rather complicated. Someone care to tell me where this particular Basingstoke joke originates?
Under AV, your political influence would be reduced. The joke originated in my head …. Basingstoke has a long history of voting Tory. He was promptly kicked out in for another Tory. I was indeed confusing it with another constituency, and that constituency was Basildon. I have now changed it. Thanks for this post.
But I would still be interested to hear those arguments against AV that you think are valid…. So I think there is room for legitimate debate there. However, my personal view is that AV would probably not lead to a big increase in the number of coalitions, and I also like the principle of parties having to negotiate and reach compromises.
The strong arguments against AV would tell in favour of other systems, e. Suppose, for example, that in a straight vote between A and B, A would win, and in a straight vote between A and C, A would win. Nevertheless, it might be that in terms of first preferences, B and C both score more than A so A is a sort of compromise candidate.
I mean no offense to Englishmen, but in this respect I believe the French are ahead of you. As for the winning party having disproportional powers, the answer was given by in plain English the founding fathers here across the Atlantic: checks and balances, 3 separate branches of government, and a split legislature.
The problem is the parliamentary system, not the method of voting. Now the most important point is to retain constituency, or district, voting. In Brazil representatives are elected at large. That makes campaigns very expensive and removes the link between the voter and the representative.
So now the Brazilian Congress wants to change the system to a party-list vote. Fortunately indirect voting is extremely unpopular, and banned by the Brazilian Constitution, but the politicians are trying to make the change anyway. After taking into account your criticism of the English system, I still say it is the 3rd best in the world. The French system has its own disadvantages. For those who do not know it, here is a rough outline: 1 there are two rounds; 2 the candidates that go to the second round can be i either the first two of Round 1 e.
You certainly know more about the French system than I do. In Brazil we have been using two-round voting for executive positions since redemocratization, and the results are excellent, specially if you compare to the previous one-round votes. I agree that constantly changing the rules is a disaster, and that proportional elections in the large are very problematic. But I still believe that 2-round voting in each constituency would be a simple and effective way to do achieve similar results to AV.
This is not good for democracy, because when, after a year or two, public opinion turns against the majority, it has not good way to express itself in parliament…. Emmanuel, in answer to your question about Labour, they would probably have done better under AV. However, if they had introduced it without a referendum, I suspect that the punishment they would have received at the polls as a consequence would have outweighed the advantage gained, and they would have set a precedent allowing future governments to do likewise, as in the French example.
The argument against strong governments is that some bad things are harder for governments to do. But good things are also harder to do. The negative value that markets always place on results that yield no majority or a slim majority seems to indicate that, as far as economic competence goes, the second effect outweighs the first. I was annoyed with Labour but not really positive about the Libdems.
The only thing I did feel positive about was voting against the Tories. Most people I told about it were horrified. The first time was in , when we voted […] […]. My attempt at an illustrative example is in the rare event of a tie as in the Great Yarmouth council elections last year : currently it has to be decided by drawing lots.
What about in the case where one party has a tiny majority say, by 1 vote : is it fair to ignore preferences that could swing the result massively in the opposite direction?
A system that takes account of this extra information from the start can be a lot more effective. Once you see that this deliberate practice is unfair, it also starts to seem unfair when it happens inadvertently.
A slightly tongue-in-cheek argument I read elsewhere, that appealed to me, is that the UK already has something approximating a two-round voting system: but the first round takes place in the media and election material when they decide who the top two contenders are, and is therefore completely unaccountable. However, the video makes a further point that I did not think of while writing: that in this kind of situation, a party might harm itself by campaigning more effectively.
This is clearly an undesirable consequence of AV and, according to the video, has happened in one or two places in the US, leading to the abandonment of AV. Against that, we are talking about an election with hundreds of constituencies and a phenomenon that will be very rare.
So although there can be the occasional unfairness in three-way marginals under AV, those will be places where the views of the constituents are pretty ambiguous anyway, and they will not have a susbstantial effect on which party wins power nationally.
Under FPTP, thanks to the split on the left, you can make it less likely that policies you like will be pursued if you vote for the party that best represents those policies. And that routinely happens in dozens of constituencies at every election and makes a huge difference nationally.
