Poll: UK voters don't understand the electoral system

[onebyone]

Andrew Neil reports a poll in which 83% said that in the event of a hung parliament the party with the most votes should form a government, and 51% said that the party with the most seats should form a government. So at least one third hold contradictory opinions simultaneously (or, more likely, they're answering on the basis of some idea that the

Comments

[bateleur]

Hear, hear!

(Also, as zandev and I have been demonstrating on one of my recent posts, attempts to create any system remotely approaching fairness quickly descend into brain-melting complexity!)

[onebyone]

Without reading all of that thread, range voting fails the definition of irrelevant alternatives provided by Arrow. If you've given a candidate 100, then you can only raise another candidate past them by *reducing* that 100 vote, which in turn means you could harm that candidate even if the one you're promoting is irrelevant. As you say, we're probably not very interested in people who irrationally rank their first preference less than 100

[onebyone]

creates an additive model of utilityActually in your formulation, an additive model of "happiness". But for me to even vote according to instructions, I must subscribe to some form of utilitarianism which allows me to know not only that I prefer X to Y and Y to Z, but to know *how much* I prefer them by. That's a whole other psychological study

[bateleur]

That's a whole other psychological study

Indeed.

As an aside, I'm very surprised you want a "how much" factor to your utility measure like that. Not that it's in any way inconsistent, but it's not a preference I associate with Game Theory skeptics.

In practice the next big constitutional question we face in the UK might be...

I'm sure we can prefix the issue with "meta-" an arbitrarily large number of times and keep ourselves amused all day.

[thecesspit]

They tried some sort of quota style voting here in BC. Or at least proposing it. It was 'fair' but too complicated and lacked local representation. In a province where local representation might be over a constituency the size of England (or more) combing 6 MLA's (MPs) into one region just didn't seem viable.

STV or top up seems the way to go, for simplicity but still keeping representation at the loacl level. The downside is the upside to a party list. Party leaders would be on the list. This would mean you couldn't vote out the PM/his cronies, but the PM and his cronies could spend time at the top level and the constituency wouldn't suffer as much.

One other way, which doesn't work really with the idea of a small-c conservative House Of Lords, is that one house is FPP, the other directly PR'd.

[thecesspit]

My guess is it's moot.

Clegg does deal with Tories which involves a Ministerial position and Electoral reform referendum. Tories campaign against reform, it gets 40-60% of the vote, not enough for 2/3rd majority. Clegg collapses the government on the first immigration/European issue, re-run in 12 months, Tories get slim majority, Lib Dems lose more seats.

If the Libs had gained seats, they would have had the power to deal with Labour and LibLab alliance would not collapse quite so quickly.

Oddly, there's a good percentage of the voters who should love a FPP... the BNP, Greens and UKIP...

[undyingking]

should love a FPP... the BNP, Greens and UKIP

Why so? They got 0, 1 and 0 seats under FPP, but would likely get far more under PR (about 12, 6 and 20 on the current vote percentages).

[thecesspit]

I meant to write 'under proportional representation'.