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[BRITISH POLITICS] AV referendum 5th May
smof
[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered User regular
[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered User regular
This Thursday the population of Britain, at least those that can be arsed, go to the polls to say YAY or NEIGH to changing the system by which we elect our government. This is kind of a big deal. So let's conversate about it.
I'm going to say straight away that I'm in favour of switching to AV over FPTP. So this is going to sound really biased, sorry! If there is anyone who supports sticking to FPTP though, go ahead and explain why, because I genuinely would like to know if there are benefits to it that I haven't realised.
Here I will attempt to summarise what I understand about the choices. I am not a politician or a student of politics, so this will be the My First Referendum version.
Choice the 1st: First Past the Post
FPTP is the system we use currently. Everybody votes, the person with the most votes wins. Simple. And apparently because it is so simple that all the various degrees of retard in the country can explain it in one catchy sentence like I just did, that is a great reason to keep it, never mind what it actually results in. Which is when a guy gets 30% of the vote, and everyone else only gets 10% each, that guy wins. Despite 70% of the population voting against him. Simple!
Choice the 2nd: Alternate Vote
AV is the proposed new system. Instead of voting for one guy, you rank all the candidates (or however many you want to) in order of preference. Everybody's 1st choice votes are used to create a provisional result. But if nobody gets more than half the vote (like the aforementioned dude with 30%) the selection isn't over. The losing candidate is eliminated and all the people who voted for them as first choice have their ballots looked at again, distributed according to their second place choices, and added to the other candidates' piles. This process is repeated until somebody gets more than 50%.
Here is a video featuring some cats which explains what I just said, in a way that is more engaging because it features cats
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiHuiDD_oTk
We can also discuss the respective campaigns. Personally I have only seen material from the No campaign, because I live in a really conservative area. Frankly I've found it disgusting and appalling and full of lies and bullshit. So kind of like reading the Daily Mail. Does anyone here live in an area where the Yes campaign is active? What kind of stuff have they been saying?
I'm going to say straight away that I'm in favour of switching to AV over FPTP. So this is going to sound really biased, sorry! If there is anyone who supports sticking to FPTP though, go ahead and explain why, because I genuinely would like to know if there are benefits to it that I haven't realised.
Here I will attempt to summarise what I understand about the choices. I am not a politician or a student of politics, so this will be the My First Referendum version.
Choice the 1st: First Past the Post
FPTP is the system we use currently. Everybody votes, the person with the most votes wins. Simple. And apparently because it is so simple that all the various degrees of retard in the country can explain it in one catchy sentence like I just did, that is a great reason to keep it, never mind what it actually results in. Which is when a guy gets 30% of the vote, and everyone else only gets 10% each, that guy wins. Despite 70% of the population voting against him. Simple!
Choice the 2nd: Alternate Vote
AV is the proposed new system. Instead of voting for one guy, you rank all the candidates (or however many you want to) in order of preference. Everybody's 1st choice votes are used to create a provisional result. But if nobody gets more than half the vote (like the aforementioned dude with 30%) the selection isn't over. The losing candidate is eliminated and all the people who voted for them as first choice have their ballots looked at again, distributed according to their second place choices, and added to the other candidates' piles. This process is repeated until somebody gets more than 50%.
Here is a video featuring some cats which explains what I just said, in a way that is more engaging because it features cats
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiHuiDD_oTk
We can also discuss the respective campaigns. Personally I have only seen material from the No campaign, because I live in a really conservative area. Frankly I've found it disgusting and appalling and full of lies and bullshit. So kind of like reading the Daily Mail. Does anyone here live in an area where the Yes campaign is active? What kind of stuff have they been saying?
smof on
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This discussion has been closed.
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And the way everything panned out the last election, I'm not so sure if I like it.
Though to be fair that might be the fault of the candidates really.
Before that I thought preferential voting was baller though.
Satans..... hints.....
I haven't heard that nope. I checked the rules and hedged my bets. But this is the first thread I've made so I'd be surprised if I didn't cock it up somehow, so if this thread needs a lockin' then woops, sorry, and cool.
I still don't know what I'm doing with this.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
Then again, the "Yes to AV" campaign featured a war veteran in a blatant tug of the heart-strings so they're both just as bad as each other.
-The extra complexity of the system means that Jimbob Seventhumbs of Norwich won't understand how it works. The implication is that this will cause a downturn in the number of active voters.
-The ranking system means that potentially extreme right or left parties such as the BNP and UKIP could garner seats they wouldn't have had a hope of getting before.
-The extra rounds of vote counting means that the voting process will be slower.
-The principal of democratic action in Britain has always been one man, one vote. With AV, if a person votes for a leading candidate, their vote is counted once. If, however they vote for a fringe party and rank several other, larger parties behind it then their vote can be counted several times.
Conservatives string together more arguments here
Telegraph piece with some highly bias linkage
I'm probably voting for AV, but honestly no matter what you do you're ultimately forced to vote for our current set of politicians, and they're all drawn from the same poisoned well.
