(October 7, 2012 at 9:02 pm)Hughsie Wrote: To continue with your example though it doesn't matter how you tally up the votes. There's no escaping the fact that at least 94% of people are not going to get their first choice. AV doesn't change that.No, but why should first choice matter when the first choice doesn't get more than 50% of the vote? You have to ask yourself what you think a democracy is; is a democracy where the person who gets the most votes overall wins, or where the person who is better supported by the overall vote of the public wins? AV doesn't change it, but it makes things fairer by reallocating wasted votes.
Tiberius Wrote:I think that practically everyone who votes Conservative and Labour would put the Lib Dems as their second choice to try and prevent the other party getting in. The Lib Dems would become far more involved, not because they themselves are popular, but because they are simply less disliked.You have to stop thinking of things in a three party system, or a two party system. A democracy should be a multi-party system. Conservative voters may put the Lib Dems second, but a lot of them would probably vote for UKIP more than the Lib Dems. Likewise, the Labour supporters would probably put Socialist parties before the Lib Dems. AV lets smaller parties matter in politics; their votes are not wasted.
Quote:You could quite conceivably end up with a situation where Labour get 49% of the vote. Lib Dems 26% and Conservatives 25%. And the Lib Dems get elected. That seems absurd to me.Why does it seem absurd? Labour got 49% of the vote; they didn't win. 51% of the country voted against them. With second preference votes, if all of the conservative supporters voted Lib Dem, clearly the Lib Dems actually got more of the vote than Labour. In any case, this only happens on the small scale; we aren't talking about forming entire governments with AV; that process would remain the same (i.e. whoever gets the most seats gets to form a government, or a coalition if a majority is not obtained). AV would affect the election of individual MPs only. It is likely that many safe seats would remain, but the people in those constituencies would have more voting power over their candidates. AV makes you accountable to your entire electorate, rather than just your supporters.
You didn't answer my question about the parties electing their leaders via AV by the way.
Finally, a comment on the whole "Lib Dems support this for ulterior motives". Whether they do this or not is quite irrelevant; if AV can be demonstrated to be fairer, it doesn't matter whether a party is trying to use it for ulterior motives; fairer is preferable. I believe they have a very good motive, and you can see it by looking at the ratio of popular votes to actual seats gained:
Lib Dems - 23% of the vote, 57 seats won (9.17%)
Labour - 29% of the vote, 258 seats won (41.55%)
Conservatives - 36.1% of the vote, 306 seats won (49%)
If that doesn't show you that the distribution of seats in parliament is clearly shifted towards the two main parties and away from third parties, I don't know what will.
