Grab and change it, it's yours

[venta]

Does anyone know what the actual text which is actually going to appear on the actual ballot papers on May 5th is? A bit of googling hasn't turned up any results for me, but the pages I was finding suggest to me that I may have been going about my searching in the wrong way.

I'm kind of assuming that the ballot paper will look broadly like this:

[Poll #1729575]

Now, lots of campaigners would have you believe that this is analogous to:

[Poll #1729576]

And lots of other campaigners would have you believe it's analogous to:

[Poll #1729577]

You'll notice that the second two polls allow the results to be interpreted as pol(l)ar opposites.

So, does anyone know exactly what the question is? More to the point, has the government made any commitment at all about what they're going to do with the results, how they'll be interpreted, or whether Cameron will (in fact) go "oh, that's nice" and carry on regardless with the existing system?

Comments

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

It seems very odd to me that, in the process of transferring the lower-preference votes, that those votes are not somehow reduced in 'importance'.

Because you can't really make assumptions about how strongly people favour candidates. If I prefer A to B, I'll vote A. If C comes along who I like even better, that doesn't mean how much I like A has been reduced, just that C is in preference.

If C is my first preference, but gets knocked out in round 1, my intent is that my vote should be for A, which gets counted in round 2. (And people who voted for A as first choice still get their votes counted again in round 2, so no ones getting more votes that others, as the No2AV campaign claim.)

I agree with strange_complex's point about X Factor - if in the first week the person you vote for is the one knocked out, should your vote for later rounds be halved (or even, not count at all)?

There are systems that allow people to express weightings, but that has to be done with a scoring system rather than preferences, e.g., range voting.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia has a lot of info on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum,_2011

It gives the same wording that people have said, with http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldbills/026/2011026.pdf as the reference.

Part of me wonders whether it's a good thing that it's framed as a Yes/No question - it makes it all about AV, rather than AV versus FPTP. The No2AV campaign have exploited this by focusing on criticisms of AV, even though many of them apply to FPTP. Anecdotally, I see people saying things like "I want PR instead of AV, so I'm voting No" - even though that ought to mean they're voting Yes to FPTP in this referendum.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

There are voting systems where candidates receive variable points according to how high you've ranked them, eg.

"In Nauru, a distinctive formula is used based on increasingly small fractions of points. Under the system a candidate receives 1 point for a first preference, ½ a point for a second preference, ⅓ for third preference, and so on."

Which is not quite what you were asking (there is no elimination, just a one-off count) but going in the same sort of direction.

The real answer I suspect is that it's felt the principle of (vote = 1) is too important to let go of.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

We've had preferential voting in Australia since 1918.

My own argument for not reducing the value of the transfers is that it's all about allowing you to say what you mean without having to resort to strategic voting and second guessing the rest of your electoral division; when I was living Oop North I'd vote Labour instead of Lib Dem because I knew that the latter wouldn't have been an effective vote against the Conservative party. (apologies if I've misremembered the names or spellings of the parties - I de-emigrated in '04).

AV means I could vote Lib Dem first to express my preferred result, without wasting my vote if I'm in a seat where they've very little chance of being one of the two frontrunners.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Anecdotally, I see people saying things like "I want PR instead of AV, so I'm voting No" - even though that ought to mean they're voting Yes to FPTP in this referendum.

Well yes - this was rather the point of my multiple polls up there :) I think there are people who believe they're going to be voting in poll 2 or poll 3, whatever the wording, not poll 1.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

That is indeed the question.

http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/referendum_2011.aspx?

There was a longer version proposed originally, but it was deemed to be "too hard" for the "less educated".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11442445

Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the 'alternative vote' system instead of the current 'first past the post' system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10729454

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Or for the senate where you've got a zillion candidates you've also got the option of just saying "vote how Party X would have liked me to" - though I only do that personally if there's a party whose published voting card matches my own preferences closely enough.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Indeed; which is why AV is sometimes known as "instant run-off voting".

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

Of course, the difference in the X factor is that the voting process is iterative, with the results of each round being known prior to recasting ballots - so not equivalent to AV at all.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Anecdotally, I see people saying things like "I want PR instead of AV, so I'm voting No"

It's not anecdotal - Lord Owen, ex leader of the SDP, is explicitly fronting a campaign called "No To AV, Yes To PR":

http://www.no2av-yes2pr.org/

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to know what the voting trend is in X-Factor (having never watched it, I've no idea)... do people usually pick their candidate and consistently vote for him/her through all rounds? I suspect they don't, so comparing AV to X-Factor has a risk that people will take it too literally and want to be able to vote Labour in early rounds, then Lib Dem later after that awful face Ed Milliband pulled on Newsnight...

