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

[matgb]

Heh. How complicated do you want it?

Normally, you get someone to do the maths. I've actually done this for committee elections while half drunk, it's a lot easier to do than it is to explain.

Say there are 5 seats, and 599,000 votes. To win, you need 100,000 votes, as if 5 candidates get 100,000 then no one else can get more than 99,000.

Say it's Sheffield at the last GE, when everyone agreed with Nick.

So Nick Clegg gets 250,000 first preferences. Paul Scriven, 2nd LD candidate, gets maybe 10 first preferences and 150,000 of Nick's voters give him their 2nd preference.

You eliminate anyone that's past quota first. So Nick's excess quota votes are shared out.

Now, to ensure it's fair, rather than randomly picking, or using the top of the pile, all votes are redistributed, but are now worth less each.

In this case, Nick got 250K but needed 100K. So all of his 250K votes are redistributed, but each is now worth 150/250 (3/5ths, obviously) of a vote.

So Paul gets 3/5ths of 150,000 added to his score, and the rest go off to wherever they were going to, likely spread around all the other parties.

Essentially, most modern STV systems never remove a ballot from the contention, but each individual ballot is worth less and less as counting goes on.

There's software to do it for you (Colin Rosenstiel wrote one, he's the guy that does all the Lib Dem internal counts), or you can actually do it manually by writing the current value of each ballot on the paper sheet, which is a bit of a PITA but doable.

Very very easy to actually do in practice as long as you can pass remedial maths. Very difficult to explain in words.