A couple of months ago, there was an article in City AM about the upcoming - and since cancelled - London Mayoral elections, which reminded me that the election uses a Supplementary Vote system (fairly similar to Alternative Vote).
From Wiki:
The election used a supplementary vote system, in which voters express a first and a second preference of candidates.
* If a candidate receives over 50% of the first preference vote the candidate wins.
* If no candidate receives an overall majority, i.e., over 50% of first preference votes, the top two candidates proceed to a second round and all other candidates are eliminated.
* The first preference votes for the remaining two candidates stand in the final count.
* Voters' ballots whose first and second preference candidates are eliminated are discarded.
* Voters whose first preference candidates have been eliminated and whose second preference candidate is in the top two have their second preference votes added to the count.
* This means that the winning candidate has the support of a majority of voters who expressed a preference among the top two.
As it happens, it made no difference to the final outcome, Khan won more votes than Goldsmith in the first round and his winning margin was higher in the second round. In the end, only ten per cent of all votes cast were re-allocated.
Interestingly, only about 15% of voters did not bother giving a second preference vote, meaning that 85% did - but in the 2011 Alternative Vote Referendum (which proposed a very similar system), only 32% voted in favour of it. People really are strange - they are stupid enough to vote against something which in practice, they actually quite like.
It also completely puts paid to the project fear scare story that the AV system would lead to candidates from extremist parties being elected.
A) So what if it does, it's a democracy. And how entertaining would it be if we had a couple of dozen Green/Socialist Workers' party MPs and a couple of dozen UKIP/Brexit Party/BNP MPs on the Opposition benches going at each other hammer and tongs?
B) Project Fear also claimed that AV would lead to more coalitions, which sort of cancels out the first claim, as coalitions tend to be more moderate.
C) As we see in practice, it makes very little difference. The winning candidate was always going to be from one of the Big Two parties.
IMHO, AV is still a good system. It doesn't change the outcomes of elections very much, if at all - what it does change is what sort of policies the winning candidates actually implement afterwards. The only way to 'send them a message' as to what you actually want is to vote for a smaller party with a clear manifesto or a single-issue party. The AV system clearly encourages people to give their first vote to a smaller party and their second vote to one of the Big Two as a fall back.
Local Council Efficiency
2 hours ago
18 comments:
Why oh why did they say AV and not just second preference? would eliminate the endless hyperbolic stuff about some voters potentially having their vote counted 6 or 7 times, etc.
PR is a much better system, with local issues handled by local governments to address the concern about PR leading to no named MP to handle a constituency. I've never had a named MP anyway as I've never voted for a candidate that won.
Lets get this straight once and for all, AV . SP is not a way of electing a different outcome. It is a way, if used as Mark suggests, of conducting an opinion poll on top of an ballot. The smaller party is eliminated with the AV, SP system, and , the party that people would compromise on, goes out in he first round and can not be elected.
Quote from link "the top two candidates proceed to a second round and all other candidates are eliminated."
And "Voters' ballots whose first and second preference candidates are eliminated are discarded."
M "hy oh why did they say AV and not just second preference"
Because the government decided the wording, and chose the most obscure one.
Din " It is a way, if used as Mark suggests, of conducting an opinion poll on top of an ballot."
Exactly.
People like their constituency MPs, and don't really like change.
So keep FPTP. Weight each MPs vote in the HoC in proportion to the national vote. Parties without a seat but gain an arbitrary % of the nation vote get one MP, with their vote weighted accordingly.
Simple. Can be put in place tomorrow with no fuss.
"PR is a much better system,"
but the Multi-Member Constituencies system is better still. It's a system already in use and it's a system that has been used for Westminster elections previously, so it's not new and scary, also it can still use the traditional, difficult to rig paper ballot and only needs a single count.
B, it wouldn't allow pairing off, so it's not going to happen.
Benj, that's a bit obscure and has its own problems as B points out.
B, having considered the matter back in 2011, I also concluded that MMC's had most of the advantages of other systems and the fewest disadvantages.
It has a different effect though.
SP/AV = FPTP plus opinion poll, little change to identity of those elected.
MMC = the more members within an MMC there are, the more it approaches PR.