So wait: in the first example, Labour got a majority of the vote, and got elected. In the second, the Conservatives got a majority of the vote, and got elected. For details, see this Wikipedia article. While gowers looked at a Wiki Article, it does not tell the whole story. His cherry picking tries to support his argument. It used a variation for electing a two person seat. Which leads to a good question — which type of AV will be used and who decides?
If you skip a rank, what happens? Maybe you selected 1 and 3 and 4. In San Francisco, they will use your 3rd choice if 1 drops. If you select two in a rank overvote what happens? You mention that anomalies are rare with AV, but they are not. Burlington VT which repealed AV also selected a mayor who was not the favorite of the voters:.
The occasional anomaly there will be regrettable, but it is very unlikely to change who ends up in charge in the country as a whole. Since Conservative voters hate Labour, a majority prefer the Lib Dem candidate to the Labour candidate.
Since Labour voters hate the Conservatives, a majority prefer the Lib Dem candidate to the Conservatives.
And finally, just for good measure, it happens that in this constituency the Lib Dems are somewhat left-leaning, so a majority prefer the Labour candidate to the Conservative candidate. In such a constituency, the head-to-head competitions would suggest that the Lib Dem candidate is the most popular, followed by the Labour candidate, followed by the Conservative candidate — exactly the opposite of the result provided by FPTP!
David, this is plain wrong. However, the UK does have preferential elections e. I suggest that the use of vote-counting machines in the London Mayoral Election is due to the sheer scale of that election — the number of votes cast in was nearly 53 times that of the average constituency in the General Election.
Do you have any evidence that machines are used in any such elections outside London where the number of votes is of a similar scale to a GE constituency? I am equally unsurprised that the No campaign does not seem to care whether or not the claims it makes are actually true.
Though, I do believe they are used in Scotland I may be wrong. This is a rather excellent post. Good job! For a lot of reasons, see this quite terrific piece by the estimable Tim Gowers. This entry was posted in This and that. Bookmark the permalink. IV A map […]. Thank you for an excellent post which I found by chance just as I was thinking I really should try and be a bit less apathetic about this. In Scotland there were referenda on devolution in and It took me quite some time to read it all, and it would be more efficient just to make some of the most important points well known to people.
Exactly the comprehensive article on the topic that we all need. The coalition seems to be having interesting effects in terms of where second preferences are now going, with the rump LD vote now favouring the Tories, and both parties will benefit from AV if this trend holds.
The Lib Dems were not formed until , not 87 minor, I know 2. This was proved by the Jenkins Commission. In the Tories actually got the highest popular vote in terms of raw numbers that they had ever had. The national mood was not against them in any real sense. There would have been less need for it. The increase in the raw Tory vote was, I think, largely due to the expected closeness of the election drawing more of their supporters out to vote — the total turnout increased by about a million, while the Tory increase was about a third of that.
Am I being pedantic? The points you or your friend make are very interesting, especially point number 2.
Probably AV would have given the Alliance more seats at the expense of Labour, which would at least have partially corrected one of the great injustices of that election.
I have just discovered your site and I wish to congratulate you on this article about AV. I have been trying for the past three weeks, on various sites, to counter the lies perpetrated by the No campaign with no success. There are some who form a view and will not be moved from it no matter how often you can demonstrate the fallacy of their case.
Nevertheless, as someone who studied mathematics more than 50 years ago it is great to find a mathematics flavoured take on current issues. Thanks very much for this article…. So why is it used for election of Commons committee chairs and Lords Speaker? This is slightly adapted from the wording used on Scottish LA ballot papers:.
And finally, some Some suggested mottoes for the No campaign: a The mass of people will more readily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one, b Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it, and c What good fortune for governments that the people do not think. I would prefer a weighted voting system rather than AV, but that would definately require counting machines.
This criticism is interesting. You have a point there, MorningTory. So under AV, support for minor parties may be a little overstated, whereas under FPTP it may well be substantially understated. The need to canvass votes from small parties could easily lead major parties to advance policies to attract those voters at the expense of their own supporters.
While it is most certainly true that AV is not a proportional system, neither FPTP or AV can be proportional while you maintain a single winner per constituency. I find it a little premature to talk too much about whether one system is more or less proportional that the other: we rely on geographical clusters of support to magically reflect the overall preference.
