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...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

As far as I understand it, you can only actually achieve tactical voting if you have very good information about the voting intentions of everyone in the area, which is rarely achieved by anyone - and if you get it wrong you lose big-time...

In addition the vote has to be very very close for these distortions to occur.

You and your friend want Labour to win and you do this by voting Lib Dem in this case however this only works because the majority of Conservatives would also like Labour to win. If they are happy to have them as second choice this allows them this chance.

The vote has to be very close for one or two votes to make the difference in any reasonable system. Larger blocks can successfully follow this strategy in less close races - obviously the less close it gets the larger the block required!

I think the size of the block needs to be vote difference between the 2nd and 3rd party plus one. Obviously plus chess's requirement that you have to broadly know the 2nd choices of the people in the 2nd and 3rd parties.

I agree. The comparison point in FPTP is a block the size of the difference between the 1st and 2nd parties + 1 and knowledge of which the top 2 parties will be.

Tactical voting always relies on having information about how others are going to vote - hence the bar charts with the dodgy axis.

In this case the information you need is what voters for one party are likely to list as their second choice preference. If AV becomes our voting system I expect a rash of surveys to give us that information. In fact if it does starting a polling company would be a smart move!