Alternative Voting measure fails in UK referendum

Very disappointed with this. AV isn't a perfect system, but it's much better than what we've got at the moment. There are too many places in the country where a vote for a minor party is a wasted vote, which isn't something that ought to happen in any democracy. Looks like we'll be stuck with effectively a two party system for the next 50 years.

Let's just go back to obeying the throne.

I think it would have been better to have the voting for AV on a separate day apart from the council voting.

It might be seen as more of an important issue, rather than being sidelined and maybe there would be a higher turnout.

By the powers invested in me by tabloid-reading imbeciles, I pronounce you guilty of paedophilia!

According to some of the BBC coverage, some people they talked to felt that they didn't really have enough time to go over the different arguments, and so on.

Which mostly boils down to voter apathy on the matter, I think. The information was there, they just didn't look it up.

It would have been good if the Yes campaign kinda pushed a bit harder on getting the idea known, and the reasons why. However like a lot of policies from the coalition it's turned out pretty shit. :/

By the powers invested in me by tabloid-reading imbeciles, I pronounce you guilty of paedophilia!

It was a Lib Dem idea that backfired horribly - they thought they'd be riding the crest of a wave, and that people would gladly vote for AV along with the Lib Dem candidate in the council elections. Instead the reverse happened, and there are suspicions that at least some of the no votes were a "Fuck you" to the Lib Dems rather than an actual comment on the issue or support for FPTP.

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

The Lib Dems former supporters seem to have been incredibly obnoxious about the whole thing. If they've thrown away a chance to push their partys flagship issue over an issue with the party leadership, they can cry me a river.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

I'm thinking that it was most of the votes (or standard conservatism *

) for "No" were down to that. It was for this reason that the leaflets that came in through my door for "NO 2 AV" all had Clegg's face on them.

Most Lib Dem supporters want a REAL voting system - Proportional Representation. Clegg himself admitted that AV is little better than FPTP, and I know many people who voted No today simply because they want PR or nothing. I disagree with that stance, but understand the sentiment.

The Lib Dems have no trustworthiness, and it's hardly pathetic of us to no longer trust a party that sells itself down the river for scraps from Cameron's table.

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

Are the Lib Dems the equivalent of Canada's Liberals? If so, it'd be kinda funny in a weird way to see your parliament going the same way as ours just two days later...

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Yeah, the "not good enough" argument really doesn't fly with me. Progress is progress, and if you are offered a better system than the present one, you take it, and hope for further progress in the future. You don't turn up your nose at reforms if they're even slightly effective.

This was just what the conservatives wanted. Offer a dummied down version of PR, and watch people turn their noses up at it. Problem solved, now no change has to be made at all!

^I don't know about that, but one thing the Liberals are notorious for is infighting.

edited 6th May '11 6:25:30 PM by GameChainsaw

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

"Liberal" has a very different meaning in the UK and other european countries. Liberals in Canada are more like Labour here.

Their argument was that a Yes vote would be met with "Well we changed it for you once, now there's no need to ever ask you to change it again" reply. Like I say, I disagree. Fridge Logic will be the Tory reply to any result of this, and that reply would indeed be what they'd say to a Yes vote, but deciding how to vote this time based on the possibility of PR is stupid. AV is better than FPTP - fact. PR will not happen in Britain within our lifetimes...not quite a fact, but close enough.

As I posted on Facebook earlier, I recommend people who think the No vote will be seen as anything other than an endorsement of FPTP need psychological help.

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

I'm not seeing why anyone would think refusing AV would be seen as anything besides "FTFP is awesome!" And it's certainly in the Conservative *

interest to market it as that.

I am… Very disappointed in British voters, this could've possibly been enough to raise awareness of IRV around the world, possibly enough for American states with referendum processes to start adopting it.

Also, the first time I heard of (moles from the No campaign promoting, IMHO) the “PR is better, so passing IRV would be bad, even though IRV would increase the chance of PR happening” line of unreasoning I couldn't believe my ears. It reminded me of the masses of Hilary/Obama supporters in the last US Democratic primary election responding to an opinion poll with “Well! If [other candidate] wins the primary, I'm voting REPUBLICAN, so NYAH!”. Fortunately, they weren't actually insane enough to follow through when Obama won the primaries.

Combined with the recent Canadian elections, I'm wondering if the whole commonwealth's going down the tubes or something.