If every single area voted the same way then you would have all the seats going a single party! Obviously it is unsatisfactory to hope that random fluctuations in support share out the constituency results in a representative fashion. That said, multi-member constituencies and proportional systems are not up for vote at this point in time. The biggest weakness of AV is that it is single-winner; hence, not proportional.
As single-winner systems go it is far better than the current one. A system that selects the Condorcet Winner would be preferable but that is a minor issue some will raise specific examples where AV breaks down, a Condorcet system would deal with those but they are somewhat contrived examples. It would be a great shame if this opportunity to empower voters to select their preferences in good faith was lost, especially if the major sticking point is proportionality. The biggest problem the country faces with the voting system is that our single vote is conflicted.
A single-winner system is better for selecting a representative of local people, a proportional system is preferable for selecting a government. Decoupling the conflicted voting intent would help immensely here. Discussions tend to focus on individual elections. We also need to reflect a little on what happens when people change their vote from one election to the next.
Perverse or what? Yes, Jonathan. Professor Gowers has convinced me that AV is a superior system to FPTP for some purpose; but I am not sure that I know what that purpose is and it seems to me, in all humility, that one should define the objective first.
Is the system intended to discover what people think about any issue or issues or merely to provide some sporadic entertainment and a way of determining which group of largely Oxbridge-educated white males of whom I am one should exercise power? Are we not being fobbed off with a meaningless choice between almost equally flawed systems as a way of avoiding the real issues? And so long as we have a secondary chamber populated by patronage, who are we trying to kid?
Nominally we are voting for candidates, but in reality we are probably voting for all three in combinations that will differ from one voter to another. Both systems are obviously designed to determine which candidate is elected in each constituency. While I and many other people find elections entertaining, I would assume that that is just a by-product, not an intention.
As far as I know, neither side has advocated their system on the grounds that it is more entertaining! Very well explain, but the AV alternative is for choosing parties not representatives. Each district should be represented by a person elected by the people of that district, accordingly with their preferences and not by the general interest of the party that they may belong.
Thanks to Prof Gowers for putting this polemics on a more scientific footing. All this rarified polemics on AV will again look like mere rigmarole then. These figures are all available online. Particularly DUP support actually, as they are also way to the right of any of the other parties in this hypothetical rainbow coalition and would probably put a lot of strain on the arrangement.
Balls was downright hostile to the idea. If the positions of the Tories and Labour in terms of seats had been reversed i. Voting is like asking if you want to be mugged by a guy who goes to church or an atheist.
It is really merely another form of confidence trick played on the general public by those who may differ in party name but no in essence. Personally having been sick and tired of this continuing pantomime of voting, I ceased to do so in , considering that it is better not to encourage the bastards.
Now the parasitical pricks have made enrolment compulsory which means one has [supposedly] to enrol and in doing so have to waste time going to a polling booth to mess up a ballot paper. How inane! Er… that would be the Lib Dems then. The Greens only picked up a seat in Brighton Pavilion because of a peculiar set of demographics. And in some constituencies it might even benefit the Conservatives. I concede that it is the Lib Dems who have most to gain, but that is because it is they who have suffered the most monstrous unfairnesses of FPTP.
Are they not invited to the Democratic ball? Also, over the longer term, the LibDems are still a long way in deficit in terms of power to votes ratio. Having read that and perhaps […].
The net effect, however, is going to be more seats for the Lib Dems. A fact that you conveniently skimmed over is that if the election had been run under AV, Nick Clegg would have been able to prop up a deeply unpoular Labour government. But to me, a situation where 30 million people vote, and one man decides who forms a government is profoundly undemocratic. You seem to have contradicted yourself. I think dislike of the idea of coalitions is a legitimate reason for voting no.
In some countries, such as Israel, they can give undue influence to very small parties. Also, as I recall it, it was Cameron who approached the LibDems. There was nothing to stop the Tories trying to form a coalition with Labour if they had wanted to, or some of the smaller parties for that matter.
Personally, I cannot understand why anyone would think it is better who governs is decided politicians in smoke-filled rooms thrashing out murky deals.
The defence of coalitions would be that a compromise between two parties, each of which represents a sizable minority of the electorate, is more representative than a single party that represents a sizable minority.
