My general feeling on the by election result

[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.

Comments

[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.

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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.

[andrewducker]

Approval Voting seems to have some unfortunate strategic voting options.

But I agree that neither is good for whole chambers. For that AMS (like Scotland and New Zealand) or STV (like Scottish councils) work well. As do various methods used across Europe. Proportionality is clearly important.

Open List voting seems to work quite well in dealing with the issues with party lists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_list