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

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I've no doubt you can go away and find a webpage somewhere which has a couple of inaccurate claims, or refers to FPTP with an unkind description.

Sort of moves the goalposts, don'tcha think? First I respond to the specific page provided above, which you decide is unfair because "it's not official." Not that you tell me what you would consider an "official" site. So I picked the site the Lib Dems put up, which I would think is close. So now it's "can go away and find a webpage." Pray tell: what actual source can I point to that you will agree is both "official" and a yardstick against which the Pro-AV forces can be judged? One notes that you haven't provided anything like this in your examples: you have paraphrased the arguments of others (without citing sources), and it's impossible for me to tell if you've done so uncharitably or not.

This tendency to hold others to standards that one would not for a moment think of applying to one's allies or oneself is the attitude that I find galling in many of the official (and unofficial) supporters of the Yes campaign. Disagreement of opinion I find enjoyable. Sanctimony is not.

Maybe I'm biased because I have a point of view - but then, maybe you are too :)

Perhaps. Then again, I'm not particularly partisan for FPTP. When I was a TA, I had to teach an entire unit on voting theory. I'm fond of Arrow's theorum that roughly states that there is no perfect voting system: it's a matter of trade offs. I'm marginally more partial to FPTP, but I recognize that it has its weaknesses.

That said: any theory of political malfeasance that says (a) it's a horrible travesty to link AV to potentially higher spending, cuts in services, etc. (which I agree are not necessary outcomes of AV, although each falls in the "possible but unlikely" category) but (b) it is not equally morally bankrupt to link the adoption of AV to the relatively strong economic Australian performance after the financial crisis, or to state that the most populous democracy in the world is using a "discredited" system to chose its members is one that, if it is following a system of consistent principals at all, follows one that I cannot divine.

[condign.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more along the lines of "It's a national capital, with an electorate that will likely be more informed on major and national political issues than the country as a whole may be." Particularly since the form of vote to be used was a major issue in London when the elected mayor was restored. On this issue, they may simply be better informed and experience than the rest of the UK.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

There are, but they fall under the heading of "things that are bad about AV anyway".

For example, consider the French presidential election of 2002, in which Chirac faced le Pen in the final round. He took 82% of the vote, which I think we can safely say he wouldn't have achieved in an instant runoff. The Socialists endorsed Chirac in the second round, but I suspect that it's politically very difficult for the party that "should" be in second place to say, "look, we really think we can win this election, but just in case we come third you should vote for our main opponents second. Really. We're very confident".

Pretty much any electoral system would have delivered Chirac as the winner of that election. And it's not as if those people who voted "against le Pen" rather than "for Chirac" actually changed their opinions or their preferences between the rounds, but the exact count was surely affected, since knowing the result of the first round motivated them to *express* that preference. A rational electorate and campaign, capable of coldly considering hypotheticals, would have fewer reasons for runoffs to differ from AV, but still not none.

For example both runoffs and AV still have some perversities, it's not just FPTP. In that same election, suppose that le Pen's support was slightly weaker. Chirac, while looking good to win the election, might have thought to himself that he'd much rather face le Pen in the final than Jospin. In which case, he could ask a small proportion of his own supporters to vote for le Pen in the first round, just to be sure of eliminating Jospin. AV is also weak to this tactic, although not as weak as a real runoff, since in a real runoff Chirac's fifth columnists can switch back to him in the final round, whereas in AV they can't.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Oh, and also perhaps in AV le Pen would have come third rather than second anyway. You'd think that second preferences would pretty much have unified the left behind Jospin, whereas in the actual election a narrow third place in the first round is game over.

[condign.livejournal.com]

You admitted that the Fairer Votes campaign has made "inaccurate" claims, but your argument rests on the idea that making fatuous claims about the costs of implementing AV somehow renders the No folks reprobates, but making equally ridiculous (if not more so--the Australia thing really is a howler) claims about AV's benefits is no-harm, no-foul.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

"Pretty much any electoral system would have delivered Chirac as the winner of that election" - hmm, on second thoughts maybe not. The Left was even more fragmented than I realised, and hence bigger: *two* communist parties picked up 7.5% between them.

Anyway, I don't think that was important to answering your question.

The point is that although the need for tactical voting is notorious under FPTP, it's still there to a smaller extent under AV. Your optimal vote may depend on your beliefs about the votes of others. Both systems obliterate a candidate who is literally *everybody's* second choice, perhaps in favour of someone who is the first choice of only one person, and no better than third choice of anyone else.

