I will be voting in favour of the Alternative Vote system in the upcoming referendum. I wish to use this to explain why I’ll be doing so.
AV means that you rank the candidates in order of preference. This means that when you vote, you will be voting in a way that represents your views better. We…
I realize you posted this after the election, but perhaps you’d still like to think this one over.
The question really shouldn’t be between IRV and Plurality. Both are pretty bad. To IRV’s credit, it can mitigate the spoiler effect to a degree. But you still get spoilers with IRV once those up-and-comer candidates get more support. You also get a weird effect about 1/5 to 1/6 of the time where you can rank a candidate better to help that candidate or rank a candidate worse to help that candidate (nonmonotonicity). That’s pretty weird.
I agree that AV is not the best system available - my argument was purely from the point of view of AV vs FPTP, as that was the choice at hand at the time. All I was saying was that AV was better than FPTP, and was a good first step towards a better voting system in the UK.
Personally, I am a supporter of proportional representation - it’s simple, clear and it makes the most sense.
Approval Voting is interesting, and not something I’d heard of, I must admit - the knee-jerk response is that of a lack of fairness in allowing multiple votes, but reading through I understand the points being made. Unfortunately, I think this is why AV was chosen - the No2AV campaign began saying AV wasn’t fair because you got more than one vote, and that was with AV and it’s clear system where votes are transferred, not counted at once. Approval Voting would be even harder for the public to adjust to, and unfortunately, that’s a big issue.
