UK AV Referendum Poll

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yes, duh.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Bit far, but I see wheat it's saying:

Worthless demagogy.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Well, everything's gone through now. It was nice having a relatively civilised and relatively non-partisan procedure for drawing constituency boundaries and I think we're all eventually going to miss it, irrespective of party. Precedent set, era ended, regrettably.

How will the new redrawing system work ?

Please, don't tell me it will become the government's business...

[Antonio the Sixth]

What kind of guidelines ?

[Antonio the Sixth]

To be precise I didn't even knew there was another thread.

And what is a quota exactly in this case ?

[Antonio the Sixth]

I really don't understand the arguments of PR supporters against AV. FPP is the worst possible system in the world (excluding multi-seat winner-takes-all, but this would be just crazy) and whatever would replace it would be better.

[Antonio the Sixth]

It is not about what would advantage/disadvantage my political side, that's not the way I reason. I support AV over FPP because no MP should be elected if a majority of the voters haven't voted for him.

[Antonio the Sixth]

That's my point - you're not understanding isn't taking into account I find it far more reprehensible to be stuck in a system where the Left gets even less of its rightful percentage of parliament seats than that MPs can be elected with less than a majority. 

Underrepresentation is far greater with FPP than with AV, the link posted earlier shows it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Underrepresentation is far greater with FPP than with AV, the link posted earlier shows it.

 
The link posted is modelling a completely different political environment to now. Polls are suggesting a return to pre-SDP two-party politics. 

The people who now make up the deciders in the constituencies that aren't safe Labour or Tories are overwhelmingly rightists, and so they'll be able to swing every constituency Tory that isn't safe Labour, making representation for the left disproportionately weaker.

I'm not fond of making those assumptions about what the political scene could become and how it could affect the results.

And anyways, whether or not this would disadvantage Labour, I think it's fair not to be elected if you don't manage to get an absolute majority.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Let's put it that way. Say that the national results are as such :

Labour : 43%
Conservative : 35%
Miscellaneous right-wing : 22%

Which party is more legitimate to form a government ? Clearly the tories, because a majority (57%) of the electorate is closer to their views than to those of the Labour.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Anything that has to do with party lists is bad.....FPTP, AV or STV are all acceptable to me.

Are you naive enough to believe that parties have any less influence in the choice of candidates in uninominal systems ? Come on, you know that except in a few countries parties always choose the candidates whatever the voting system is.

[Antonio the Sixth]

In closed lists, even voters' ability to rebel against dreadfully bad candidate selection is massively impaired - you'd have to reject the entire list. Closed lists are fairly undemocratic. I'm not talking about "inattractive" candidates - belgian is quite right about those - but for example known corrupts being granted a comeback. It's happened before.

The obvious solution is open lists, of course.

Indeed, thus not ab inherent flaw of PR.

Actually, open-list PR is far more democratic that uninominal constituency voting, where voters aren't given the ability to turn for another candidate of the same party if they don't like the first one.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Choice of candidates, yes.....but the voters are still able to reject an individual candidate without rejecting the entire party's choices.

I know I don't vote against a party list because of a couple of people on it I might not like. I don't like the fact that I have to cast a ballot for an entire list.

1. Read my answer to Lewis and acknowledge that closed lists is only one form of PR. What you treat as a flaw of PR just isn't one.

2. The problem is that if everybody follow your logic (refusing your party's candidate because of his personality), nobody actually votes for the party that best fits his ideology (or, if so, he does incidentally). The reason why I like party lists is precisely because they de-personalize elections. The primary goal of parliamentary elections isn't to elect MPs, its to elect parties, or at least currents or opinions.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I don't necessarily oppose proportionality. As previously stated, I could very easily support PR-STV.

I was not refering to STV, but to open lists.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

But what does matter when you look at the results of a parliamentary elections ? The party tally. What will matter on the composition of the future government ? The party tally. With the notable exception of the USA, where personality matters a lot more, european MPs vote as their party wants. So, the personality of the candidate is just a way to distort the voters' choice from what it should be.

[Antonio the Sixth]

If this referendum fails, electoral reform is dead in UK for the next 50 years at least.

[Antonio the Sixth]

It has remained the same for 400 years... So I don't think it's an irrealistic extrapolation.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Fair enough, but still the voting system in Britain in its main principles is a particularly well-established tradition.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Just to know, how many spoilt votes you get in Australia due to this silly rule ? I wouldn't be surprised if they reached 5%.

[Antonio the Sixth]

He presumably means having to preference everybody, ie the not optional kind.

Yeah, indeed. I can't understand the point of this law except to disqualify votes.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Sigh. Bye bye to electoral reform...

[Antonio the Sixth]

I've yet to see a serious and non partisan argument in favor of the no.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Clegg brands NO as a "nasty, right wing clique." I'm sure he'd know a thing or two about right wing cliques.

Sadly, the clique is not only "right-wing".

[Antonio the Sixth]

Made all the more damning by the fact that Angus Reid were one of the last to show AV in the lead when other pollsters were signalling NO gaining the upper hand.

Interesting to see various figures come out in recent days making direct appeals to Labour voters - to vote for their partisan interest. I've watched in amazement as Clegg and his merry Orange Bookers have done their utmost to extinguish any good feeling from Labour voters - the very same voters their AV hinges upon if it's to pass. Of course when AV's future started looking bleak he dismissed it as being not all that important to him, but that's been roundly disproven as he and his colleagues battle in an unprecedented scale during this coalition for it (something that again has registered terribly to Labour voters - a battle for self-interest but not his voters or the welfare state).

Some might blame YestoAV, but I think Clegg's played a shocking hand since May last year and I think it's now simply a case of how much his miserable little compromise loses by.

Nick Clegg is an idiot, I think we can all agree there. That doesn't say anything about AV, though.

[Antonio the Sixth]

How does it work ? I'm curious.

[Antonio the Sixth]

You have one vote. Top two votegetters elected in every constituency.
I'm not sure, maybe it's D'Hondt and you can have a running mate and get both seats if you poll twice as much as the nearest opposition. Anyways the result is that parliament is always almost exactly half Conservative and half the Left Coalition (which really is a coalition, not a single party), with the occasional stray indy.

EDIT: Looks it up and yeah, that's right. Two candidate "lists", and D'Hondt. Oh, and they're open "lists", at least.

LOL, that's retarded indeed.