The new British government has promised to hold a referendum on whether Great Britain should use the “alternative vote” method for House of Commons elections. That is another term for one version of Instant Runoff Voting. This poll shows that the idea is leading 59% to 32%, with the other 9% undecided. Thanks to Robb Richie for the link.
Yes Rob – thanks for the link. But most of the comments leave one asking why there were no more choices than just FPTP and AV? Several of the comments indicate a mistrust of AV based on cost, the need to introduce more electronic voting to do AV (and the problems with STV in the 2007 Scottish election), etc.
This is something that should be studied carefully before they jump in and make a so-called “reform” with AV. We had such a clamor for reform in the US after the 2000 Florida “hanging-chads” and we got paperless DRE touchscreens and electronic poll books to contend with.
The big problem with the UK elections was that not everyone got to vote. If the UK can’t handle the issue of registering voters to cast a single vote, how would they possibly handle registering the same voters and then counting the ranked votes? No – start at the beginning and make small changes. Maybe change the sizes of the single member districts so that you have the same number of districts but that represent the same number of people in each district. Then you redistrict by census every ten years. It’s how we do it in the USA.
Chris Telesca’s fear-mongering about AV-IRV and STV-choice voting doesn’t work in the context of the United Kingdom because these systems are used frequently there and repeatedly recommneded by formal study commissions — as examples of use, IRV is used for many party leader elections (new Labor leader will be elected that way), and choice voting is used in Northern Ireland and is having expanded use in Scotland now (for health board elections).
With ongoing distortions in representation from three major parties in a system built for two, the debate has been focused on three variations of instant runoff voting – the majoritarian form in one-seat districts (“alternative vote”), a semi-proportional variation with “top up seats” (“alternative vote plus”) and the more fully proportional version of choice voting.
“The big problem with the UK elections was that not everyone got to vote.”
No, that’s not the big problem. It’s obviously bad that not everyone got to vote, but the big problem is that FPTP leads to minority rule, throws away an awful lot of votes, and encourages voters to reward poor governance by supporting the “lesser evil” party.
In 1997, Labour won 63% of the seats in the House of Commons with 43% of the vote, and in 2005, 55% of the seats with 35% of the vote. The Lib Dems got 23% of the vote in 2010 but less than 10% of the seats. Labour was trying to scare voters into supporting them rather than the Lib Dem, Plaid Cymru, Scottish Nationalist Party, or Green candidates that they preferred
AV would have greatly reduced the spoiler effect in the 2010 election and probably resulted in Labour and Lib Dems having enough seats to form a majority. While AV is not as good as PR, it’s certainly an improvement over FPTP.
Lets get real AV is not PR. Look at this years South Australia State election Labor won the election even though they got fewer votes than the Liberals thanks to the second preference votes from the Greens. If its good enought for Ulster and Scotland its good enough for the rest of the Kingdom. Lets have STV now!
IRV = THE method to elect Stalin/Hitler TYRANT extremists into single offices when the middle is divided.
34 H-M-S
33 S-M-H
16 M-H-S
16 M-S-H
99
IRV fanatics are as math CRAZY as the old flat earth fanatics.
IRV IGNORES most of the data in a place votes table — which means ZERO to fanatics.
—1—2—-3
H 34–16–49
S 33–16–50
M 32–67–0
Sorry – this is another age of FANATICS — as in the 1930s.
NO reasoning is possible with FANATICS.
P.R. and nonpartisan A.V.
Pay attention to your acronyms, folks!
(It’ll help you notice these problems if you read other people’s comments before writing your own.)
Some of you are using “AV” to mean “Alternative Vote”, better-known in the U.S. as “instant runoff voting” (and sometimes also called “ranked choice voting”), while some of you are using “AV” to mean “Approval Voting”, which is a very different (and in my not-so-humble, often-stated, and well-supported opinion, much better) system.
A.V. [USA] = AppV = Approval Voting
A.V. [UK] = AltV = Alternative Voting
This is mainly a U.S.A. list.
#7 Oops, sorry about that! I should know better, as I’m aware that AV also stands for approval voting.
Instant Run-off is fine. Its quite interesting to see that Demo Rep is having ago at our system not producing a majority party when all the alternatives he suggests will effectively make it impossible without squeezing smaller parties to lose seats making them worse off for the number of votes they get; something he keeps whining about is the problem we have with FPTP.