The current coalition is not the best advertisement for the principle, but that is, in my view, because under FPTP coalitions take us by surprise. Oh, for crying out loud! Now I understand why your blog post was so long: you assume your readers have absolutely no prior knowledge of a subject!
But you were talking about Labour, so I was addressing the point about Labour. It may well be that you are making a valid point. AV probably harms the Tories more than anyone else. However, I have an even stronger commitment to correctness and rationality. Some of the comments above have revealed to me that I was wrong in some of the details of what I wrote in the post, and I welcome such comments.
There may be some future reality in which another party is their position. Is it desirable that this deficit is corrected? The real issue we have is that we have a plural political landscape. AV is sometimes sold as a magic bullet guarantees that an MP is endorsed by a majority of their electorate. But, of course, it does no such thing. In fact, I almost put him down as my first choice. The only thing we can really conclude about a transfered vote is that the voter did not want the recipient to win.
Not with all the other deficiencies of AV. Under the last election Labour would have gained. The Green party now has a strong enough localised showing that it would be competitive enough in at least a few seats to have a better shot of winning them under AV. It also provides independent candidates with a better chance. Preferential voting is important in NI. In most countries where coalitions are the norm they explicitly set out which policies they will prioritise in the event of a coalition deal in their manifestos.
It is considered a majoritarian system. Yes and no. The political plural landscape means that, particularly on the left wing, people support multiple parties.
In the current landscape it is more important, not less, that people can therefore have additional preferences. It is certainly more suited for a diverse political landscape than FPTP. That not true. This is an odd way of thinking. But that gives the 2nd preference of one voter the same weight as the first choice of another. That projection predicts that Labour would have lost 10 seats, not 20 — using the gross figure is very misleading.
I might fish out some other projections later if I have time rushed now. One reliable projection indicating that Labour would gain more seats surely shows the principle that not just the Liberal Democrats could gain from the system. Particularly given how a lot of Labour supporters no longer like the LDs.
People vote for single parties because they can only put down one preference. Broadly lumping together left and right wing is the easiest way to illustrate this as usually tactical voting under FPTP is to either keep a Tory or Labour candidate out depending on the seat.
Obviously you get people who like parties across the left-right axis too — I know someone who is keen on the Tories and Greens for instance. The whole point of AV is to simulate run-off elections. The vote of someone who picks a non-eliminated candidate is the equivalent of voting in a run-off for the same candidate as in the first round.
Would you rather be forced to rank every candidate? Many people may like multiple parties nearly equally in fact. Particularly given that cross in a box is likely to just be the candidate that can beat the candidate they dislike most rather than their actual favourite candidate. Electing a government is a serious matter. It wont surprise you to learn that I think that is profoundly wrong. The point is, as a rational voter, I MUST in some circumstances put multiple preferences so as not to disenfrachise myself.
Earlier you said that AV simulates run-offs. In a run-off election I get as many votes as there are rounds; i. Some AV ballot papers are marked more than once, are physically counted more than once, and affect the outcome of the election more than once. Imagine a future where we have 3 party politics between UKIP, the Tories and Labour the Lib Dems having been decimated for abandoning every principle they ever stood for in pursuit of power, sorry I digress….
Then someone of a broadly Euroskeptic, anti-immigration small minded Little Englander sorry I digress again! Would you be saying the same thing then? Of course you would… In short you are imagining your own prejudices in the minds of every other voter, with no warrant. You proved yourself that we cannot conclude that, when you gave an example of a situation where a voters might vote UKIP 1, Con 2, even though their real preference was the reverse. We should expect MPs who are not the first choice of more than half of the voters how many under FPTP have more than half of the electorate, given current turnout levels?
Why is someone who only puts down one choice decisive? They have only made one decision — that they prefer that one choice to any other candidate — whereas someone who ranks all of the candidates has made several decisions. Any preference they had after that is not accounted for, but that is their own fault for not expressing it. Now we are down to three in both seats, but in one the UKIP vote goes to the Tory as a second preference, whereas in the other it is a first preference, even though there is no difference in the preferences of the two voters, so why should they be given different weights?