[alien8.livejournal.com]

ref AV : http://neilharding.blogspot.com/p/10-facts-about-alternative-vote-av.html

kinda needed to counter the garnage being put out atm.. - the no campaign is so full of BS that I'd vote yes to AV just to annoy them.

No, AV isn't perfect - not by any stretch. But it's a change in the right direction. Changing to AV+ at least, or PR from it will be less of a hurdle.. IMHO etc.

[alien8.livejournal.com]

oh and let's not forget that the Political parties use AV for electing their own leaders!

If first past the post had been used for the Conservatives, David Davies would be the leader now...

good enough for them but not good enough for us? PAH!

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I'm reading your emphasis of "at all" correctly - are you just emphasising that it isn't exactly the same as runoff voting (which is indeed true), or do you mean that it isn't anything like the X Factor voting at all?

I think it's close enough for the explanation - I mean, do you think that people's votes in X Factor should be reduced? Or if not, what is the important difference between the two systems?

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

This is true - but I'd argue that's mainly done for entertainment; I don't think changing one's vote because the campaign is still in progress is a good feature. Plus in X Factor, in the first week you know hardly anything about the candidates, where as we know a reasonable amount about the parties from the start of the campaign (although it does seem interesting how undecided until the last minute many voters in elections seem to be, if polls are anything to go by).

If one had a hypothetical really quick series of rounds of runoff voting, where there was no chance for people to be changing their minds due to new campaigning, I would hope that would give the idea of a reasonably good system, that doesn't give anyone more votes that anyone else. And then IRV/AV can just be seen as the instant version of it.

I don't know if there's any tactical situation where knowing the results of the earlier rounds means you might change your vote?

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Mm. I wonder how many people failed to understand the wording of the question but did understand the difference between FPTP and AV.

[venta.livejournal.com]

That article was last year, and alledgedly people will have been educated about the difference by the various campaigns by now.

Having said that, my only info has been obtained when I've deliberately sought it out, so the campaigns would have largely passed me by if I hadn't already been interested.

And that the BBC presented a very basic fact wrongly bugs me quite a lot. I may stop harping on about this, but probably not any time soon.

NL

[bondagewoodelf.livejournal.com]

Btw, in the Netherlands we have 'AV', sort of. That's why I think our voting system here is fine as it is ;-)

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

I don't think it would have occurred to me that that was a very major distinction to make, to be honest - it's what would be the case if everyone ranked all the candidates. But then it wouldn't have occurred to me to vote in an AV election and not rank at least most of the candidates - any left blank amount to 'if this is the choice I can't even be bothered to vote'.

[venta.livejournal.com]

To me it was very important. A post by Guido Fawkes (http://order-order.com/2011/03/30/av-too-much-for-bbc/) reporting on a BBC mock-election, which was done using AV, claimed that:

(a) most people didn't want to put a second preference
(b) the result of the election was therefore "no result", because no one candidate got 50%.

It seems quite likely to be that (at least initially) many people won't put second preferences ("I'm a Tory, I'm not voting Labour! And the Lib Dems are clearly idiots. And I don't want the BNP, because they're mental. And the Greens are a waste of space.") The requirement for 50% would then result in a lot of undecided elections (messy, annoying, and expensive).

Anecdotal evidence from a couple of posters (on another LJ elsewhere this morning) suggested that, while campaigning, they've come across plenty of people who don't want to express a second preference.

So the 50% requirement - which has been and still is being extensively reported, but isn't actually correct - changes the system from "a bit of an improvement over FPTP" to "unworkable" in my estimation.

[venta.livejournal.com]

PS. I should add that it's not like I implicitly believe everything Guido says. However, that was the only report I'd seen of any sort of AV mock-up being done at the time. And the point it raised seemed valid, given that everyone is busily touting this 50% figure (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/av/billy-bragg-av-would-marginalise-extremists-2266943.html).

[condign.livejournal.com]

Agreed. And that "known prior to recasting ballots" is huge.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

We got a nice explanatory leaflet through the post the other day. Presumably everyone will be receiving this in due course...

Oh, and 'Alternative Vlster', as no-one else has said yet… very apt.

[condign.livejournal.com]

I've voted in a couple of AV systems, and never put a second preference. So that result makes a fair amount of sense to me.

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

I think it's the difference of information. On X-Factor people can quickly see the real states of the voting (based on last week's poll) so can make informed choices about the next poll, including tactical voting if they so choose.

If everyone on the X-factor got one chance to vote, then yes I would say that they should adopt a ranking system rather than STV.