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

[king-of-wrong.livejournal.com]

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.

[1st-law.livejournal.com]

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.