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

[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.