A few answers to questions

Evening all

I'm going to be responding to a post on another blog, which can be found here.

Little Miss Giggles pointed me at this, knowing my views - so I've bitten, and I'm going to try and rationally debate the answers. Yes, on the internet. No, the other one does not have bells on.

It's a serious of questions, which Raggady Man put to the No to AV campaign and he wasn't happy with the answers. I can't blame him, I'm not either. But there are answers, which I'm going to attempt to give.

Now, question one - I don't see a need to respond to. The motivation to put "None of your taxes have been used to print this leaflet" could be almost anything - and it's not really a contentious point, really. A little dirty... but not one word that wasn't true. So let's leave that...

Question 2:...on the front page you claim that the current First Past The Post system gives one person one vote. However according to http://www.voterpower.org.uk/ with the First Past The Post system and the dominance of one party in my area I actually have around 0.25% of a vote. Can your further explain how, when my vote will be discounted if/when I don't vote for the local dominant party, I actually even have a vote worth casting in the next election.

Answer

Well, the official answer sucked - yes, the people who made the website are partisan. This does not allow you to ignore the point.

The point is in the current system, some votes aren't worth the same. Ignoring the strict, 1=1 point, this is to a degree, true. I've lived in areas that I couldn't change the outcome so much as a bean. However, does AV make this any better? Let us examine some cases in a hypothetical election...

Out right winner

1) If the majority party has more then 51% of the vote, under AV your vote matters exactly as much under FPTP as AV.

Your party won...

2) If you voted for the A party, and they win (and were the largest party) the value of your vote was the same.

3) If you voted for Party A and they won, and didn't have the most 1st priority votes cast, your vote is worth the MORE.

4) If you voted for Party B and they lost, but did have the most votes at stage 1, your vote is now worth LESS.

5) If you voted for party B and they lost and didn't have the most votes at stage 1, your vote is still the same.

Your n+1 choice won (not out right)

6) ...and your first choice was eliminated, your vote is worth more!

7) ...and your first choice is still in the running your vote is worth..less.

Someone you didn't vote for wins (not out right)

8) ...and they had the most in the first round, your vote is worth the same.

9) ...and they didn't win the first round, this just gets madly complicated. But probably balanced.

Now, my point here by listing all these possible outcomes is that the answer to the question of "Is my vote worth more with AV" the answer may be yes or no. It's complicated. But for every situation where your vote is "worth more", there is another where it is "worth less".

And for added fun, one of the most marginal seats in existence is Crawley. In 2005 there was a majority of 37. And in that seat, your vote is worth...according to http://www.voterpower.org.uk/crawley - 0.932, increasing to 0.952.

In a constituency where some voters have more pets then the winning candidate had majority voters your vote isn't worth 1.

The very metric that this site is using is flawed, because the only "perfect" situation is where there is only a majority of 1 - and that's you, alone, on an island.

According to the numbers on the page itself, swapping to AV increase the number of "marginal" seats by 6.4%.

So, really, 6.4% of people's votes are worth more.

And the people whose votes are worth the most are the minority parties - because they are the parties who will always get re-assigned.

The smaller the party, the more extreme, weird and odd the issues they consider important.

Are they the people we want to have the deciding vote?

The prank vote, the protest vote, the single issue parties?



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Depending on response, may/may not continue with the rest of the questions - I'm out of time!