Political Question

[andrewducker]

At the moment the House of Lords are debating the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill.

I've heard numerous claims that this bill is incredibly unfair, and blatant gerrymandering by the Conservative Party.

Looking at the details, I'm feeling baffled. I can see a claim that the exemption for the three Scottish constituencies (Two Liberal Democrat, on Scottish National Party) are biased in their favour. But I can't see how a system whereby people are grouped together in what's going to be a massively arbitrary manner (each area must be within 5% of the national average, and are set up by independent bodies - the Boundary Commissions).

I don't really have a stake in this one - I'd just like someone to explain how this system would give an advantage to any one party. I can see that it could _remove_ advantage from a party if the old system with much less equal constituency sizes gave that party an advantage, but I'm totally failing to see how it's anything like gerrymandering.

Am I missing something obvious?

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

As I've observed before, the issue with moving from AV to AMS is that you go from AV back to FPTP to do it, making everyone look a little bit silly.

[andrewducker]

You don't have to. You could use AV for local constituents and then top-up.

[drplokta]

But do you base the top-ups on people's first preference votes, or on the votes they ended up with after their preferences were redistributed?

[andrewducker]

In Scotland, neither. We get two votes. But that's because we have FPTP +Top-up, and the FPTP bit is recognised to have a lot of tactical voting so you need a second vote to be used to say what you _really_ think.

With AV you'd get a lot less tactical voting, so I think you'd be safe going with the original vote being the one that got used for top-up.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Hence the invention of AV+, which looks shiny but for the fact it's (a) untested and (b) not fully proportional (although the latter seems to me to be something that could be easily fixed).

(Personally I'd go for the top ups to proportionality being based on the first votes, whether or not those votes were counted in run-off.)