Annoyed by politics

[andrewducker]

I keep seeing articles talking about alliances between the Lib Dems and Conservatives, either for the next election, or for the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election that's happening a week today. In the latter case, many of the Conservatives basically seem to be saying "We don't have a chance of winning, so you Tory voters should vote LibDem instead, so that Labour don't win."

Not only do I disagree over there being alliances over elections (because it denies people a free choice), but I object to the fact that the current system encourages them. If we had AV then Conservative voters could vote the way they want to (Conservative) and then vote Lib-Dem as a second choice _if that's what they want_. Similarly, Lib-Dem voters could vote Lib-Dem first, and then either Conservative or Labour depending on which they preferred as a second-choice, etc., etc.

That way the parties could concentrate on standing for themselves, and not what other parties are doing, and electoral bargaining could at least wait until _after_ the votes were in.

As it is, the election results won't actually tell us what the honest choices of the electorate are. People will be voting tactically, to keep out the people they oppose, based on guesswork over who has the most chance of winning. It's a horribly broken system.

(Not that I think that AV is the bees knees, but it's decidedly better than FPTP. I think my ideal system would probably be AV with an AMS top-up, but that's a completely different debate.)

Comments

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I don't like that requirement. For smaller parties, like the Greens, that could fatally weaken them. It would also lead to a lot of 'independent' candidates who were actually from extremist groups (be they BNP or SWP) without that information being on the ballot paper. The Greens, say, are only likely to get a maximum one MP in a four-member constituency, so whether they stood two candidates or five the choice would still be in effect.

[drplokta]

I'd be happy with an alternative rule that a party can only have at most (n-1) candidates elected, where n is the number that they put up, so that the Greens can run only two if they're confident they can't have two winners.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I'd be less *un*happy with that, but it does rather require everyone to either have an accurate idea of how they're likely to do (which is a bias towards large parties who can afford private polling) or risk going against the electorate's wishes (if they really do want two Green MPs but the Greens thought they'd be lucky to get one).