andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2011-01-06 11:26 am
andrewducker) wrote2011-01-06 11:26 am
Annoyed by politics
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.)
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.)
no subject
That was my instant reaction too. One reason is the practicalities of counting. Counting an STV election manually (or AV, or others of that ilk) is do-able but requires trained counters. Counting a large Condorcet election manually is labour-intensive to say the least.
SFAIK, the only practical way to count a large Condorcet election is electronically. If the votes are born digital, this is entirely practical, but vulnerable to hard-to-detect tampering - though if you're using electronic voting systems, you have to trust the people running it anyway, so this is not necessarily a show-stopper.
There are widely-attested issues with use of electronic voting machines in full-scale Political elections. There exist some workarounds for verifiability and paper trails and so on - but they rely on the fact that it's relatively straightforward to re-count a disputed precinct. With Condorcet, it's much more labour intensive. Not impossible, but it's adding serious complication to something that's already close to what's wearable practically.