That AV Vote

[Notters]

Right I've got a good anolog.

10 of you are going out for a drink but you can't decide which pub
6 vote for the Revenge with it's jelly and stripppers night
3 vote for The Great Eastern
5 for the Evening Star
4 for Earth and Stars
2 for Lord Nelson
1 for Battle of Trafalgar

You knock out the bottom three who all vote for Great Eastern as their second choice.
Then you knock out the two evening star voters who both vote for Great Eastern too, meaning you all go to the Great Eastern.
While more people wanted to go to the gay bar than any other individual pub, the fact that the majority would prefer to go to an old man's pub with good bitter is reflected in the outcome

Brilliant work, using some of my favourite pubs! I've now ranked them in my order of preference.

 

[BensGrandad]

When asked on the radio yesterday about PR the expert said it would be up to a future government or indded even this government to decide wther or not to put that to the country in a similar reforendum but effectively this vote does not affect or change the possibility of one day having PR or not.

 

[Dandyman]

But surely you agree that people currently vote tactically? E.g. you're a Labour supporter in a Tory constituency. You want to vote Labour but you reckon (going on previous elections) that the LibDem has more chance of getting in - so you vote for them instead. You've now been recorded as a LibDem 'supporter' despite the fact that, as you say, it's just someone you dislike less than the Tory. Under AV you can vote for your 'own' party.

This tactical voting means we don't know what people really want. I'm sure the Greens would get a lot more votes but people think "Where I live voting Green is a waste so I'll vote Lib Dem instead."

You're right though that real minority parties may never win seats but may get 5% of the vote nationally. Should they get 5% of the seats in a parliament? Being a PR supporter you'd probably say 'yes'. I'm not so sure.

Fair points. As another posters suggested there could be sense in having straight PR for an upper chamber (100 members - 1% of the national vote equals one seat) and STV/Multimember constituencies or something similar for the lower chamber which would retain the constituency link.

 

[Leekbrookgull]

Is there anyone here who has voted for No to A/V but Yes to P/R ? If you have and you know that is not going to be on the ballot paper,out of interest will you still vote ?

 

[16bha]

I vote 'no to AV', but my alternative vote is 'yes to AV'. Does that help?

 

[Leekbrookgull]

I vote 'no to AV', but my alternative vote is 'yes to AV'. Does that help?

As clear as MUD !

 

[Dandyman]

Is there anyone here who has voted for No to A/V but Yes to P/R ? If you have and you know that is not going to be on the ballot paper,out of interest will you still vote ?

Yes, I will vote and it will be no to AV.

 

[Cian]

The major problem with PR is the loss of direct representation. I like the idea of having a parliament that is truly representative of the will of the people, I'm just wary of the public losing their one link to parliament. For that reason I will probably be voting Yes to AV.

There is an option of constituency PR, PR-STV. AV with multiple seats in each area. This gives you a direct link but also gives something thast comes very close to PR

However in the UK it would have the downside of there being rather a few BNP and UKIP MPs...

 

[8ace]

Yes, I will vote and it will be no to AV.

Wouldn't a yes for AV mean more seats for parties who support PR? A stepping stone if you will.

 

[Dandyman]

Wouldn't a yes for AV mean more seats for parties who support PR? A stepping stone if you will.

A fair question, but IMO AV is not PR and is more about the deal between the Tories and the Orange Book LibDems than anything else. I don't want a system that presents even more unfairness than the current one and therefore would rather this is defeated and a proper movement to a truly representative system pursued instead.

 

[paddy]

I will be voting no to AV for four reasons:

(1) I haven't time to read through each party's entire manifesto - I want the other parties to point out the deficiencies and problems with the others. I do not want politicians to refrain from doing this because they are afraid of alienating that voter who might select them as a second choice. Voter apathy is in part driven by the feeling that the political parties are all the same - AV will intensify this feeling

(2) AV is not a proportional system, nor is it a stepping stone to one.

(3) It promotes coalitions and in doing so removes the electorate of its most important power - to remove a government it does not approve of. It will be the Lib Dems and a variety of other minor parties who decide who the government will be in negotiations after the election, not the voters. Incidentally, we have seen what happens to manifesto commitments in such negotiations, and it has extremely serious implications for the House of Lords where the coalition now have an unprecedented de facto majority in a chamber which has always been run on the basis of consensus.

(4) It treats an Person A's first choice as equivalent to Person B's second choice

Just a few thoughts on one of the central criticisms of FPTP: 'My vote doesn't count'. How can this be right? Does your votes appear on the final totals? Yes. Is it counted on election night? Yes. But if we are talking about changing the result of an election, very few, if any, single votes do this. What in fact people who use this argument are saying is 'its not fair because I'm not in the majority'. Frankly, tough. Democracy runs on majorities. There is no guarantee that your vote would count in this sense under AV - your vote may be redistributed to your second, third and even fourth preference but the person you didn't vote for can still end up winning.

It is particularly revealing that only one major democracy, Australia, use AV as a voting system for their Parliament and there are calls for them to revert back to FPTP.

 

[cannedheat]

Until yesterday I had not made my retarded mind up, now I see the luvvies are getting behind the AV vote so I vote to keep things as they are.

 

[Silent Bob]

(2) AV is not a proportional system, nor is it a stepping stone to one.

