'Is AV really so complex? Or is it just confusion marketing?' blog discussion

dggar

jamesd wrote: »

I have. It's why I'll be voting no and think that anyone who wants a reasonable chance of choosing the national government with their votes should do the same.

The proposed change will let a system that may be good for a local government election bubble up to make coalition governments more likely at a national level. I'm not going to vote in favour of more coalition governments made up from backroom deals by political parties.

My objectives in the last election were, in priority order:

1. Prevent party A from achieving political power, because of its policies.
2. Remove party B from power.

That worked perfectly at a local level - the MP of party B was removed and from party A was not elected - and was circumvented by a backroom deal between political parties to produce a coalition government at a national level that put party A into power anyway.

I'm not going to vote for a repeat performance that sees things like tuition fees and reductions in pensioner income introduced without the electorate actually choosing based on a manifesto, not a backroom deal, who gets in. If that takes a second election, where the voters can see the results of the first and adjust their votes accordingly, that's fine compared to a backroom deal.

FPTP produced the situation that you are complaining about.
For you to have the situation that you want there would need to be a change in the law which forbids political parties from forming coalitions or pacts without the proposition being put to the electorate again.

irnbru_2

NoSatisfaction wrote: »

Unlikely I know, so I suppose the question is what are the contingencies?

FPTP has used this and this to deal with such contingencies.

tonyhamm

tomwakefield wrote: »

Do you have a source for this? (preferably demonstrating how that figure is arrived at)

3-candidate IRV elections Probabilistic model type-I failure prob type-II failure prob monotonicity failure prob Random-elections = Impartial culture (12.157±0.001)% (2.3119±0.0005)% (14.469±0.002)% Dirichlet [uniform in 5-simplex] 13/288=4.513888...% (0.90935±0.0001)% (5.4232±0.0001)% 1D "Political spectrum" 5/72=6.9444...% (2.7778±0.0003)%* or 0 (9.7222±0.0003)% or 5/72

http://rangevoting.org/Monotone.html

zagfles

tonyhamm wrote: »

In the real world this affects upto 1 in 7 elections under AV.
Its political science. It doesn't have to be every preference, for your party to lose by gaining extra support or win from losing support

For example if the Labour 2nd prefs were 70% LibDem, which according to the British Electoral Survey & YouGov July 2010 poll they pretty much are, then REAL LIFE seats like Northhampton North would still give pretty much the same perverse outcomes under AV.
If we say 2nd preferences would likely be as follows for the parties;
Tory -> LibDem
LibDem -> Tory
Lab -> LibDem
Northhampton North would give such a perverse outcome under AV (2010 GE) (picked at random - there are plenty of seats like this).
TORY 34.1
LAB 29.3
LIB 27.9
If the TORY spent more on his campaign and got more votes, got more support from LAB voters on some theme like immigration, but short of a majority, upto 15% more support, he would lose to the LibDems. If he asked LAB voters not to vote for him, he would win. CRAZY!!! CRAZY!!! CRAZY!!!
AND AS COMPLEX AS HELL!

Yes, that's a better example, I mentioned something similar earlier in the thread. Basically under AV, if your party is in the lead then you want the party furthest politically from yours to finish second, in that way their second preferences are never counted.

In the above example, the Tory taking votes off Labour really could cost him the seat. So the Tory would need to modify his campaign to appeal to LD voters, not Labour voters.

This will true to some extent over the whole country, taking votes off the LDs will be more valuable to both the Tories and Labour than taking votes off each other.

If AV does happen, the next election will be interesting as the Tories will need to campaign most heavily against their coalition partners, rather than Labour!

clouty

If the No campaign win this referendum, we will not have another chance to change our unfair voting system, perhaps for decades, for it is in the interests of those in power at the moment to keep things as they are. AV as we are voting for this time is not perfect, but should the Yes campaign win there is every chance that we will be able to move on to a better system, such as AV+, in time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_Vote_Plus_(AV%2B)

Why do the No campaign refuse to say where their funding is coming from? The Yes campaign has published its funding sources.

With a choice of more than two, there is no way that FPTP is fair to the majority. These days we can have as many as ten candidates to choose between. AV would mean an end to tactical voting - surely that is a good thing?

Australia is not the only other country to use AV, and Australia has had less coalition governments than the UK in recent times.

It's really hard to get stats on which countries use what voting system. This page seems to be the best. Analysing it, 60 countries use FPTP, a lot of them rather unsavoury (the Congo and Zambia, for instance), out of a total of 242 countries (this figure is +/- 5%, those lines are hard to count). The others use some other form, including AV, FPTP+runoff, PR, etc. So to say the majority of countries use first past the post is just untrue. Nationmaster is a reliable database.

GooeyBlob

irnbru wrote: »

Under AV everyone has the opportunity to rank candidates in order of their preference.

And some get to vote for more than one. Why shouldn't those who voted for the most popular candidate get the same say as those who are opposed to the most popular? It's as if those who voted for the most popular candidate are put to one side while everybody else is gathered together and allowed to decide upon another candidate to stop the most popular one.

AV is unfair and unbalanced because of the order in which the votes are counted. If you are going down that road it would be fairer and simpler just to aggregate ALL the votes in a single round and award the seat to the candidate with the lowest score. The proposed system is a great deal less fair than the system we already have.

dggar

GooeyBlob wrote: »

.....

AV is unfair and unbalanced because of the order in which the votes are counted. If you are going down that road it would be fairer and simpler just to aggregate ALL the votes in a single round and award the seat to the candidate with the lowest score. The proposed system is a great deal less fair than the system we already have.

So if there are 4 candidates and I rank them
A=1
B=2
C=3
D=4


all of the numers for A, B , C and D are added.

What happens if I think C and D are so odious that I either don't put a mark there or mark them
C=0
D=0.

GooeyBlob

dggar wrote: »

So if there are 4 candidates and I rank them
A=1
B=2
C=3
D=4


all of the numers for A, B , C and D are added.

What happens if I think C and D are so odious that I either don't put a mark there or mark them
C=0
D=0.

They'd be scored 4, obviously. Far simpler and fairer than the AV system that is currently being proposed.

Onyourcase

clouty wrote: »

If the No campaign win this referendum, we will not have another chance to change our unfair voting system, perhaps for decades...

Typo!

Should read "If the Yes campaign win this referendum, we will not have another chance to change the unfair AV voting system, perhaps for decades...[/

kermitfrog

What's the difference?