Tue, 25 Jan 2011
Voting Reform - Correcting the confusion
With the announcement of the formation of the current coalition government I was overjoyed to see that voting reform was one of the key points over which the coalition agreement was formed. I have since got involved with the Yes to fairer votes campaign. Helping out with the campaign in the Canterbury area.
It is whilst working with the campaign that I have come across what has to be one of the most annoying responses when talking about voting reform.
I don't want AV; I want PR
When I get this response, I generally enquire as to what they mean; the answers I get are varied, and almost always entirely wrong.
Many people appear to believe that Proportional Representation (PR) is, itself, a voting system. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of either what a voting system or PR is. PR is not a voting system, it is a goal, a concept. The aim of Proportional Representation is to elect your government with a voting system that apportions representation in proportion to the share of the vote attained. To achieve this there are any number of interesting and esoteric voting systems most well known of which are Alternative Vote (aka instant run off), Single Transferable Vote and the Party List system, all of which are able to provide Proportional Representation to a lesser or greater degree, but they are themselves not PR. PR is the goal, STV, Party List, or AV is the system used to attain that goal.
In this referendum we will not be presented with a choice between STV, Party list, AV, or First Past the Post (FPTP). What we will be presented with is a choice of AV or FPTP. That is the choice.
So why should we want AV? The simple answer is because it is better than FPTP, but more importantly, because it is the stepping stone. We are presented with a once in a generation chance for real wholesale electoral reform in the UK, something that the Electoral Reform Society has been campaigning for in one guise or another since 1884[1]. If we say no to fairer votes now because we would rather have STV or Party List, we are unlikely to get a chance like this for another 20 years. If we accept that AV is better than what we have, and a step in the right direction, it provides us a gateway for future improvements into a truly proportional system like STV or Party list.
posted at: 18:33 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 1 comments
Posted by Dmitrijs Ledkovs at Mon Mar 14 23:13:22 2011
I held a similar opinion until I did the count. https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?hl=en_GB&hl=en_GB&key=0AhdwgX-P_xpMdGhoN0FHcUk5UlNCZm1xVlRsOG80d0E&single=true&gid=0&output=html
If you treat everyone's votes equaly - conservatives and labor would have significantly less seats and libdem significantly more. Not enough to have a majority, so still a hung parliament.
UK Independent party would go from 0 to wooping 20 seats and national party from 0 to 12 seats. Thanks, but I'd rather have the current results than independent & national party in the parliament.
If everyone has the same alignment as the party they voted for in 2010, the referendum for AV would fail.
I haven't analysed more complex voting strategies. That would be hard since I don't have the per-voter access and no way to gather additional data for some voting strategies.