Alternative Vote

[lost]

as you don't have to rank all the candidates then its still possible that one candidate will not get 50% of the vote as people may only vote for 1 candidate or 2 minority parties... what happens then another election or can some one win with 49%?

[Alcatraz]

as you don't have to rank all the candidates then its still possible that one candidate will not get 50% of the vote as people may only vote for 1 candidate or 2 minority parties... what happens then another election or can some one win with 49%?

[lost]

If it gets to the final 2, then whoever has the most vote share wins

Edited May 6, 2011 by lost

[beLIEveR]

I'm furious with the way the last six weeks have gone.

I can understand why the Yes campaign felt it had to go negative: the Tories were always going to do so. But once that decision was made, they only needed to do two things:

1. Put up 2,000 BNP No posters on massive billboards, ensuring that Griffin's face and the BNP logo were prominent.

2. Send Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg to Benghazi/Christchurch/Fukushima for two months.

I've seen some polls suggesting that the Yes vote will be as low as 32%. For f**k's sake, a referendum on bringing back hanging would garner more than 32% support. Incompentent morons.

I'm one of the few people who felt that the coalition agreement had the potential to be a good thing. The caveat being that the Lib Dems would stick to the letter of it, and refused to support anything else unless they wholeheartedly agreed with it. Didn't even occur to me that they could possibly f**k an electoral reform referendum up, given that they have been planning for one (in various guises) for 90 years.

[eFestivals]

I'm one of the few people who felt that the coalition agreement had the potential to be a good thing. The caveat being that the Lib Dems would stick to the letter of it, and refused to support anything else unless they wholeheartedly agreed with it. Didn't even occur to me that they could possibly f**k an electoral reform referendum up, given that they have been planning for one (in various guises) for 90 years.

I still think that the coalition agreement is a good thing. For all its faults it's far better that the tories have some restraint on their actions rather than the none-at-all which would have been the alternative after a 2nd election.

But as far as the AV referendum goes, that was a f**k-up from the very start. It's not what Clegg and the LibDems wanted, and neither is what the vast majority of people who want electoral reform wanted. But it's all that was allowed by the tories, because a PR referendum was too dangerous a step for them to take, as it would see them out of power maybe forever as its consequence.

And so while I don't much like it, I can see why Clegg accepted it - he, just like you and me, might well have been weighing up those two factors against each other, and concluded that the compromise was better than no compromise and no coalition.

Of course, there's other things in the mix too, such as a desire for power - after all, that's what people go into politics for (along with what the power allows them to do).

But more than the LibDems, it's nu-Labour who hold the responsibility for wasting the opportunity for much needed electoral reform - they had both the commitment (tho it proved to be empty) as well as the power to achieve it, but chose to do nothing.

[beLIEveR]

I agree, Clegg had to accept AV. How he thought the Lib Dems would ever get a PR referendum from either party is beyond me. And he clearly did, given how strongly he came out against AV a year or so ago.

EDIT: My point was that once AV got into the coalition agreement, I figured it was a banker. Sorting that out was the Liberal Democrat party's only job. The majority of people in this country want more of a say in how the country is run, so if both campaigns were run competently, it would have been a comfortable yes.

Edited May 6, 2011 by beLIEveR

[feral chile]

The point is that what you think about any candidate and who might vote for them is not for your consideration. It is only your own vote (or multiple votes if with AV) that is for your consideration.

In a democracy, if people want to vote for a candidate who you dislike, that is their right just as much as it's your right to vote for who you like.

It's a mistake to consider issues like this on such an insular and self-serving basis. When it comes to voting, we each have equal rights to vote for who whoever we choose.

Edited May 6, 2011 by feral chile