I'm genuinely struggling to see what this system offers over FPTP.
I'm not normally so egotistical as to go around quoting myself, but I really can't do much better than:
1. AV is essentially automatic tactical voting: if your preferred candidate genuinely cannot win this election, then your vote is automatically shifted to your next preference, and so on. It allows a voter to accurately express their preferences without risking wasting their vote.
2. AV does make safe seats less common. This is an important part of reducing the power of political parties (as they are less able to parachute favoured candidates into safe seats) and makes individual MPs more readily held to account.
That's what AV offers over FPTP. Wasted votes and an overabundance of safe seats are two problems that arise under FPTP when there are more than two candidates per seat. AV fixes those two problems. With the trend in recent decades away from effectively two-party politics, fixing these problems is timely.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2011-03-29 02:37 pm (UTC)I'm not normally so egotistical as to go around quoting myself, but I really can't do much better than:
1. AV is essentially automatic tactical voting: if your preferred candidate genuinely cannot win this election, then your vote is automatically shifted to your next preference, and so on. It allows a voter to accurately express their preferences without risking wasting their vote.
2. AV does make safe seats less common. This is an important part of reducing the power of political parties (as they are less able to parachute favoured candidates into safe seats) and makes individual MPs more readily held to account.
That's what AV offers over FPTP. Wasted votes and an overabundance of safe seats are two problems that arise under FPTP when there are more than two candidates per seat. AV fixes those two problems. With the trend in recent decades away from effectively two-party politics, fixing these problems is timely.