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

[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>

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

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

[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]

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?

[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.

[emarkienna.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.

Can you give me an example where knowing the previous results would mean you might want to change your preferences?

But either way - yes I know that runoff voting isn't identical to instant runoff voting, but I don't see how that affects the point about why people's votes aren't reduced in value? Why should people's votes be reduced in value in IRV/AV if their most preferred candidate drops out in a round, but not in runoff voting?

The other reason why votes aren't reduced is because it would make the change pointless - you'd be going back to the tactical voting decisions of whether to vote for a minor party or not, just that it'll be a "reduced" vote you get instead of a "wasted" one.

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.

What if the choice is between IRV and FPTP?

[condign.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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...

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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 :)

[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.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

This would have been my argument too.