Is more than one decision too much for their tiny minds to cope with? Voters in multi-seat wards seem to cope with voting for more than one candidate. Under what circumstances would the presence or absence of C change the order in which you placed A and B?
Yes — at least to the same extent as FPTP interprets a tactical vote used so as not to disenfranchise the voter in that way. Utter lies. AV does not do that, it merely encourages voters to express their preferences as far down as they wish to.
FPTP, on the other hand, encourages large numbers of voters to vote for candidates who are not their first choice ahead of those who are. One of the problems of this debate is that the opposing sides have different objectives. There is one side that wishes to maximise the chances of single party government the Executive at the expense of fair representation in parliament the Legislature. The campaigns have mixed up these objectives, either ignorantly or deliberately — but the curious thing is that AV would do little to alter the odds of getting single party government, nor would it be likely to produce more overall fairness.
It would weaken the elected dictatorship a little bit. It would also mean that the 10 million people who voted against Labour and the Tories more than voted for Labour last year would be heard, even if only for their second preferences. Very intresting article, and I agree with most of it, except for one thing. I think it would be in the best intrest of Tories to vote in favour of AV as well in the long run.
I am a Tory supporter myself and plan on voting yes. Although we have a situation today where the left is more divided than the right, we cannot be sure this will always be the case.
My girlfriend is from Sweden where the exact opposite used to be true, and the right-wing vote was divided on three equally strong parties.
By virtue of the length of the original blog, the content, the mathematical examples. In a true democracy, surely we can only be confident in the decision we allow people to take if they are fully informed decisions — decisions where the decider understands fully the implications of the decision they are making.
Is it right to introduce a new system that a substantial number of voters do not fully understand the implications of their vote preferences. Our legal system currently makes allowances where people have broken the law where it can be proven they were unable to make an informed decision — how can we have a voting system that goes against that.
In summary, AV is just too complex for people to understand the full implications of their decisions — as demonstrated by the original article. FPTP is not without issues, but is the current fairest way and every vote counts. The ideal system is similar to AV, but with a fresh round of voting after every count, until there are only two candidates left, but obviously could never be implemented.
They lost five or six times, but still their views are equal to mine. Can you give me a good example where a voter would vote differently if they understood better how their votes were going to be counted afterwards? Example 1 — Labour voter does not fully understand AV — knows they can put their other preferences on the form. Lib Dem 3 and BNP 4. Final vote is between Lib Dem and Conservatives and this vote goes towards a conservative victory. I have used the BNP in both examples, not to scaremonger, just that the BNP are a party that creates radical decisions amongst voters.
If they prefer the Conservatives to the Lib Dems then their second choice vote is giving them exactly what they want, given that Labour has been eliminated. In your second example, you are suggesting that a voter might vote for the BNP without understanding that it is possible that that vote might affect things. I suppose it would be some comfort to that voter that the BNP would not actually get elected. The basic principle of voting under AV is very simple: put the candidates in order of preference until you no longer have a preference.
AV merely provides the option of allocating preferences if one desires. I'm a little confused. You say the Greens would have won only one seat under FPTP, but your table has them as the primary vote leader in Melbourne. Should it be 2 seats, or have the primary percentages for Labor and Green been transposed? Love your work, btw :. Even when they have little hope of winning, preferential voting systems may give minor parties some ability to exert influence through preference deals.
In Australia we have seen the major parties sometimes tailor their policies to make it more likely that supporters of minor parties give them their second preference. I think this ability to influence indirectly can be a benefit to minor parties under preferential voting systems and would be another advantage of AV.
The Greens are not the only minor party in the UK. Indeed, some minor parties seem to do quite well out of FPTP, specifically the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, and I doubt they register as 'extreme' on anyone's political spectrum.
Do you have an opinion on how AV might affect the regional nationalist parties, i. Plaid Cymru and the SNP? Or at the very least place them in the position of Adam Bandt wherein they are dependent on major party preferences to survive. Doesn't the possibility that the nationalist parties may lose out and thereby remove the political voice of the nationalist cause which seems to be supported well outside the voter base of the respective nationalist parties mean that switching to AV could be prejudicial to minor party interests?
I'd imagine the nationalist parties would only be in trouble if supporters of Labour, the Conservatives and LibDems saw common purpose in defeating the nationalists, and I'm not sure that would be the case.
