No2AV
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Today the official website for the opposition to the Cameron and Clegg hastily knocked together compromise on changes to the voting system has gone live.
In what has got to be the most surreal referendum ever, two parties who don’t want the Alternative Vote because one wants the status quo and the other one wants electoral anarchy, have pushed through a parliamentary bill offering a public choice in the teeth of opposition from a party which actually offered AV in its manifesto. Comes into the “can’t make it up” category.
One of the lasting AV moments of the Australian election was a candidate in Canberra being elected on something like the 30th round of voting after two weeks of counting. Fun. Impossible to imagine how exciting it is to rank over 30 politicians in a list of how much of a dick you think they are compared with each other…although you don’t have to in Oz because you can ask a party of your choice to do it for you. *sigh* How much more power do we want to hand over to politicians to appoint themselves?
UPDATE: TheEye has been thoroughly and rightly turned over in the Comments for the Oz bit by Angry Exile.
Being in a jurisdiction unaffected by this nonsense, TheEye will just relax and watch the farce from a patronising distance.
The British public is not in the least interested in AV, except for some Lib Dems who see it as a vehicle for ensuring their minority participation in any government of the future be it left or right.
Instead how about Give Us Our EU Referndum!
oops, REFERENDUM
Yes, and the really ironic thing is that AV wasn’t ever LibDem policy but an In/Out referendum vote WAS! Of course they would campaign Yes and it was only a cynical ploy to outflank the others, but it was there in blank’n’white…
Sorting out preferences for the House of Reprehensibles isn’t that complex. Most seats don’t have any more candidates than you’d see in a British election. I had a choice of 6 candidates for my ‘local’ MP in the British election. In the federal election here it was also 6. It’s only for the Senate where the ballot slip looks like a roll of wallpaper, though the numbers vary quite a lot from one state or territory to the next. The ACT, basically Canberra only had half a dozen or so, while I think New South Wales had 84 (here in Victoria there were 60).
Don’t confuse the AV type electoral system – and it’s not quite AV – with the reason for the result taking so long. That’s due to more to compulsory voting and the need to get every single vote counted or to record that a valid excuse for not voting was provided, even if the last one is coming from one pissed backpacker on a gap year in the Andean mountains or some poor digger ducking gunfire in the ‘Stan (as distinct from British squaddies getting postal votes that wouldn’t make it back in time to be counted in case they voted against Gordon). It only buggered things up because it was very quickly clear that it was a close election and so normally the absentee votes that wouldn’t be large enough to make a difference became important. The 2007 election ran on exactly the same system and the result was known a few hours after the polls closed.
“…you can ask a party of your choice to do it for you.“
Again, only for the Senate, which by the way isn’t AV at all but STV. The equivalent in the UK is, of course, the House of Lords, where a party not necessarily of your choice does the choosing without asking you at all. You don’t get the party option on ballot papers for the House of Reprehensibles, but with as few as 4 dickhea… er, candidates to choose from it’s not rocket science. Granted, the Senate form is a genuine pain in the arse, and if you don’t want to let one of the parties/groups do your thinking for you then it’s really necessary to spend an hour or so planning it out before election day. We made a crib sheet to take in and copy from, but of course 90% just put a 1 in a party box and let them sort it out.
There are things I don’t like about the Aussie system – compulsory voting, compulsory rather than optional preferences, the insistence on a Senate election when they’re on fixed terms and can’t take their seats for ten months – but on the whole I prefer it to the UK.
On the other hand given that my MP in both countries is a massive dickhead does it make much fucking difference anyway?
Thanks for that, Exile, very interesting. Yes, I’d blurred the two voting systems for the different Houses unintentionally and I apologise. My memory was of reading about 30/32 stages somewhere…which makes sense because on an 84 candidate list the jokers will be eliminated immediately and their lower preferences (being so small in number) wouldn’t top any other candidate enough to hit a threshold.
Much of the analysis I’ve seen tends to indicate that AV exaggerates landslides when they occur, so would you say that there would be more of a chance of a large third party in Australia under a different system?
I’m not affected by these changes so I’m more of a spectator enjoying the political back room deals and compromises which got us here rather than rooting for any particular outcome. Hence the main paragraph being about the politics rather than the nitty gritty.
My apologies for the inaccuracies in the Australia part of the post – I’ll put something in the post to that effect, and thanks for putting me straight.
Ps its funny how the no to AV camp are talking about themselves in the third person – they are mainly funded by right wing tories – the leader, Elliott, won a tory best mates award a couple of years ago and is now paid by donations from them but yet again they are again giving mis-information and trying to convince the unsuspecting reader they are something differnet. spreading mis-inormation is the only way they have a chance of winning
Surely everyone who rises to a position like that has a political history of some shade?
An anti-EEC rally of a few decades ago could have seen Enoch Powell and Tony Benn on the same platform. It’s the message which counts, not the messenger. If the message is wrong then it’s up to the other side to counter that.
And I’ve put me gravatar down somewhere and now I can’t find it. Oh, cock!
I’ve posted it as two parts. Nice article, very good reading. Thanks for that.