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

[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!

[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.

[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... :-/

[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]

[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.

[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>

[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.

[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.

[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.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[venta.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I think the best way to describe it is 50% of all votes cast *after transfers*. If your ballot becomes exhausted because all your listed preferences are eliminated, then you are not transferred, you don't cast a vote in subsequent rounds, and you aren't part of the group of which the winner needs half.

AV supporters have IMO misled on this point - in particular exaggerating the importance that it would have even if it were true. OK, so an AV winner does have over 50% of the vote, after discounting all the people who didn't vote at all, and all the people who didn't express an opinion between the winner and the second-placed candidate.

Of course we think, "so what?". At the point where I'm expressing a preference for the BNP over the National Front (or vice-versa) on the basis that I think that one of them is very slightly less a bunch of racists and criminals than the other, I don't in any sense *support* the winner, and if pro-AV people are going to interpret that preference as "support", then I'm hardly going to want to express a preference. I suppose I'll just take whatever racists I'm served.

Anyway, it's actually expected that under an AV system, many or most voters don't need to express a second preference, because elections are reasonably predictable. Once you've listed either of the candidates who (eventually) makes the final round, there's no point listing anyone below them, because there is no possibility that your ballot will go any further than that candidate. I expect that in many constituencies it will be pretty clear who the last two candidates will be. If you don't know who the last two will be (and after all elections are only *reasonably* predictable, not entirely predictable), or if you want to give an ultimately futile show of support to someone else, then you list two or more preferences.

Consider the London mayoral election. Conducted with a special dumbed-down AV system three times, but fundamentally if you wanted to have any influence on who won, literally all that mattered on the day was how you relatively ranked Boris and Ken. Most of the first-choice votes went to one of the two of them, suggesting that most London voters don't need AV on their own account. They might want in future want to express a first choice for a candidate expected to come third or worse, of course.

Last time out, 83% of voters used their second preference. I can't predict whether the ability to express a third preference, or general antipathy toward AV, would depress this. Or whether it was inflated in the first place by things like the Lab-Green second preference pact, a perception unique that the supplementary preference (uniquely) is an important "show of support" for someone you don't really want to win, or perhaps even by Londoners not really understanding the system.

[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.

[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]

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.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

If you expected that under AV, the number of votes to win is 50% of the turnout rather than 50% of the final round, did you also expect that under AV, you can turn out and cast your ballot with no preferences on it at all, and if there are enough of these then there's a no-result? Was this the case in the mock election? Were the mock voters told that it was the case.

We've never had a genuine RON option on ballots, and I'd expect to hear about it if anyone in parliament was at all serious about trying to introduce one even by means of exhausted AV ballots. In a tight race, of course, it doesn't require very many such ballots to prevent a result. Nobody in politics really wants to see the electorate "doing a Wisconsin" where a minority withholds quoracy, however entertaining it is in a "fight the power!" sense.

[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.