Yes or no

[altariel]

OK, f'listers, let rip. In 100 words or less, and without reference to the other case, tell me why I should vote either 'yes' or 'no' to the following question:

"Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the 'alternative vote' system instead of the current 'first past the post' system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?"

Non-UK perspectives welcome.

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Pro-AV sites that suggest that to be concerned about people's anxiety means that you are calling people stupid really annoy me.

Quite. It's one of the main concerns of designing research tools in the social sciences: Is this accessible? Does this exclude people in any way? How manageable is it for someone with dyslexia, for example, or someone with limited mobility? (Those huge ballots for the EU elections are astonishing!)

There's a clarity to the process of FPTP: "Put an X next to the name or the symbol of your choice". If we're serious about enfranchising the disenfranchised, then complicating the process doesn't seem to help.

And, yes, this is nothing to do with stupidity! It's to do with disempowerment, or one's relationship to institutional power, or any one of all manner of things!

So I haven't really ever been given an answer to this that satisfies me. Even a case study of a small number of voters talking about voting in FPTP and AV elections and comparing the experience would be somewhere for me to start.

I guess that if AV gets through then there's money set aside to do TV adverts and educational leaflets, and so on.