djglover – Member

AV is a terrible system. If you support a minority party followed by a mainstream party you are effectivley getting two votes for the price of one. That is not fair.

AAAAAAARGH it’s last week’s thread again.

In AV, nobody gets more votes than anyone else. There’s 2 ways to look at it, both are right, choose whichever you prefer:

1) You get one vote, but if your original candidate is one of those knocked out, your one vote for them no longer counts and so is reapplied to your next choice.

OR, my preferred explanation

2) Everyone gets multiple votes, but after the first round anyone whose candidate has been knocked out votes for someone else whereas everyone whose candidate is still in the running still votes for their candidate

Either way, nobody has more votes than anyone else, unless people choose either to not vote at all, or to not give more than one vote, which is their own choice.

The top-up system for PR is an area of conflict. IMO, lists can be made up from runner-up candidates of the vote. That way, they are MPs elected by our votes rather than selected from a crony list. It also helps prevent freaks become MPs.

If Lib/Lab had won enough votes to form a government at the last general election, we would be voting for PR now.

We are not being offered PR with the Con/Lib, it doesn’t suit the Conservative demographic. That’s why Cameron is against AV, because he knows it will evolve into PR.

most people in this country are wasting their time voting under the current system, At most a few thousand votes decide the election. Now can anyone tell me that is fair?

How is it that a achieving less than 40% of the vote can give a party a massive majority of MPs, can anyone tell me that is fair.

So the choice is status quo or change, if you vote against AV it will be assumed as a vote for FPtP, even if that isn’t what you meant.

AV is far from the best system, but it at least shows a change is wanted.

And talking of change, what is happening with the house of lords!!!!

So, with AV, if 49% of the population vote Labour with say the Green Party as their 2nd choice {we all have a conscience don’t we, so would put Green as our 2nd choice} and another 49% of the population voted Conservative with the Greens as their 2nd choice {yes, even the Cons have a social conscience} then the Greens would run the country?

no, because you need to look at the constituencies rather than as a national whole.

But in a constituency, if 49% vote Labour, 49% tory, 2% liberal, but 100% vote green second then On first count, Liberal is dismissed as in last place, leaving 49% labour, 49% tory and 2% green. the second vote of the liberal voters is now considered instead of their first choice. Green is now dismissed as in last place and the third choice is looked at, keep on going until you get to the point where one party gets over 50%.

naedeyw – Member

So, with AV, if 49% of the population vote Labour with say the Green Party as their 2nd choice {we all have a conscience don’t we, so would put Green as our 2nd choice} and another 49% of the population voted Conservative with the Greens as their 2nd choice {yes, even the Cons have a social conscience} then the Greens would run the country?

Er, no. Assuming that the other 2% all voted Green, the Greens would be eliminated in the first round as the lowest scoring party, and then the green secondary votes would decide between labour and tory.

Oh dear oh dear naedeyw, you are completely confused – it could never work out like that. No one with a conscience ever votes Conservative.

I see. So it’s only the 2nd, 3rd, etc., choices of the eliminated candidates that are counted. Makes a bit more sense now. Have to say that the Yes adverts that I’ve seen are almost enough to put me off the whole idea altogether they are just so childish and negative.

[edit] 😆 😉 e_l[/edit]

TBH I’d have said exactly the opposite, the No campaign’s been a bad joke. It’s possible to make a sensible argument against AV but they don’t seem to be at all interested in doing so.

The Yes one does seem to struggle a bit to get past “Of course we should go with it, it’s bloody obvious isn’t it, just about everyone who disagrees with it is doing so for daft reasons or due to misunderstandings or because it benefits their party” but then, they’re probably right on all counts.

The way i understand it, on the first round who do you want to win, at the end of that round the candidate in last place is eliminated.

Move to the second round, look at everyones first choice, remembering that one candidate no longer exists. so for anyone who choose them as first there second choice is now their first choice. count the votes, eliminate the last placed candidate.

repeat until the first placed candidate has got 50% +1 of the vote.

Because it is done on a constituency basis it does not reflect the national view and some peoples votes are still wasted, look at the core labour and tory regions, those are places where over 50% of the vote already goes to the winning candidate. Where it matters more is in those seats where currently you might have 40% tory, 30% labour and 30% liberal. This is where second votes come into play and you could have the candidate with the most votes not winning.