With two members, barely any change to outcome. No 'opinion poll' element.
With five or more seats, there is a realistic chance that a smaller party will scrape at least one seat. For example, with 5 members, a party with a single candidate only needs 16.66% of the total vote and their candidate gets a seat. It's a slow burn.
"Interestingly, only about 15% of voters did not bother giving a second preference vote, meaning that 85% did - but in the 2011 Alternative Vote Referendum (which proposed a very similar system), only 32% voted in favour of it. People really are strange - they are stupid enough to vote against something which in practice, they actually quite like."
That doesn't make sense. I was "stupid enough" to vote against proportional representation when it was proposed for parliamentary elections. If PR had won the vote i would still have voted in subsequent general elections.
F, what I mean is, only 15% didn't use the second vote. If 67% voted against, then why don't they turn up their noses at their second vote? You're under no compulsion to use it.
If you are true to your principles, you would only use the first vote.
It's like
"would you like a beer?"
"No thanks"
"I've got a spare one going begging"
"Oh go on, I'll have it then"
if that person really didn't want a beer, he would have turned it down.
@ MW obscure, as in not know about, sure. But as its the simplest route to PR, then it should be known to everyone.
All voting systems have problems and are compromised. With Weighted FPTP, its "super MPs". But that's only the opposite of what we've got at the moment i.e "super parties". As for pairing off, no biggie. MPs have already discussed electronic voting. Or a MP can get another of a like mind, to cast their vote in proxy.
I prefer AV to our system, however I would go for the same system as Switzerland as the Swiss economy seems to have done better than ours in the last few years.
FPTP seems to produce extremists in parliament, I don't want to get into arguments but there are some who have extreme views.
Benj, your suggestion does little to help minority parties or have an 'opinion poll' element.
LF, the Swiss have a jumble of different systems, which tend towards PR. Do you think that FPTP produces extremists? That was the argument levelled (wrongly) against AV/SP, but I don't think it applies to FPTP, does it?
I don't know if FPTP does produce extremists but we have had extremists elected under FPTP. Apartheid partly came in due to FPTP
"Together, the HNP and the Afrikaner Party won 79 seats in the House of Assembly against a combined total of 74 won by the UP and the Labour Party. By a quirk of the First Past the Post system the NP had won more seats, even though the UP had received over eleven percent more votes. The Nationalist coalition subsequently formed a new government and ushered in the era of formal, legally binding apartheid. In 1951, the HNP and the Afrikaner Party merged, returning to the name National Party (NP)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_South_African_general_election
@MW It does, if as I said, a party that get an arbitrary % of the national vote(but doesn't win a seat) get a one MP with their vote weighted accordingly.
Could be 1%-5%. Which is reasonable, as anything below 1% would get a bit silly. But that's true of every voting system.
@Mark W
It's more like:
"Do you want lager or proper beer?"
"I'll have a proper beer please"
"The landlord says he's run out of proper beer"
"OK, I'll have some Eurofizz instead"
F, no, wrong analogy.
"Would you like one vote or two?"
"One please"
"You get two anyway"
"OK, I'll use both"
The beer in my example is the second vote that people said they didn't want but then used anyway.
Here in Sweden we have a perfectly representative PR system and are still stuck with the same useless government that was voted in in 2014 and decisively out again in 2018. Then we had a referendum that was ignored. It was against the Gothenburg congestion charge, rejected by a decent majority; in reality it was a vote against the useless and hugely expensive Västlänk - an infrastructure vanity project. The congestion charge continued, as did Västlänk construction. Then 190,000 migrants arrived in the autumn of 2015 and the money from the congestion charge was taken to help pay for the costs of these indigents. So the local authorities are now having to sting people for the infrastructure project that nobody wants apart from some politicians and bureaucrats.
Might as well stick with FPTP. At least you have a representative you can pester directly.
Phys, I have never recommended pure PR like in Israel.
I like AV or MMC for the reasons stated above. With AV there is still one elected MP for each area. You can still have constituency MPs with MMC. You merge (say) five existing constituencies into one MMC, five people get elected and each chooses which sub-constituency to represent (where they live, or where they got the most votes, or whatever).
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