So even under AV an individual could be tempted into tactical voting - if you don't think your first choice is going to win overall, put that compromise candidate first just to be on the safe side. If you're doing that, then your order of preference very well might change based on the results of earlier rounds. In particular, if you were wrong to start with and it eventually does came down to your "true" first choice vs your "tactical" first choice in the final round, then in delayed runoff voting you would indeed switch votes.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know that tactical voting is possible under AV. It's annoying about the monotonicity criterion, and I'd gladly vote for Condorcet if that was the referendum we were having. (But I still feel AV beats FPTP overall.)

I was curious though if there was a tactical difference between IRV/AV, and non-instant runoff voting - i.e., knowing the results of the earlier rounds might mean you vote differently in the later rounds, to what your initial IRV ranking would have been.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Condorcet is great provided that you want to strengthen candidates with high levels of approval. But I dread to think what the "you're too stupid for AV: vote against it" mob would make of it. In a sense the electorate doesn't *need* to understand it, since it doesn't really need to affect how they vote. One impression I get from the campaign though is that a reasonable proportion of people don't want to feel that the electoral system is arcane. Or at least, the No campaign believes that to be the case. It's fair to want people to understand why the winner won, although my preferred means of achieving that would be to explain any new system rather than to reject it!

Aside from correcting a "tactical" preference back to a "pure" preference in the final round, I think a psychological reason why people might express preferences in a runoff that they don't express in IRV is that IRV doesn't let you express a preference for "whichever one of X or Y" over "Z" unless you can express either a preference for X over Y, or Y over X.

So you can't say what many voters think, which is, "my preferences, followed by everybody else equal, followed by the fascists" (or communists, as the case may be). People might be discouraged from expressing arbitrary preferences in order to strengthen a negative preference, although rationally speaking they should probably just toss a coin or something.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Really? FPTP is discredited? The many countries, including the U.S., which use it are engaging not in a political choice system with which one can honestly disagree, but one that is absolutely without credit?

I wouldn't describe FPTP as discredited (and it seems rather foolish to do so), but I do wonder that the US isn't a very good example of why it works.

My understanding of US politics (which may be wrong, or at least naive) is that it's basically a two-horse race. You've got your Republicans and your Democrats, and realistically pretty much no one else. So FPTP works fine (and is basically equivalent to AV anyway). One of the reasons I feel the UK is floundering a bit is that at the last election there were three horses of (very) approximately equal likelihood which makes the whole business much more complicated.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

(Also replying to the other comment - note that it was anonymous, so is screened.)

I agree that the Lib Dem has a couple of poor claims. I'm happy to count it as official.

I'm just saying, in my opinion, I don't think that comes anywhere near close to the level of No2AV, either in terms of the number of poor claims, the level that they stoop to (claiming Yes supporters don't like AV by misquoting; argument by emotion; etc), or the prominence that they give them.

This tendency to hold others to standards that one would not for a moment think of applying to one's allies or oneself is the attitude that I find galling in many of the official (and unofficial) supporters of the Yes campaign.

No, as I say, I don't like some of the Yes claims being made. On that note, AV supporters have been criticising claims made by the Yes campaign. Anecdotally, I've seen people on my flist disappointed with the Yes campaign.

Has anything similar happened in the No2AV campaign? Have Tory MPs stood up and said that they've no intention of bringing in voting machines, and that it won't cost £250 million (they should know)? Or that the Tories won't have an extra £250 million for the NHS should No win? Or noted that David Cameron was the "loser" in their first round of leadership election?

Maybe they have, though I haven't seen it yet. If not, that's something else to note: the misinformation from the Yes campaign gets criticised by Yes and No supporters alike; yet there seems to be a silence from No supporters on the No campaign.

That said: any theory of political malfeasance that says (a) it's a horrible travesty to link AV to potentially higher spending, cuts in services, etc. (which I agree are not necessary outcomes of AV, although each falls in the "possible but unlikely" category) but (b) it is not equally morally bankrupt to link the adoption of AV to the relatively strong economic Australian performance after the financial crisis, or to state that the most populous democracy in the world is using a "discredited" system to chose its members is one that, if it is following a system of consistent principals at all, follows one that I cannot divine.

I agree that the Australian claim was incorrect and unfair. The travesty isn't that one claim alone, it's the full extent of the list. I cannot divine making two incorrect points on a webpage equal to a large number of incorrect points in adverts and door leaflets.

Plus the issue wasn't the link to the cuts; it was the link when it's the Tories who are making the cuts whilst supporting No2AV; and the claimed cost of AV is known to be a lie, not simply a matter of opinion.