Example

40% tory, 29% liberal, 28% labour, 3% green. on first round green are eliminated. So recount the votes if we assume the all the green voters chose labour as there second choice.

recount

40% tory, 29% liberal, 31% labour. This time liberal is eliminated as in last place, assume all liberal voters surviving choice is Labour. Remember any liberal voter where green was a second choice, as Green has already been eliminated you look at the next choice.

So next count

40% Tory, 60% Labour.

And how is that fair!

is it fair that the tories win when 60% didn’t want them?

neither is a “fair” system.

as i said earlier, you can stick with the unfair system we have and be stuck with it for ever more, because you didn’t want change.

or you can choose a different unfair system but indicate that you are not happy with the current system.

The conservatives AND the BNP want us to vote no.

That, if nothing else, is more than enough reason to vote YES!

Oh… and it is a less unfair system, if not entirely fair still (and give up with this whinging that some people get more than one vote – not they don’t as the first vote is discounted and a second/third choice used instead – they don’t get to stack several votes for the same candidate so are, infact, only voting once – one man one vote is still true).

We need to change politics from the 2 horse race and tribalism that we are currently blessed with to something more representative of the populous. True AV isn’t what we want to end up with long term, but is at least a tentative stagger in the right direction!

>And how is that fair!

Because if you’d said to the liberal/labour/green voters ‘sorry, you can only vote tory or labour’ they’d have voted labour anyway because that’s the second preference they’d taken.

What it means is that people are freer to vote honestly first for the party they *actually* want, whereas currently they vote for who’s more likely to keep out the party they don’t want in, which is not the same thing at all.

Looks at it another way, in that example 60% *didn’t* want the tories but had a second preference of labour but in the existing system the tories would have got in. That’s the problem with the current system – the winning party may have the largest single block of the votes cast, but it’s actually minority of the total votes cast.

What I want to know is why don’t I get to rank my preferences in this referendum?

You do aracer. If you vote “No” for example, that will be counted as your first choice, and “Yes” will be counted as your second choice. HTH

you cannot have AV with only two choices

mrmo – Member

Where it matters more is in those seats where currently you might have 40% tory, 30% labour and 30% liberal. This is where second votes come into play and you could have the candidate with the most votes not winning.

No you won’t. You may have the candidate with the most first votes not winning but you’ll always have the candidate with the most counted votes winning.

How long has all this been going on for? How much advertising has it had? This is the first I’ve heard of any of this.

You should have had a leaflet through the door a week or so ago. We got one even though we did that Royal Mail thing that stops ‘to the householder’ mail, so maybe it came with the local paper.

And how is that fair!

Anything that got rid of the Tory is fair – FACT

Right, thanks, read some more on PR, it’s a better system than AV isn’t it, why can’t we have that?

We’ve got PR in Spain, and it’s terrible – you very quickly end up with what buzz-lightyear so accurately calls a “crony list”: 3 or 4 known candidates at the top of the list, and the rest are filler made up of party activists. There’s nothing to guarantee that the filler represents different parts of the country, for example, they could all be from London or Edinburgh or wherever.

Anything that got rid of the Tory is fair – FACT

Agree.

Anything opposed by the tories is to be supported.

My MP (ToryBoy aka Michael Gove) was wheeled in from god knows where to get a safe seat so he could be one of Dave’s cabinet chums. He knows nothing of the area, had probably never been here before and will probably be gone as soon as he falls from grace for whatever dodgy reason the tabloids uncover. How is that any different to mogrim’s PR situation?

from SW:

Having a vote is better than not having one. But what we vote for bears little resemblance to what we get.

UK general elections use the first past the post system. The candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of their share of the total votes cast.

So, at the last general election the Tories got just 36 percent of the vote—but ended up with a far higher percentage of seats in parliament.

This system, which allowed Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to win election landslides with just two fifths of the vote, is unfair.

Socialist Worker supports electoral reform if it helps break the dominance of the increasingly unrepresentative big parties, and opens up a space for the left.

The upcoming referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) voting system does not offer this opportunity.

AV allows people to vote for candidates in order of preference—if they want to. So they would put “1” by their first preference candidate, “2” by their second preference, and so on.

The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their preferences transferred.

