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

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

In the STV elections I've counted, the order of counting votes is entirely irrelevant, and you count up *all* the votes for each round each time. You can't complete the first round until you have all the votes in. (Obviously, you can be pretty confident of how it's going to go once you have 95% of the votes!)

First you count up all the votes (for security checking).

Then you count first preferences, discarding any invalid. Total of valid first preferences gives you N, you calculate the quota, and declare elected anyone over the quota (or eliminate the lowest if nobody made the quota).

When someone's declared elected, you distribute their surplus. You take the whole pile of their first preference votes, and redistribute them to their next-available preference candidates. You don't just add those totals to the other candidates though - you multiply those totals by the surplus divided by the number of votes.

So, say the quota is 1000 votes, and Candidate A gets 1500 first preferences. Their surplus is 500. All 1500 papers are redistributed to next available preferences - say 500 go to B, and 1000 to C. The transfer value (the value of a redistributed vote) is 500/1500, or 1/3. So B's score goes up by 500/3, and C's by 1000/3.

So if you voted for candidate A, it's as if 2/3 of your vote gets counted for them, and 1/3 is distributed to your next preference.

[andrewducker]

Thank you. That makes perfect sense. Takes a little longer, but gives you a better result.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. If you're really interested, the Electoral Reform Society procedures for the count itself under STV are here:
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/votingsystems/stvrules.htm

That's pretty much how I've done it in practice. For big elections, there's a load of counters sitting in a big hall at tables facing the front, and the Returning Officer sits at the front like teacher. A big groan goes up late on in the process when they announce you have to transfer a surplus from a candidate with a huge pile of votes but only a small surplus - you know that transferring their votes isn't going to get anyone else elected, and you'll have to transfer someone else before the count is done.

Happily the number of votes to re-count tends to tail off through the process - lots of people only rank two or three candidates. But towards the end of a big count, you're stuck with the hard core who have listed every single bloody candidate. (Which is what I do if I vote in such elections.)