andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Reminder that any voting system where you can win a single seat without 50% of people thinking you're better than the alternatives is not fit for purpose.

Date: 2025-05-02 06:01 pm (UTC)
bens_dad: (Default)
From: [personal profile] bens_dad
Why this focus on ranking preferences ?

To my mind the important point is which candidate is acceptable to the most voters, so why not go with Approval Voting, where each voter says "Yes" or "No" to each candidate*. The candidate with the most "Yes"es wins.

A bit harder to count and recount (and demonstrate that you are doing that fairly), since you cannot sort ballots into a pile for each candidate.

* Make the "No" implied by the absence of "Yes" to avoid blanks.

---

Importantly, neither instant run-off not approval voting work well when you are considering how parties do across a whole elected chamber. Simply consider a chamber where voters in each seat have the same spread of views. Here the same, strongest, party will win every seat, regardless of whether the second party got 0% or 49% of the vote.
Giving each constituency a few seats doesn't help, since the top party will still get all of the seats under both systems.

Our election system is based on people voting for a representative (MP , councillor etc.) and cannot be expected to produce a chamber which accurately reflects the wishes of the electorate as a whole.

I struggled at European elections; our constituencies were so big and had multiple MEPs, so I felt no connection between an MEP and my constituency.

That leaves me thinking that instant run-off versus approval voting versus FPTP missed the important problem, but I have no liking for party lists - that puts real control of who gets a seat into the hands of the parties.

If I thought there was any way it could be implemented, I would ban political parties, but that is not practical, realistic or helpful.

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