This Is Why Av Is Not Democratic

[jplevene]

An example of 12 people voting for 4 parties, Conservative, Independent Conservative, Labour & Lib Dem.

Ballot papers as follows (some people will only vote for 2 parties, others for more), who do you think is the winner:

1st Round 2nd Round 3rd Round TOTAL

Con 5 1 0 6

I Con 1 6 1 8

Lab 3 3 1 7

L. Dem 3 2 2 7

Under the current system, Conservative would have won with 40% more first choice votes than Labour, under the new proposed AV system Labour would have won:

First Round

Con | I.Con | Lab | Lib Dem

5 1 3 3

Independent Conservative is knocked out as he had least votes in first round, all Independent Conservative votes don't count in next round

1 3 2

Lib Dem knocked out, giving Labour a more than 50% lead

0 1

The fact that some people get more votes than others is not democratic, it is "selective democracy", meaning only the select few have their votes counted. The voting system turns out to be more of a lottery, and statistically with these more "Random" figures, the less popular parties have a greater chance of winning seats. Surely if we were to have AV then it would be fairer not to eliminate the looser of each round, if this was the case, Independent Conservative would have won. Please note that he even had more votes than all the others, yet he lost, how can this be democracy !!!!!!

Maybe if Lib Dem get their way they can get emergency powers like Syria & Egypt so that we have leaders we don't want forever. People in Libya and Syria are dying in the streets for Democracy and we are being asked to give it up.

[jplevene]

An example of 12 people voting for 4 parties, Conservative, Independent Conservative, Labour & Lib Dem.

Ballot papers as follows (some people will only vote for 2 parties, others for more), who do you think is the winner:

1st Round 2nd Round 3rd Round TOTAL

Con 5 1 0 6

I Con 1 6 1 8

Lab 3 3 1 7

L. Dem 3 2 2 7

Under the current system, Conservative would have won with 40% more first choice votes than Labour, under the new proposed AV system Labour would have won:

First Round

Con | I.Con | Lab | Lib Dem

5 1 3 3

Independent Conservative is knocked out as he had least votes in first round, all Independent Conservative votes don't count in next round

1 3 2

Lib Dem knocked out, giving Labour a more than 50% lead

0 1

The fact that some people get more votes than others is not democratic, it is "selective democracy", meaning only the select few have their votes counted. The voting system turns out to be more of a lottery, and statistically with these more "Random" figures, the less popular parties have a greater chance of winning seats. Surely if we were to have AV then it would be fairer not to eliminate the looser of each round, if this was the case, Independent Conservative would have won. Please note that he even had more votes than all the others, yet he lost, how can this be democracy !!!!!!

Maybe if Lib Dem get their way they can get emergency powers like Syria & Egypt so that we have leaders we don't want forever. People in Libya and Syria are dying in the streets for Democracy and we are being asked to give it up.

Number alignment didn't come out well, to see it properly, hit reply at it aligns correctly (Board bug)

[the gardener]

An example of 12 people voting for 4 parties, Conservative, Independent Conservative, Labour & Lib Dem.

Ballot papers as follows (some people will only vote for 2 parties, others for more), who do you think is the winner:

1st Round 2nd Round 3rd Round TOTAL

Con 5 1 0 6

I Con 1 6 1 8

Lab 3 3 1 7

L. Dem 3 2 2 7

Under the current system, Conservative would have won with 40% more first choice votes than Labour, under the new proposed AV system Labour would have won:

First Round

Con | I.Con | Lab | Lib Dem

5 1 3 3

Independent Conservative is knocked out as he had least votes in first round, all Independent Conservative votes don't count in next round

1 3 2

Lib Dem knocked out, giving Labour a more than 50% lead

0 1

The fact that some people get more votes than others is not democratic, it is "selective democracy", meaning only the select few have their votes counted. The voting system turns out to be more of a lottery, and statistically with these more "Random" figures, the less popular parties have a greater chance of winning seats. Surely if we were to have AV then it would be fairer not to eliminate the looser of each round, if this was the case, Independent Conservative would have won. Please note that he even had more votes than all the others, yet he lost, how can this be democracy !!!!!!

Maybe if Lib Dem get their way they can get emergency powers like Syria & Egypt so that we have leaders we don't want forever. People in Libya and Syria are dying in the streets for Democracy and we are being asked to give it up.

Boo hoo.

Bleat, bleat.

I just hope people vote for AV. Pity it's not a vote for PR, that'd be a lot fairer but the ConLab lot won't allow it. They'd rather continue to disenfranchise a large proportion of the population.