For the "discredited" point: I noted that it was no different to No2AV referring to Australia as "undemocratic", yet I don't think either is a big problem. Claiming something to be discredited is a matter of opinion (well, I guess there's the implication that it's something that everyone agrees on, though I think this would apply to all uses of the word "discredited"; either way, it applies to calling AV, and places like Australia that use it, as not being democratic).

Also note that America doesn't use straight FPTP, as you have earlier rounds - Primaries - to decide the Democrat and Republican candidates, reducing it to almost a two party system (as venta comments). This factor can't be ignored - the election process includes the primaries as well as the final FPTP round. The primaries reduce the problems of FPTP, such as vote splitting between similar candidates.

You admitted that the Fairer Votes campaign has made "inaccurate" claims, but your argument rests on the idea that making fatuous claims about the costs of implementing AV somehow renders the No folks reprobates, but making equally ridiculous (if not more so--the Australia thing really is a howler) claims about AV's benefits is no-harm, no-foul.

I just think, in my opinion, that the level of misinformation is not equal. I admit that maybe this is just me being biased. Although I've yet to see a list of Yes misinformation countering the list that I've provided - maybe I'm just not seeing it though.

[venta.livejournal.com]

note that it was anonymous, so is screened

Now unscreened. I don't screen anonymous comments, but LJ seems to have got properly picky about what it thinks is spam of late.

[condign.livejournal.com]

Sorry... missed the fact that I posted it anonymously. My error. :(

[condign.livejournal.com]

I just think, in my opinion, that the level of misinformation is not equal. I admit that maybe this is just me being biased.

Yes, I think you're biased.

The mismatch in "misinformation" is rather what I'm finding hard to believe. Not that you haven't found a list--your evidence of having looked very hard is somewhat thin--but that you think such a list wouldn't be trivially easy to produce. Someone of reasonable intelligence should be able to produce a list of "misinformation" that meets the standards you set for the "no" vote very easily.

First, a factual point: not all states have primaries. (Iowans, for example, would be fairly surprised to find out that they've been having primaries all these years.) Second, a primary is simply a nominating election, and many primaries are uncontested. It's not like the Mike Castle/Christine O'Donnell situation was typical.

So for instance:

(a) Tories use AV to choose their leader? No, they do not. The have multiple rounds of elections, yes, but this is not the same as AV (at least as relevant here), because a voter in the second round knows the result of the first round vote. See al_fruitbat's comments above for why this is important. The endless repetition of this ridiculous claim, which actually ignores the importance of interim knowledge in voting,

(b) Take a look at the first three claims here: http://www.yestofairervotes.org/pages/av-myths. That is to say, the first three bullet points of the first paragraph. Please note that all of the failings of the FPTP system also apply to AV so long as what they list as "Myth 9" is not true. The only condition under which AV eliminates the three problems mentioned is where a voter is required to vote for multiple candidates. Otherwise, AV as a system may result in candidates winning with only 1 in 3 votes cast for them, candidates retaining seats without a majority, etc. This is just basic math.

I could go on, but here's the point: I'm not actually that strongly against AV, and I recognize that these claims are BS. Or rather, they're the same thing as the claim about the cost of voting machines: a statement which is not necessarily true, but true inasmuch as it relies upon certain assumptions, those assumptions not shared by opponents on the other side. Either that or "shading" the truth by leaving out facts necessary to be coherent (such as the Tory election not being AV, at least as contemplated here).

This happens all the time in politics, and it's no big surprise. I don't think there's an "imbalance" in misinformation. I do think, however, that there is a serious imbalance in the sanctimony about it. I'm not saying that two isolated points on a website are equivalent to your "list"--though one has to point out that you've cited no sources and quoted no statements, merely paraphrased arguments--but that you're not looking critically at the arguments that you favor, certainly not with the same standards you apply to the No campaign.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree that the No campaign to Cordorcet would be "We can't understand it!", not to mention they'd be making the points about voting machines and "It elects the loser!"

(Although I'd like to think that the principle of the Condorcet criterion is straightforward and natural - if one considered having separate elections each between two candidates, and A beat B, and A beat C, it seems hard to argue that B or C should be the winner, not A. But it gets tricky when trying to think how this is decided and worked out in a single election...)

I see your point about the psychological issue. And I agree that tossing a coin would be the best thing to do (I also liked this comment). Hmm, thinking about it - I want AV to pass, just so I can worry people by tossing a coin as I'm making my vote :)