This process goes on until one candidate receives more than

50 percent of the vote and is declared the winner.

Mainstream

The present system makes it very hard for minor parties to get elected. That why some right wingers want no change while some on the left think any change must be good.

But AV would not help minor parties win elections. AV strengthens mainstream parties because those who vote for smaller parties give their extra votes to the centre.

The Electoral Reform Society says that if the 2010 general election had used AV there would be a slight reduction in the number of Tory MPs, a slight increase for Labour and the Lib Dems, and no increase for non-mainstream candidates.

The Green Party’s Caroline Lucas could have lost in Brighton under AV and George Galloway could have lost in Tower Hamlets in 2005.

With AV, the coalition parties could recommend that their supporters give a second preference to the other coalition party.

The main likely effect of AV would be for the Lib Dems to grab second votes from the Tories and fend off total annihilation.

The proposal for AV doesn’t come from a commitment to better democracy.

It comes from a shoddy deal between the Tories and the Lib Dems as they stitched together the coalition government.

A genuinely proportional system would be very helpful to the left—and to the UK Independence Party and the Nazi British National Party.

But AV is not proportional representation (PR). It doesn’t deliver seats on the basis of the percentage of votes.

It doesn’t improve democracy, even within the limited terms of Britain’s parliamentary system.

One argument for a yes vote is that people could vote left of Labour without fear of letting the right in.

But AV is no magic formula for the left to win more seats. In the London election for mayor in 2008, where voters had a second preference, most people still saw the election as Labour versus Tory and voted accordingly.

Socialist Worker backs a no vote in the referendum on AV and supports PR. But we don’t consider voting systems to be the key question. Many European countries have more progressive voting systems than in Britain. Portugal has PR—but workers still face savage cuts.

Divisions over AV are blurred. Some 200 Labour MPs and peers support the No campaign, alongside the majority of Tory MPs.

The GMB union is against AV but the PCS union is for it. Labour leader Ed Miliband is campaigning for the Yes camp alongside the Lib Dems, claiming that AV would enable “progressive” parties to come together.

Both the yes and the no campaigns are unappetising, trading celebrities and spurious arguments.

The left should not get trapped in a debate about constitutional reform that serves the interests of the big parties.

The problem with today’s democracy is that it is extremely limited. To address that we need to go far beyond what type of voting system we want.

To make democracy truly relevant to the majority of working people, we need economic and social democracy as well as political democracy.

The capitalist class can live with political democracy—the election of parliaments and governments—because the decisive levers of power are outside parliament.

Voting on AV won’t change that but voting no, and rejecting what Nick Clegg called “a miserable little compromise”, can deepen the cracks in the coalition.

Socialist Worker supports electoral reform if it helps break the dominance of the increasingly unrepresentative big parties, and opens up a space for the left.

i.e. we want a system that works for us. Political party in biased, blinkered views shocker.

Anyone heard the ‘no’ campaign broadcast on the radio with the horse-racing commentary. (Lib dem horse comes third and still wins etc…)

I proper LOL’ed.

The way I see it is that we already have a hung parliament and a government formed from parties from opposite sides of the political spectrum, neither of whom got a parliamentary majority and are punting all sorts of things not mentioned in either parties election manifestoes less than 12 months ago.

1) the lib dems did talk about electoral reform/referendum well before the election, which is more than can be said for many other bits put forward since May.

2) what’s the chances of AV electing an even more mixed up government than the one we already have?

3) The notion that your local MP votes with the interests of his/her constituency is shakey to say the least. Yes, our (Cons) MP supports local individuals and writes letters in support of them if he sees fit, but in the Commons, 98% of MP’s from all parties vote with their party 99% of the time. Linky for the very few ‘mavericks’ in parliament.What are the chances of the wishes and needs of their constituents coinciding exactly with those of their party?

4) On the basis of there being so many safe seats under the present system and the unlikelihood of most of them ever changing, what’s the chances of more people being inspired to actually go out and vote because they think it will make a difference?

My MP (ToryBoy aka Michael Gove) was wheeled in from god knows where to get a safe seat so he could be one of Dave’s cabinet chums. He knows nothing of the area, had probably never been here before and will probably be gone as soon as he falls from grace for whatever dodgy reason the tabloids uncover. How is that any different to mogrim’s PR situation?

