The government has committed itself to holding a referendum on voting reform in the UK in three months time, specifically, whether we should switch from FPTP to AV in general elections. There seems to be a vocal minority who are very excited about the prospect of moving away from FPTP (yet also disappointed that we aren’t implementing STV or some other form of PR) and a vocal minority who are extremely disappointed with the prospect of even holding a referendum.
From what I’ve read, the Electoral Reform Society seems to endorse AV as the best choice for electing MPs. However, I recently came across this property of AV, wherein a candidate can lose an election by simply being ranked higher by their supporters than another candidate. Even worse, a mathematical analysis shows that this should happen in up to 15% of all AV elections (the Wikipedia article cites two different examples in mayoral elections in the US and Australia in recent years). To me, this seems to be a killer disadvantage: how is AV “democratic” when a higher ranked candidate can lose to a lower one? Aren’t we replacing one (supposedly) bad system with another one, where people cannot predict how their voting will affect an election?
It may surprise you to learn that people who are not citizens of the UK might be interested in understanding what you’re saying, and possibly even participating in the conversation, maybe, to some extent, if they are welcome to do so, perhaps.
So then… AV and FPTP and STV and PR mean what exactly?
I’m not a fan of AV, and actually like FPTP, but I will say, in response to the above, there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system, and no matter what voting system you set up, if there are three or more choices, it’ll never accurately reflect the preferences of the voters while at the same time being democratic and Pareto efficient. Read Kenneth Arrow and Allan Gibbard.
And to answer your other question, the motivation for change is that the Lib-Dems know that they’ll never be in a position to lead a government with first past the post, and hope that some alternative voting system will get them more seats.
I am a bit out of touch with the British system, but when reading Ridley’s post, that’s the first thing that came to mind. Liberal Democrats have been complaining for decades that the system is stacked against them, now that they’ve got one foot in the door, it would make sense that they’d try to get their political partners to cut them a little slack comes election time.
I think a more important issue is electoral districts. It’s possible to have the highest number of country-wide votes (indicating that the country as a whole wants you), but because they’re spread across the country, you come second in every election - gaining zero seats at parliament.
That artifact of the current system means that the party with the most votes can end up with no seats, while a party with far fewer votes can end up with a majority of seats.
Yes, I’m aware of social choice theory and Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Still, it seems any voting system where up to 15% of the elections run under that system return a candidate that nobody voted for, and as near as possible voted against within the confines of that system, is fundamentally worse than the system that we have at the moment. It essentially means a sixth of all elections could return wild results, depending on who exactly gets eliminated first, and how their votes are redistributed. For all the bleating about how broken our current system is, I don’t see the current system as being that bad.
Or, we could have proportional representation, so that voters get the politicians they do want. Of course, that would mean that the two largest parties would lose a great deal of their power, and we’ve been told clearly that we wouldn’t want that.
I dislike the Alternate Vote system. It’s too complex where the contest is close. I prefer Approval Voting which is dead simple and far more transparent. I think that not only does an election have to be honest but it has to be seen to be honest, and the Alternative Vote system doesn’t quite make it there. Further, Approval Voting scales to multiple-member constituencies (e.g. the European elections).
Let me give a concrete example. Here in Luton South, my MP was Margaret Moran, of whom the less said the better, and the Labour candidate was someone who had supported her. My prime objective at the last election was to vote anti-Labour. As it was, the anti-Labour vote was split and the Labour guy got in. With Approval Voting, I could have ticked every box other than Labour and the BNP (and Esther Rantzen who tried to be a carpet-bagger) and I would not have had to gamble my vote and the Labour candidate would likely have lost; under the Alternative Vote system, I would have had to worry about the precise order of my votes.
How does alternate voting not scale to multiple member constituencies? And why shouldn’t you have to worry about the precise order of your votes?
If you assume that most voters go into the booth with the mindset of “anyone but X”, approval voting makes perfect sense. If you don’t - and it seems to be that the anyone but X mindset is a rarity - it doesn’t.
To be fair all of those acronyms in the beginning are standard usage for those electoral systems.
I’m in favour of the reform as it is a (small) step towards making the outcome of elections match more closely with the votes cast by the electorate, and there is no better option on the table.
Alternate Voting does scale to multiple member constituencies - I never said that it didn’t - but it doesn’t scale as cleanly and transparently as Approval Voting.
Because it’s simpler. And faster. Consider the stereotypical little old lady going to vote and being asked to rank the candidates.
I disagree. That was one example I gave, and was not to the exclusion of others.
Approval Voting says, “I’m happy with any of A, B, or C”; Alternate Voting forces you to rank them.
PR essentially favours small parties, allowing them to act as king makers, dictating the composition of government even if they have a tiny percentage of the vote. It also favours small parties with very narrow agendas, or parties that are only relevant in certain geographic locales. Do we really want parties that campaigned only on an issue relevant to South Yorkshire to achieve nationwide power?
IMO, bigger parties are better. They absorb the best ideas from smaller parties, and act as a filtering mechanism, ignoring the really kooky and irrelevant ideas that smaller parties put forward. If you can’t get a big party to co-opt your idea, more often than not, there’s a pretty good reason for that.
That’s an inescapable fact of any legislature which requires a majority to pass laws. The US Senate is probably the furthest from PR you can get, but is full of individual legislators greatly affecting laws in ways the mythical 1 seat obstructionist small party could only imagine.
This is entirely backwards. In FPTP a Yorkshire First candidate can win seats with pluralities in Yorkshire electorates, but a national smaller party with a far greater % of the overall vote can get nothing. Look at how many seats the Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh parties get under the existing system.
Why not allow the electorate to actually pick which ideas are relevant? If a big party can’t get a majority of the vote, why should it have the power the pass any law it wants? And if reducing the number of parties is better, then why not just have a 1 party system?