(3) It promotes coalitions and in doing so removes the electorate of its most important power - to remove a government it does not approve of. It will be the Lib Dems and a variety of other minor parties who decide who the government will be in negotiations after the election, not the voters. Incidentally, we have seen what happens to manifesto commitments in such negotiations, and it has extremely serious implications for the House of Lords where the coalition now have an unprecedented de facto majority in a chamber which has always been run on the basis of consensus.

There seems to be some confusion over whether it leads to coalitions or bigger swings towards the poular party of the moment, both things can't be true. In fact it's also been suggested that AV would barely have made a difference in the results of any election in the past 50 years.
I think that is the closest to the truth really, it's a very small change. In Australia they'#ve just had their first coalition government in about 90 years using AV, we've had more coalitions than Australia. But I don't see coalitions as a bad thing, this coalition is shit because the Lib Dems gave up too much in exchange for too little, because they had no other option really (and Clegg's a tory), because of the electoral system. In any system the government can be 'kicked out', by not voting for them. The thing with our system is that the country doesn't kick out governments, a few hundred thousand voters in swing seats do. I don't see how it can be argued it's the will of the people to kick governments out when we've had almost constant minority government since the 70s.

All the no to Av, yes to PR people, can you give me any examples where rejecting reform has then lead to even more radical reform?
You've got one party who will never, ever support any kind of change. You've got another who might be a little more open to it, or at least some of them would be, but then most likely never do it because they'd be happy with the system, especially when the third party, the only party that really supports this, are wiped out.

 

[Waynflete]

Just a few thoughts on one of the central criticisms of FPTP: 'My vote doesn't count'. How can this be right? Does your votes appear on the final totals? Yes. Is it counted on election night? Yes. But if we are talking about changing the result of an election, very few, if any, single votes do this. What in fact people who use this argument are saying is 'its not fair because I'm not in the majority'. Frankly, tough. Democracy runs on majorities. There is no guarantee that your vote would count in this sense under AV - your vote may be redistributed to your second, third and even fourth preference but the person you didn't vote for can still end up winning.

You make some good points and I agree with some of them, despite on balance being in favour of AV myself. Just to take issue with your point about majorities, though, I don't think anyone is suggesting it's not fair just because they're not in the majority.

Firstly, part of the point is that FPTP isn't run on the basis of majorities. Very few MPs are elected with 50% or more of the vote, so they're elected by minorities not majorities. No government in recent history has won a majority of the national vote. Governments are usually (not always) elected by the biggest minority.

Secondly, in the knowledge that you're not usually going to get a majority of the electorate voting for a single party, the question should really then become: 'How do we best understand the mind of the electorate? How do we find out what the people think?'. I'd argue that allowing people to state preferences is a better way of doing this than forcing them to vote tactically for people they may not really want.

 

[paddy]

You make some good points and I agree with some of them, despite on balance being in favour of AV myself. Just to take issue with your point about majorities, though, I don't think anyone is suggesting it's not fair just because they're not in the majority.

Firstly, part of the point is that FPTP isn't run on the basis of majorities. Very few MPs are elected with 50% or more of the vote, so they're elected by minorities not majorities. No government in recent history has won a majority of the national vote. Governments are usually (not always) elected by the biggest minority.

Fair point. Although, I still can't see how someone's vote will count more under AV than it does under FPTP. If, for instance, you live in a tory safe seat and have libdems, labour and greens as preferences but the tories still end up winning, you are in precisely the same position as you would have been had the election been FPTP and you had voted for libdems with the tories winning. The point is, if the criteria for a vote counting is your single vote having a decisive factor in who is elected, almost no electoral system will be able to ensure that votes count, and certainly not AV.

 

[cunning fergus]

Right I've got a good anolog.

10 of you are going out for a drink but you can't decide which pub
3 vote for the Revenge with it's jelly and stripppers night
2 vote for The Great Eastern
2 for the Evening Star
1 for Earth and Stars
1 for Lord Nelson
1 for Battle of Trafalgar

You knock out the bottom three who all vote for Great Eastern as their second choice.
Then you knock out the two evening star voters who both vote for Great Eastern too, meaning you all go to the Great Eastern.
While more people wanted to go to the gay bar than any other individual pub, the fact that the majority would prefer to go to an old man's pub with good bitter is reflected in the outcome

The problem with your analogy is if I dont like 4 of the pubs and haven't got any intentions of drinking in any of them then why should I have to rank my preference of going drinking in them? Its completely pointless.............and certainly not democratic.

My analogy would be that our choices are represented by 6 lumps of dog shit each with a slightly different topping, you know like Cherries/Pineapple Chunks/Almonds/etc. As it stands all we have to do under the current system is to discern which lump of dog shit is least offensive. Once we have decided that we can feel comfortable with a particular lump of dog shit we then put our x in the box. The turnpout figures would suggest there are many millions of us who can barely do that.

So, having gone through a simple analysis of 6 lumps of dog shit to choose 1 lump of dog shit, why should I have to go to the trouble of creating an algorithm to determine my order of preference with the other 5 lumps of dog shit. After all under the various toppings they are all just lumps of dog shit.

The fact that frustrated millionaires like Stephen Fry, Tony Robinson, Eddie Izzard and Colin Firth are all backing the AV system is as good a reason as any other to vote no.

 

[Leekbrookgull]

Should this A/V vote 'get through' is that it then,every general election will be decided this way ?

 

[Super Steve Earle]

If Milliband and Clegg want AV it must be a bad thing.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

I'm in the "don't give a toss, I wouldn't vote for any of the useless ignorant tossers" party.

 

[JJ McClure]

What countries currently use AV?