chess | Yes To Fairer Votes photo in Cambridge

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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...

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So, coalitions every time and endless people whining that $PARTY has betrayed them by coming third in the election and yet not carrying out every single detail of what they said they'd do if they won? I'll give it a miss, thanks...

Just out of interest, though, how is AV "fairer"? In FPTP, every vote cast has an equal weight and is pretty much fair under any definition you can come up with. As opposed to AV, where disproportionate weighting is given to people whose first preference loses badly.

(Not that it matters, because with the Labour lords filibustering the AV discussion, it's going to miss the deadlines for a May 5th vote...)

I'm not sure it would always lead to coalitions. Clearly if one party wins by a few votes everywhere they will get a majority of MPs just like under FPTP. Also aside from the gnashing of teeth I don't think coalitions are too bad anyway. We aren't very used to them but they have them on the continent and they work most of the time.

Fair is always hard to define. I really don't agree that anyone gets disproportionate weighting in AV.

I'd phrase it in terms of incentives. In FPTP you have no incentive to vote for the candidate who's only poling at 10% so you might as well vote for someone else. If you chose to vote for the people you want to win your vote would be "wasted". This is undesirable because it means people aren't voting for who they want. They are second guessing who they believe will win and then choosing.

Surely it is better that people are encouraged to be honest in their preferences.

I really don't agree that anyone gets disproportionate weighting in AV.

Really? How about this scenario: 49% of voters choose Red, 49% choose Blue, and nearly all of the remaining 2% pick the BNP. The minority parties are eliminated, second choices tallied, and the election is called based on the second choices of the people who voted for the extremists. Their votes are considered more times, even if they're only tallied once in the end.

What AV does, at least as I understand it, is give the tie-break decision in a close election to the people whose choices are furthest from the mainstream. We see that in coalition negotiations across the world, where a minority party gets to make demands of the first- and second-choice parties, despite polling far far lower - as they say, when things are nearly balanced, it's the guy with his thumb on the scale who gets to decide.

Also, depending on the order in which the losers are eliminated you can tip the results: AV does not meet the Condorcet criterion.

It is true that the people that would prefer minority parties get to contribute if the election is close but they only have a choice of one of the two majority parties that ended up having broad support.

AV strongly favors candidates who appeal to most people and so you wouldn't expect extremists to get elected.

As is being discussed in the other thread the Concordat Criterion can't be satisfied in any system that has independence of irrelevant alternatives. That is vote splitting or other similar distortions.

I would argue that the concordat criterion is less important than independence of irrelevant alternatives as in most cases parties can be ranked in terms of similarity to an ideal or loosely on a political spectrum. This means that if people rank one party slightly above another then a good number of people will also have ranked those parties the other way round. This avoids a number of issues you can get with truly arbitrary sets of preferences like the example given in the other thread.

Finally I would say even though no voting system can be prefect AV is much closer to electing the candidate with the broadest support than FPTP.

AV minimises the total unhappiness with the result, which some people (such as me) think is a fairer way of deciding what the result should be than the current system, which can give a result a plurality of voters prefer but a majority of voters are unhappy with.

Of course whether one believes this to be "fairer" is a matter of opinion since "fairness" is not completely objective.

A different example illustrating the non-objectiveness of fairness - I have 1000 pounds of money to give away to people, I have 10 people asking for money. I could say "it is fair to give each person 100 pounds", or I could say "it is fair to assess each person's needs and apportion the money according to need"; both options are justifiable as "fair".

"coalitions every time and endless people whining that $PARTY has betrayed them by coming third in the election and yet not carrying out every single detail of what they said they'd do if they won?"

Hopefully, "coalitions every time" should lead (over the course of a few years) to the public realising that give and take is a natural part of how coalitions work. I don't think "the public don't understand coalitions" means "we should avoid coalitions" but "we should help the public understand coalitions"; if they're more natural in the voting system, that'll be a likely consequence.