The four party nature of Wales and Scotland is why PR was adopted for the local assemblies. Northern Ireland is a different matter entirely, which is why its Assembly uses STV and has all sorts of constitutional checks and balances. Another good article, I've always felt that the main advantage of preferential voting whether compulsory or optional is allowing people to vote for their genuine first preference, knowing that a preference can be given to a major party candidate anyway.
Obviously there is still occasionally scope for tactical voting particularly under compulsory preferential but it is far less common than under FPTP. The obvious rebuttal to the idea that an FPTP system obeys the "plurality rule" is the example of the Belgian Parliament. In Belgium there are lots of ideological ideas which float through coupled with broadly Flemish and French speaking parties, resulting in as many as 5 or 6 different parties which could conceivably form government.
With regards the above comment about Compulsory Voting: If people are forced to vote, then they tend to be more engaged in the politics of the nation. This results in far less money being wasted on advertising in enticing people to the polls. A better informed population means that people are probably less likely to be driven by the cult of personality with regards their vote.
Thank you so much for your contributions to the debate. I'd make them compulsory reading for the No camp - except that e.
I should always say recommended preferences rather than directed. This is in contrast to Labour Being only 6. Is there evidence i. It is very difficult to use national vote share figures for the UK because support for the parties is so geographically concentrated, and also because of the high incidence of tactical voting. In addition, the LibDems consistently finish second and third, so AV isn't going to convert many of those second places into victories.
However, I'm having some difficulty getting my head around the outcome referred to, which seems rather unlikely on such a low primary, the recent Balmain result seeming a more likely parallel to any potential scenario here.
Would you be able to shed light on which electorate he might have been referring to, and the actual voting count, before I front up to another meeting on Saturday week at which the same gentleman will again be speaking? Much appreciated! We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work. Based on experience with AV elections in Australia, there is a two part answer.
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Thailand's sex industry generates billions of dollars. This too seems incontestable. If there is a No vote tomorrow, and especially if it is a convincing vote, it is very unlikely that the alternative vote AV or any proper proportional system of voting will be introduced in British parliamentary elections for many years. If, however, there is a Yes vote it will encourage those who believe in getting full PR to redouble their efforts.
A Yes vote will stop critics from claiming that the British people have voted on electoral reform already and voted No. This is not quite so clear-cut.
The AV system is a different system and, The Independent believes, a better one. But it might not invariably be fairer. Under FPTP the person with the most votes wins.
Under AV voters can nominate 2nd, 3rd and 4th preferences so that if their favoured candidate is eliminated they can still have "a say" until one candidate gets more than 50 per cent of the support. As a study by the Political Studies Association points out, under FPTP how well a candidate does depends partly on how popular he or she is and partly on how many other similar candidates are running in the constituency.
In a constituency with one left-wing candidate and three right-wing candidates, the left-wing candidate could win even if right-wing voters are in the majority because the right-wing vote splits.
AV is designed to prevent such outcomes. It allows the right-wing voters to coalesce around the most popular right-wing candidate and secure the seat. But it would also disadvantage the candidate with the most individual support first preference votes who loses out in subsequent rounds to a candidate who is possibly less polarising. Thus the No campaign is right to say that AV could lead to the election of the "least unpopular" candidate.
AV is not a proportional system like the single transferable vote system with which it is confused and does not generally help small parties win seats. In fact it can exaggerate the over-representation of the largest party and would have given Labour an even bigger landslide in Like FPTP, AV can produce biased election results where two parties with the same vote shares secure very different numbers of seats. AV might reduce the number of safe seats — but it would not eliminate them.
Seats where one party regularly scores more than 50 per cent of the vote seats at the last election would remain safe.
AV could make a difference in some seats that are fairly safe by making them less safe. In recent elections this would have been most likely in Conservative-held seats where Labour and the Liberal Democrats both won substantial votes. Conversely though, AV would make some seats safer.
This is clearest in many Liberal Democrat seats where the party would be strengthened by lower preference votes. In recent elections it would also have applied to some Labour-held seats where the Conservatives came second and the Liberal Democrats were a strong third. However given the nature of the Coalition Government the effect could be very different in
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