Robot Chicken
Seriously?
What do people think about Proportional Representation as used in today's Euro election?
This made me smile!
This made me smile!
Curious Orange said:I prefer to vote for a person myself. Proportional representation is a bit of lottery.
Curious Orange said:I prefer to vote for a person myself. Proportional representation is a bit of lottery.
timco said:
PR is no more likely too allow extreme parties than any other system. Its the people that vote that allow extremes too take hold.
Gangsta said:I think everyone should have to be able to pass some sort of test when they vote or its a spoilt paper ( yes I know some people struggle just with the cross ).
How about say 1 maths question, 1 geography question , music and so on. I mean at the moment you dont even have to spell you're own name ( add that and take out part of South London).
I reckon if you did this it could put the fun back into voting and may even encourage a better turn out ( in more than one sense of the word).
That really would be reform.
Richie Morris said:Its a shit idea. One which helped the Nazi party get a foot in the door in Germany.
MYOB said:What the UK is using for the EuroMP elections isn''t PR, it isn't even close to it.
Proportional Representation is a modification of Instant Runoff Voting for more than one seat. Or IRV is PR for one seat, whichever way you see it
Candidates appear individually on the paper and you give each one a prefence, or no preference at all. 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
A candidate has a quota to get it at. If a candidate reachs that quota at the first count, whatever number of votes they have over the quota are taken randomly from their total vote pool and they are distributed in the second count. The person with the least votes is eliminated.
This continues for as many counts as needed (9 rounds being the record I know of, for my local council elections in 1999) until all seats are filled
Thats PR, as its known in every other country in the world, and inNorthern Ireland. NI has a slight variation in how it calcuates the excess which is too complex to explain here.
What the UK has hasn't got a name. Although combined with the kind of electoral areas changes Labour have made, I think you can call it Gerrymandering.
Richie Morris said:That is wrong. If an extreme party recieves a few votes in a lot of areas, they may not win any seats in 'First Past the Post' because they may not have the most votes in any one seat. However, if when you total up these votes they may have enough to warrant a seat or two. Therefore PR is more likely to let extreme parties in, like the Nazi's in Germany.
This "minimum support" idea is the only way PR can really work. The only problem is, who decides what that percentage should be?timco said:In most forms of PR a party has too reach a level before they get that share, normally 5 %. Any party that gets 5% of the popular vote in an area really should be entitled too seats or you end up with disenfranchised people with no one too represent their views. You may not like those views but its up to you to do something about that.
Simster said:Maybe some form of hybrid between the two is the way forward. Perhaps you could double the size of each constituency - half the MPs are then elected by FPTP, the other half are elected using PR. So each vote is double-counted but even if your candidate misses out serving your constituency, at least your vote counts towards the PR vote for the other half of MPs.