There was no change to the way votes were counted that I'm aware of. This is a FPTP political system in action.
There was a referendum to move to a more grown-up voting system, but the majority voted against it. Depressingly, many of those who voted against were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting against. I could only weep as someone left the polling station proud to have taken a stand against proportional representation.
I suppose they could have been balanced by people who voted in favour who were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting for, but I suspect that is less likely.
The AV system we voted on wasn't actually PR, any kind of PR got veto'd by the conservatives, and the Lib-Dems were perhaps foolish to try to continue with such a meagre reform, as it now gets used as an excuse to not implement PR in future as "the country voted against it" (except of course they didn't, as it wasn't one of the two options they were allowed to vote for).
Yes, that's why I said I wept as people left the polling station having thought that's what they were voting about. That's my point. Lots of people didn't know. They thought that's what they were voting on.
My particular hatred was for the people who chanted "One man, one vote", like only being able to express yourself in favour of one candidate was some kind of superior state of being, rather than the kind of democracy you have to introduce to a society coming out of a millenium of dictatorship to get them used to the idea before they can move on to a grown-up political system.
"AV is not proportional representation and in certain electoral conditions, such as landslides, can produce a more disproportional result than First Past the Post (FPTP)"
Yeah they clearly bet the farm on it, lost it, and got hammered in the election. But had it passed, the Lib Dems could have been reaping the rewards for decades, since they'd almost certainly gain more seats.
I'm not sure that we are that stupid. I think that many people agreed with me that AV was a needlessly confusing system that the LibDems wanted only because it would boost their electoral chances in a country where there were at the time two left of centre parties and one right of centre one.
(I am a supporter of single transferable vote and I didn't see it on my referedum voting sheet only FPTP [rubbish] and AV [?more/less? rubbish but still rubbish].)
> We also thought that AV would probably increase the number of pro-PR MPs and therefore increase the chances of getting actual PR later.
Ahh I didn't think of it like this. I thought that AV would allow the Tories and Labour to say that we'd had electoral reform and that would be it for another 100 years... I'm hoping that the pressure will build against FPTP now - especially after the farce of an election we just had.
I do hope that we don't go full PR or even region based PR for the commons though (maybe for the Lords if it ever gets reformed?). Political parties already have enough power in deciding who gets to run. I don't want them controlling the list order as well. I want voters to control the list order with their ballots.
> (I am a supporter of single transferable vote and I didn't see it on my referedum voting sheet only FPTP [rubbish] and AV [?more/less? rubbish but still rubbish].)
Really? Because AV is what Ireland uses and called it PR-STV.
For elections to President of Ireland, there is only one 'seat' available. And it is elected under PR-STV. The PR-STV system works fine with only one seat. You select the quota the same way, you do transfers the same way. Ireland uses PR-STV for single-member constituancies just fine.
This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person. It's not possible for someone to be 40% blue party and 60% red party, because there's only one of them. So, in Ireland votes for the president, and for by-elections to replace a single member use AV.
STV and AV (and a bunch of variants of each) are closely related, but they do have differences, and repeatedly claiming that one is the other, when they're not, isn't that helpful to the conversation.
> This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person.
Proportional representation is really a matter of degree rather than a binary categorization -- a system doesn't magically become proportional when you apply it to a two-member constituency that would be not-proportional when applied to a single-member constituency.
OTOH, the maximum degree of proportionality you can achieve in an electoral system increases with the number of seats that are elected by the same set of ballots.
STV is an election method defined for any arbitrary number of seats, IRV/AV is exactly STV applied to a single-seat election.
It's got nothing to do with disagreeing with me. People who thought that they were voting for/against proportional representation were just plain wrong. That's just plain not what the referendum was for.
Are you saying that these people were not misinformed? That somehow, even though the referendum was not about PR, and they thought it was about PR, they were still right? Is this some kind of "prizes for all, everyone's correct in their own way" situation?
When faced with the exact same evidence, a majority of people will react the same way.
What's more likely is that the sum of the evidence isn't actually the same.
People will generally vote based on what they know (the evidence that's been presented to them). What they know isn't much for most of the population - it's whatever TV channel they watch, whatever newspaper or website they read.
IOW, anyone who disagrees with GP is, in fact, likely to be misinformed - at least from the point of view of GP.
There was a referendum to move to a more grown-up voting system, but the majority voted against it. Depressingly, many of those who voted against were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting against. I could only weep as someone left the polling station proud to have taken a stand against proportional representation.
I suppose they could have been balanced by people who voted in favour who were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting for, but I suspect that is less likely.