F**k them.

[Fairies Wear Boots]

I don't understand your use of the word democratic.

Everyone gets a vote. Someone gets elected. Sounds like democracy to me.

[Pauly_Boy]

Nick Clegg said it's a "miserable little compromise"

[jplevene]

I don't understand your use of the word democratic.

Everyone gets a vote. Someone gets elected. Sounds like democracy to me.

How can democracy be some people get more votes than others.

If your second choice was the looser of the first round, your second vote doesn't count.

Statistically winning would be more of a lottery again shows a lack of democracy, the list goes on.

Pro AV want it so that their unpopular party can get in.

Attack is the best form of defence when you have no defence, maybe that is why the pro AV supporters are attacking without any supporting evidence.

[Fairies Wear Boots]

Also I just read your mathematical statements. And you put....

Independent Conservative is knocked out as he had least votes in first round, all Independent Conservative votes don't count in next round

Which is totally wrong. All Independant conservative votes then get redistributed to whoever they voted second to. Either that or I have totally got AV wrong.

[Injin]

How can democracy be some people get more votes than others.

[jplevene]

Also I just read your mathematical statements. And you put....

Independent Conservative is knocked out as he had least votes in first round, all Independent Conservative votes don't count in next round

Which is totally wrong. All Independant conservative votes then get redistributed to whoever they voted second to. Either that or I have totally got AV wrong.

You have and you haven't, that is another reason why we shouldn't have AV, hardly anybody understands it.

[Fairies Wear Boots]

You have and you haven't, that is another reason why we shouldn't have AV, hardly anybody understands it.

Say what?

The general public only need to know you number parties in preference order and don't number any that you don't like.

I find it very strange that the first losing candidates votes are the only ones redistributed in the second round.

In the current system we have you can win a seat when 60 percent of people hate your guts. If we're going to start misusing the term 'democratic', that doesn't sound very democratic to me.

Also ten percent of the population can vote for the green party and they win no seats whatsover. Hardly democratic.

[thecrashingisles]

Something's wrong with your example if you have the Conservatives losing votes after the first candidate is eliminated. That's not possible.

Can you show what each individual ballot would look like? Assuming that second preference of the person voting for the Independent Conservative was the real Conservative Party candidate, then the Conservative would have won with 50% of the vote.

[Guest tbatst2000]

Pity it's not a vote for PR, that'd be a lot fairer but the ConLab lot won't allow it.

Imagine a voting system where Jacqui Smith, Charles Clarke, Michael Portillo and Chris Patten could never be voted out of parliament because they're up the top of their party lists... That's the reason I could never vote for PR.

[thecrashingisles]

Imagine a voting system where Jacqui Smith, Charles Clarke, Michael Portillo and Chris Patten could never be voted out of parliament because they're up the top of their party lists... That's the reason I could never vote for PR.

You could have larger multi-member consituencies elected on a PR basis. That would remove the problem above and also increase representation since it would be more likely that one of the locally elected MPs would fit your political point of view.

[Guest tbatst2000]

You could have larger multi-member consituencies elected on a PR basis. That would remove the problem above and also increase representation since it would be more likely that one of the locally elected MPs would fit your political point of view.

I don't see how that is likely to produce a proportional result overall though. Surely you still have the situation where large parts of Scotland don't return a single Tory MP despite 10% of the population voting for them and likewise for Labour in the home counties?

[betterToDo]

There seems to be this sad notion that somehow everyone should get their way, and anything else is not democratic. No, not everyone can have their way. We have to whittle down all the myriad of opinions and policies to a single choice at the end of day. I'm as cynical as anyone about politics, but this wafty AV or PR or any other version of "everyone's voice matters" is nonsensical. To improve our democracy look at all the corruption at the top of the system, not at the bottom. Complete red herring.

[shipbuilder]

I got a leaflet through my door explaining it - why is there still confusion?

Here's another explanation - http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/5_may/referendum_2011.aspx

[Tiger Woods?]

An example of 12 people voting for 4 parties, Conservative, Independent Conservative, Labour & Lib Dem.

Ballot papers as follows (some people will only vote for 2 parties, others for more), who do you think is the winner:

1st Round 2nd Round 3rd Round TOTAL

Con 5 1 0 6

I Con 1 6 1 8

Lab 3 3 1 7

L. Dem 3 2 2 7

Congratulations on a completely contrived example. One can make the same sort of example for FPTP, where the majority want a right wing party and you end up with Labour, e.g.

