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

[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]

It does make sense, but I find myself slightly bemused anyway.

Over 80% of people used their second choice in the last London mayoral election, despite the fact that 78% of people voted first-choice for one of the candidates whom all the polling said would be the final two.

In fact I'm surprised by the actual voting behavior, and taking on board that surprise causes me to *also* be surprised that fewer than 50% used their second preference in the AV mock election.

Something, perhaps the fact that second-choice totals are published "above the fold" of the returning officers' statement, causes people to express a second choice in London when it makes no difference to the result of any round of voting. Something else then causes them to not express a second choice in the mock-AV even though it would affect the result.

[condign.livejournal.com]

Isn't the most obvious candidate for the difference that these are two separate polities? The mock election was not limited to Londoners. I would expect their voting habits to be different, just as I would not be shocked to find DC Metro area voters to behave differently than US voters as a whole. Not saying that is the only explanation, but at least an obvious line of inquiry.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

True - any electorate that gives the Greens 16.9% on FPTP is already pretty unusual. They got 3% of the first round in the mayoral election.

So I guess I don't mean that some reason causes "them" to omit the second preference in the mock election. It's a different "them", but still there's a big contrast. Someone, probably a candidate chasing second-preference votes, is going to want to know the reason.

[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]

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.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

"Were the mock voters told that it was the case."

Ah, no, I see: it wasn't that the BBC used the wrong system, it's that Guido has (no doubt unintentionally) misled his readers about the pros and cons of AV by making a false statement about its results. The BBC stated the result correctly.

[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.