Irony is, all the conservatives who are campaigning against AV use AV to elect leaders internally. I tried asking my MP what he made of that and how they can justify a voting system that is supposedly so wrong being the one they use themselves, but i got no answer.
probably because i regularly fling thinly veiled insults at him on twitter... hmm maybe i should stop that.
This would be my main concern of voting for AV.
One is the election of a single leader via an informed group, and one is an election of 600 something candidates by the general public. Leadership elections and national elections are two completely different processes, and you can support one system for one and another system for the other without being hypocritical. There's plenty of reasons to vote yes, but that's a red herring.
The threat of BNP suddenly dropping into seats across the land is a pretty minor one, since they'd require more votes under AV then they would under FPTP. BNP/The Socialists are rejecting AV because it requires them to get the approval of 50% of the population of a constituency, where under FPTP they only need to get more votes then the other parties, allowing the possibility of them getting through with between 35-40% of the vote.
Proportional representation is really the only democratic option and I was pretty suprised to find out you guys don't have it.
Would you accept me dropping the label of 'left' or 'right' in exchange for 'a nasty pack of tossers'?
Ahh I see now.
I am glad this thread has been made because I have been meaning to look into this more.
What system do you have in Holland?
But that very rarely happens.
I am like 90% sure there hasn't been a case where someone has gathered less than 10% of the vote and has gone on to win.
Really every argument that taskman put out either doesn't actually happen or influences the result so minutely it doesn't really matter.
Satans..... hints.....
Proportional representation is not a specific voting system, its a type of system that covers a lot of different things. You can't just put in Proportional representation, you need to put in a system that proportionally represents.
Being afraid of the BNP getting a seat with AV seems like a trivial concern when you're talking about getting a (very slightly) more democratic system, but I don't know how people over there are experiencing it.
Ah, right. Well thats good.
My apologies if I'm coming across as ignorant, I'm trying to educate myself on it more.
I'm aware, but considering there's zero discussion of actually implementing one of those systems and they're not up for vote it seems moot to argue about it. I should've been less vague though, sorry!
The monster raving loonys?
We appear to be experiencing it in the most democratic way possible; squabbling, name-calling and masses of largely unbacked propaganda on all sides. Pretty much indistinguishable from all of our day-to-day politics, really.
In our system we can vote for any candidate on a party list with a ''preference vote'' so to speak, so the option of electing specific people still exists.
Electing specific people is good, much better then raw party list, but would you ever be able to get rid of Nick Clegg under the system? How would you knock out a specific part of a parties elite?
What are your top ten favourite albums of all time, in order?
There, you just performed the exact same level of intellectual work as you would do voting with AV.
Yes this. People are being turned off it because there is a chance a party they don't like might get in. But it's a more democratic system, you get more say in who is elected. How is that a bad thing? If the BNP win some seats, that's obviously because some people want them in. Does their opinion not matter just because they like a fringe party?
Also this argument I keep hearing of "AV lets the 3rd place guy win" or whatever. Well, if every vote under AV came up with the same result as under FPTP, what would be the point in suggesting change in the first place? The whole reason people want more proportional representation is exactly because it will make a change in the results. So that maybe the 63.9% of us who didn't vote for the tories last general election don't end up with a tory government.
In practice people usually don't care enough and I recognise that's a flaw.
Plus with AV you can essentially vote as you do at the moment just by putting a 1 next to the party you want to vote for and not filling in any more numbers.
edit: I wrote this before seeing SporkAndrew's post. Wasn't trying to be snarky!
I think the best reason for voting no was so that we can get PV instead. This appears to be based on the expectation that we'll have a referendum every month until we choose a new system. It's not like we have only ever had two referendums in history. And then again, I'm not sure I like the idea of PV, although I think this just stems from my own clumsy attempts to think of what a system based on PV would look like in the UK.
Liiya.
Liiya.
Let me help you.
The BNP support keeping FPTP.
The basic litmus test for British politics is "What do the BNP want? Oh? Let's do the opposite, fuck them.", so apply that rule here.
Plus it's what I say people should do, and I'm reassuringly tall.
I do not believe that to be true, as I seem to recall the BNP winning a seat with something like 10% of the vote in one election, it seems that they ONLY win due to FPTP.
one of the many reasons for low voter turnout. Of course, it can result in other forms of tactical voting, but this one at least is eliminated.
Voting no on AV because you want something else seems like shooting yourself in the foot. As long as you guys have a Tory government you're not going to see another referendum on this, so a small step is better than no step at all.
You want to try disagreeing with Stephen Fry?
I don't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J31QkzWmmUc
But then UKIP are endorsing AV.
So if you vow to do the opposite of what a bunch of barely-disguised racists and bigots do then you're stuck in an infinite loop.
Totally, and yet it's not a tiny minority that appear to be doing just that. It's just the reason I enjoy the most from the no-camp.
That is a good point! And you forget that to me your height is intimidating.
Though I do intend to keep following this thread closely. I think Wiet has a point though, in that a small step is better than no step at all.