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

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure about my answers to the second two questions (it needs reform, and AV is non-ideal). I'm just not sure about my answer to the first question...

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

It's all very similar to the "Should Australia be a republic" poll a few years back. The choice was between business as usual or a really odd new system. Many Aussies who didn't want the monarchy still preferred the monarchy to the mad new system, so voted to keep the monarchy...

[venta.livejournal.com]

it needs reform, and AV is non-ideal

Indeed - I think that's how many people feel. But the various campaigners would have you believe you have to tick opposite boxes to express those two opinions.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that AV losing was almost a given, but the increasingly desperate and transparently misleading lines taken by its opponents recently make me wonder.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

The question is do we want AV or FPTP.

For that question the answer is a clear 'AV', but it's the wrong question and only being asked because there was no way that Clegg could get a genuinely good system past the Tories.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes; the problem is what's going to happen with the results? If AV wins, do we necessarily get it? (I've not seen any commitment on that).

If AV loses, are we never allowed to consider electoral reform ever again because "the country is clearly against it"?

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

No, and Yes.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

If Cameron chooses to ignore an AV yes vote, the coalition dissolves (well actually, Clegg remains to witter, but the rest of the LD MPs bugger off), and a Vote of No Confidence causes an election. Then Labour get the most seats, but not an overall majority, and go into coalition with the LDs. Many argue that a narrow AV yes with a low turnout is not a mandate for reform, but the LDs say 'tough' and make the new system their key condition.

(Of course this assumes the LDs have any MPs after the election, they may implode)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

The official question is covered here. As far as I know, it has now been changed to the simpler second version proposed by the Electoral Commission.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aha, thanks for that.

Although, referring to a different thread elsewhere this morning, I note that that article you linked to says:

Anyone getting more than 50% of first-preference votes is elected. If no-one gets 50% of votes the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their backers' second choices allocated to those remaining. This process continues until one candidate has at least 50% of all votes cast.

So I maintain it's no wonder I'm confused!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

AFAIK the current proposed wording of the question is:

"At present, the UK uses the 'first past the post' system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the 'alternative vote' system be used instead?"

which is not too far from your first notion.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

The bill clearly states that the outcome of the referendum is binding, although it wouldn't apply to any election held before 2015. But politics is politics, and of course a Yes vote could be ignored if the coalition breaks up before that.

However, I think that if the referendum really does deliver a Yes, no political party would then want to be seen to be so flagrantly disregarding the will of the people as to do anything that would block its implementation. It would make the anger over tuition fees look like chicken feed.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yes, that last sentence should at the very least end with '...of the remaining votes'. It's something I try to be careful about when I'm debating it with ordinary voters, but as I said in my own post, there is a real tension between giving a strictly accurate account of AV, and actually getting across its real benefits in a way that most voters can understand. The No campaign, of course, are ready to jump all over us whenever we lean too far in either direction - but it's pretty clear to me that they are far worse offenders when it comes to misleading over-simplifications.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

no political party would then want to be seen to be so flagrantly disregarding the will of the people

That may depend on what the turnout is. A very low turnout may make it easier for a Government to disregard it for political expedience, as they could argue that it doesn't represent a mandate.

[venta.livejournal.com]

As already waffled at you elsewhere, I think that the system would be unworkable with the requriement that one candidate has at least 50%. So, bascially, misreporting from a number of sources (BBC to Guido Fawkes) nearly had me automatically voting 'no'. It bugs me, rather, that the BBC can (in my view) totally mis-describe the system like that and not be pulled up for it.

In fact: Someone is wrong on the internet! (http://xkcd.com/386/)

Otherly, thank you for coming along and being informed at me :)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Heh, no worries. There's no point in me having boned up on it all if I don't then pass that knowledge on to other people - especially where doing so also helps to encourage votes for the Yes camp! I genuinely believe that a cool-headed examination of the actual facts should lead logically to a Yes vote for most people, unless they are MPs sitting in a currently-safe seat which would become less safe as a result. But it's just getting those facts across in the right way to the right people that's the problem... :-/

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

In the Australian system it does require 50%, but you are required to rank all candidates.

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

May I ask one question? 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'.

Initially, I'd have said 'halve the vote' of any transfers, so by the time your vote has been transferred 4 times, it's worth 6.25% of a first preference.

I understand that this might mean that no candidate reached 50% of all votes, but it would still boil down to a choice between 2, and then it could be a simple numeric thing.
[deleted and edited for maths]

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes - it makes sense in that context. But without a requirement to express a second preference, you'd end up with (potentially) a lot of elections with no results. Which (up til now) has been my objection to AV - as it's described on the BBC/electoral-reform.org/various other reputable places. Finding out that objection isn't valid because it's based on something that isn't true is rather worrying.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

The law passed mandates the passing of AV; and I can't imagine any government would dare back out on the will of a referendum but I suppose it might just happen - if, say, we had an election before 2015 and the winning party ran on a platform of a different system.

If AV loses there is little hope of us seeing another electoral reform opportunity within the next twenty years or so because FPTP favours those parties likely to be in power and they will be able to point to the failure of AV as a lack of appetite for change. I'm not sure AV winning would make it much different from that (we can't tamper too often with the system) but at least we get AV in the meantime.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Though, of course, not as worrying as finding out after voting ;)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

No problem. The best articulation I have seen of why the value of votes does not change between rounds is here. It may also help to think of it as equivalent to a multi-round knock-off vote of the type used on The X-Factor, except with voters expressing all their preferences from the start, rather than being asked to vote again each time a candidate is eliminated. Basically, what's happening is that at each round, all voters are effectively voting again from scratch - it's just that those whose first preference is still in the race are assumed still to back that candidate, whereas those whose favourite candidate has been eliminated have to make a new choice.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Yes! Sadly I'd been living in the UK for slightly too long to submit an absentee vote on that one (only by a couple of months IIRC).

Much as the new system was a mad strawman invented by Howard to create a bias towards the status quo, I still would have voted in favour of it. Really though, I just wanted the governor general to be renamed, selected the same way he/she is now, and no longer rubber stamped by the Queen.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Maybe all the Yes! campaign needs to do to win over Joe Public is to say "hey, this'll make it more like the X Factor!"

<ducks and runs>

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Hey, we'll try anything. And we have. ;-)