Because they're parliamentary rather than presidential. Instead of voting directly for the president, they vote for legislators who then vote for a prime minister. This means national elections are less prone to vote waste, but since legislators are elected about like in the USA, local elections are still prone to all the vote waste and gerrymandering we Americans are familiar with.

Eric,

Correct. We don't vote for a Prime Minister, or even a party, we vote for a representative of a party, as chosen by the party themselves from among candidates. Those representatives will generally share the party's political attitudes, and act in such a way that benefits their party, but they will focus primarily on their constituents, and if this means calling their colleagues on issues they strongly disagree on, it may have to happen.

The party leaders are voted for among those representatives (M Ps) and members of the public who have membership of the party. The leaders are elected to their constituency just like any other MP, and theoretically could lose their job automatically by not being voted into their seat. Obviously, they tend to get seats in areas in which the public heavily supports their party, meaning being voted out isn't likely.

However, less senior officials do occasionally lose their jobs this way - the depute leader of Plaid Cymru (essentially a nationalist Welsh party, their version of the SNP) was voted out last night. These things force administrative shifts within their parties.

This system makes elections a bit more personal, as the individual qualities of the candidates are often as or even more important than the party they represent. It also means the independants have a genuine chance of success; sometimes they've defected from their old party, and get re-elected as independant by huge margins because their constituents like the job they do specifically. Naturally, this sometimes backfires when played as gambit to try and make a point against a party the MP has specifically fallen out with. Robert Kilroy-Silk suffered this several times IIRC.

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

Also, parties are less important to begin with, since multiple parties (and independent legislators) can fuse together into coalitions, which function sort of like pseudo-parties. While this means most parliamentary nations boil down to a two-coalition system, the inter-party politics are still far more fluid than in a presidential system's two-party politics.

Oh, now that I think of it, aren't some local UK elections already done using PR? That makes part of the No campaign even more boneheaded.

Eric,

We use Single Transferable Vote to elect our assembly here in Northern Ireland, and I'm pretty sure a similar system is used in Scotland at some point in their circuitous process.

Scotland uses Regional List, a neat split between First Past The Post and PR. You see you get constituency seats, and you get regional seats. (Yeah, that causes some interesting jurisdiction arguments.) Constituency seats are direct FPTP, Regional List PR.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

Yeah, I avoided the Scottish electoral system question in last term's coursework.

Correct. This is why in my constituency (Glasgow Shettleston, which was one of Labour's safest seats and yet fell to the SNP for the second time in three years) I could only select from the four candidates for that area. There were closer to 20 candidates in the regional list elections though. I'm probably not the only one who voted for their true choice in the List vote, and "best of a few bad options" in the constituency vote.

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

As someone who voted No in the referendum I am happy with the result.

Before anyone asks, yes I am well aware how much of the No campaign was a pack of lies, it was written by politicians if they weren’t lying they weren’t doing their job. In actual fact I didn't read any of the campaign literature for either the no or yes campaign I just looked into how AV worked and how First Past the Post worked and decided I preferred the later.

edited 7th May '11 9:34:43 AM by SebastianGray

That's fair enough. May I ask why you preferred FPTP?

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My interpretation of it is that the AV system makes the votes of those who support the smaller parties worth more than the ones who vote for the major parties as it is only the minor party votes which get counted multiple times. At least with F Pt P you get someone who is peoples first choice rather than a compromise candidate. (I am probably not explaining this very well so I apologise).

Actually, that's quite wrong. FPTP has far more "compromise candidates", if I'm reading the term correctly.

Why? Tactical voting. If I want to vote for a left-leaning independent party *

in the general election, the odds are that my vote will be "worthless". Given that I am left-leaning, I do not want the Conservatives to be in power; I'd prefer Labour, say. Ergo, I should vote for Labour, on the basis of insuring that the Conservatives don't get in power.

In other words, I, the voter, am compromising on my choice of candidate. Alternative vote means that I can make the left-leaning independent party my first choice, and Labour my second. Ergo, my vote cannot be "wasted".

Or is that not what you meant?

I suspect a lot of people believed the line about AV being a roadblock to PR/STV. That was a barefaced lie. Electoral reform is now permanently off the agenda in the UK parliament.

The best result we can hope for now is a devolved English parliament. The UK parliament is a creaking dinosaur holding on to power in the name of the good old days but doing nobody any good in its current state. The Scots are mad that it gives the English a say in their public services, the English are mad that it lets the Scots vote on whether to charge the English (but not Scots because it doesn't have that power) more for university and whether to force the English (but not Scots etc.) to carry ID cards on their persons at all times or face arrest.