Because that’s one seat, not a whole country of them. Big difference!

There’s no point at all in discussing PR, as that’s not on the table.

We have a choice between AV and TPFP.

Under FPTP, if I want to vote for the Greens, my vote is wasted as only Labour or the Tories have a shout of winning where I live. If it’s definite that Labour or the Tories will win, I can vote Green as a symbolic vote. If it’s a but tighter, I need to think about how other people might vote; if it looks like the Tories might get in, I need to vote Labour instead to keep the m out.

As a result, the Labour and Tory parties don’t know what my real concerns are and it’s assumed that I supported the Labour policies 100%.

Under AV, I could give Green my 1 vote and Labour my 2 vote. Labour would still win, but the message that there were x% of Green votes available would get through.

My concern is that there are 4 countries in the world that currently use AV and IIRC they are all looking to reform it, some back to a FPTP system. It leads to too many hung parliaments and costs a fortune to implement (You will lose the overnight election results as they will more likely take a week or so).

I’m still undecided. If I vote no will that be taken as I don’t want reform in any shape as I do. But if I vote yes it’s unlikely we’ll get another chance to change it again in the near future.

It leads to too many hung parliaments and costs a fortune to implement (You will lose the overnight election results as they will more likely take a week or so).

FPTP can also lead to hung parliaments and long delays in results 🙂

Personally, I think hung parliaments can be a good thing. Can you imagine what the Tories would be doing if they had a majority?

, but the message that there were x% of Green votes available would get through.

d’you think?

I’m a bit more cynical than that
I wonder how much credence the current government give to the views of the 41% that didn’t vote for either Ant or Dec?

In two horse races – under AV – the second vote will nearly always go to the Libs, not because anyone actually wants them, purely out of hatred for the other party, so just more tactical voting really

The Electoral Reform Society says that if the 2010 general election had used AV there would be a slight reduction in the number of Tory MPs, a slight increase for Labour and the Lib Dems, and no increase for non-mainstream candidates.

Impossible to tell as people weren’t voting using AV.

Personally, I think hung parliaments can be a good thing. Can you imagine what the Tories would be doing if they had a majority?

Well the Libs are hardly holding them back are they ?

Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that this is anything other than a Tory govt.

Why did Nick Clegg cross the road?

Because he said he wouldn’t.

emma82 – Member
oh, I’m conservative though so perhaps I ought to vote no? Im confused again now

It’s not a party political issue, but I have to ask…why?

AV will give me the chance to not only vote for who I DO want to win but also for who I DON’T want to win by simply ranking them last or just not ranking them at all. I like that. This is why BNP don;t like it as it will give the 90% (made up) of constituents who think they are a bunch of racist thugs the opportunity to make sure they don’t even get a look n by not even ranking them at all- All while still voting for who they DO want by giving them a ‘1’.

I’ll be voting YES as in my view it’s giving me, the voter, more power.

Ideally the referendum would be an AV format vote with FPTP, AV and PR being the options allowing all those inc myself that want PR a chance to register their preference before voting AV. No matter what your intentions, a no vote to AV will be seen as a vote to keep FPTP. England is so ingrained in the 2 party system that PR is too alien atm.

Give it a few decades of AV and coalition politics and views will change one way or another. The key though is to get AV, however flawed, now which will then let the electorate vote their true intentions before a compromised tactical one.

It would be interesting to see the regional breakdown of votes cast in a 3 way FPTP/AV/PR referendum within the Union to see how the forms of PR already in use in regional government/assembly are perceived.

My MP (ToryBoy aka Michael Gove) was wheeled in from god knows where to get a safe seat so he could be one of Dave’s cabinet chums. He knows nothing of the area, had probably never been here before and will probably be gone as soon as he falls from grace for whatever dodgy reason the tabloids uncover. How is that any different to mogrim’s PR situation?

It is different. Mr Gove can only stand your seat. If everyone hates him so much in your town (not taking your own prejudices aside) then he won’t get elected, full stop.

In PR mandelson would just be at the top of NuNuLabours ‘list’ and you’d never get rid of him in any way shape or form.

And do you not think any Labour MPs are dropped into ‘safe’ seats?

d’you think?

I’ve seen the good showing of the Greens in the (PR) European given as a reason why the Tories really went for the green vote.