Con 3

I Con 3

Lab 4

I'm also somewhat confused as to how there are still 4 parties in your second round of voting, as in AV there would be only 3...

In any case, you are a little late in your discovery: A fellow by the name of Kenneth Arrow proved an impossibility theorem in 1950:

states that, when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a certain set of criteria. These criteria are called unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. The theorem is often cited in discussions of election theory as it is further interpreted by the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem.

The theorem is named after economist Kenneth Arrow, who demonstrated the theorem in his Ph.D. thesis and popularized it in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values. The original paper was titled "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare".[1] Arrow was a co-recipient of the 1972 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

In short, the theorem proves that no voting system can be designed that satisfies these three "fairness" criteria:

* If every voter prefers alternative X over alternative Y, then the group prefers X over Y.

* If every voter's preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then the group's preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged (even if voters' preferences between other pairs like X and Z, Y and Z, or Z and W change).

* There is no "dictator": no single voter possesses the power to always determine the group's preference.

There are several voting systems that side-step these requirements by using cardinal utility (which conveys more information than rank orders) and weakening the notion of independence (see the subsection discussing the cardinal utility approach to overcoming the negative conclusion). Arrow, like many economists, rejected cardinal utility as a meaningful tool for expressing social welfare, and so focused his theorem on preference rankings.

That is, provided there are three or more candidates, you can always construct examples such as yours.

AV is, generally, fairer that FPTP. This doesn't mean you cannot construct screwed up copunter examples.

[northwestsmith2]

Wouldn't the conservatives have voted for an independent conservative as their second or first choice?

[Tiger Woods?]

Wouldn't the conservatives have voted for an independent conservative as their second or first choice?

Precisely. The example is ridiculous and contrived.

[shipbuilder]

An example of 12 people voting for 4 parties, Conservative, Independent Conservative, Labour & Lib Dem.

Ballot papers as follows (some people will only vote for 2 parties, others for more), who do you think is the winner:

1st Round 2nd Round 3rd Round TOTAL

Con 5 1 0 6

I Con 1 6 1 8

Lab 3 3 1 7

L. Dem 3 2 2 7

Under the current system, Conservative would have won with 40% more first choice votes than Labour, under the new proposed AV system Labour would have won:

First Round

Con | I.Con | Lab | Lib Dem

5 1 3 3

Independent Conservative is knocked out as he had least votes in first round, all Independent Conservative votes don't count in next round

1 3 2

Lib Dem knocked out, giving Labour a more than 50% lead

0 1

The fact that some people get more votes than others is not democratic, it is "selective democracy", meaning only the select few have their votes counted. The voting system turns out to be more of a lottery, and statistically with these more "Random" figures, the less popular parties have a greater chance of winning seats. Surely if we were to have AV then it would be fairer not to eliminate the looser of each round, if this was the case, Independent Conservative would have won. Please note that he even had more votes than all the others, yet he lost, how can this be democracy !!!!!!

Maybe if Lib Dem get their way they can get emergency powers like Syria & Egypt so that we have leaders we don't want forever. People in Libya and Syria are dying in the streets for Democracy and we are being asked to give it up.

To be honest, I think your example was designed to show the result you wanted. What I find most depressing about the whole thing is that nothing can be debated in this country without people taking left or right 'sides'.

[Um_Bongo]

Under any system you don't get to vote for who's really in charge.

[noodle doodle]

Consider if the Av vote had 3 choices: "Yes", "No" and "Hell No"

Yes gets 38%

No gets 34%

and Hell No gets 28%

Now, first past the post fans, which system of measuring the outcome of that referendum would you prefer? FPTP or AV?

Hee hee hee

[Fairies Wear Boots]

I think AV is a fairer system. Though, I'm not sure if I want it because it sounds more likely to produce a labour victory.

Isn't this what is more likely with AV? Liberal votes being chucked onto the labour pile? Though really, most people I know are blaming the tories for 'cuts' and I get shot down in flames every time I mention that it's only because of overspend during a boom that they have cut jobs.

My brotherinlaw who is quite into politics thinks this might destroy the liberal party. I can't see it, as they must have spent alot of time researching it before backing it surely?

[Charlie The Tramp Returns]

AV if implemented will be the final political destruction of the UK. Period.

[Georgia O'Keeffe]

AV if implemented will be the final political destruction of the UK. Period.

i find it mildly troubling that such a view can still actually exist, there is nothing politically worthwhile left in the uk that hasnt already been destroyed, it must be some sort of stockholm syndrome towards the political class

Edited May 1, 2011 by georgia o'keeffe