Yes To Fairer Votes photo in Cambridge

[chess]

The AV Yes Campaign are doing a photo shoot on Saturday. I can't get to it because I'm at a player event, so I thought I would post about it. Event details and signup at http://tinyurl.com/purplephoto

I suspect if I actually made any commentary on AV I would mostly be preaching to the converted here, but I'm always happy to host a political argument on this or basically any subject if you like :).

The very short version is: I want the AV Yes Campaign to win because it would mean that I never, ever have to deliver any propaganda with the phrase 'two-horse race' or a stupid bar graph showing how Foo Can't Win Here ever again...

Comments

[chess]

As I understand it, you don't need PR at all to eliminate tactical voting - you just need a preferential voting system, which AV is. Once you have one of those, people don't need to vote for X to keep out Y (when they'd prefer to vote for Z) - they just list them '1st: Z, 2nd: X, 3rd: Y'.

You still need to encourage them to remember to put X as their second preference to keep out Y, but that's much less skeevy and unpleasant than telling them not to express their actual preference at all.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Mm. But the tricky case is when X and Y are the parties actually likely to win, Z is third and there are significantly many votes going to minority parties. Then the deferral from Z is less likely ever to happen, and it's more of a priority (for X's publicist) to persuade the Z voter to put X first.

Of course there's also more need for X to avoid offending the dyed-in-the-wool Z voter so much as to lose the second-choice vote, so maybe it works out.

[naath.livejournal.com]

That's how I understand it too.

Also that if Z want X *and* Y voters to 2nd-pref Z then they HAVE TO BE NICE (or at least NICER) about X and Y.