So, after having thought about this tactical voting business, I've come up with an idea for a change that could be made to our election system that would improve things
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In what way is this superior to a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, where you rank your candidates from 1 (favourite) to N where N is the number of candidates (you can also stop before reaching N if you want).
In fact this is sometimes called the Australian system, so you might have come across it...
Yes, I had heard of the STV system, since (if I recall correctly) Bath University Student Unions used it for union elections.
The only advantage is simplicity. I'm also working from the assumption that for a lot of people tend to have maybe a definite favourite, maybe a definite "urgh, not them" and not much in between.
I know that, despite actually looking at this a few hours ago, I can't even remember who was standing where I voted, other than Lab, Lib, Con and BNP. And I'm sure there were more candidates.
And yes, there is probably the argument that before voting I should sit down and educate myself about all the candidates running in order to fully decide whether, for example, I've truly ranked the 6th and 7th candidate according to my wishes for the political future of this country.
Quite a lot of the systems allow you to write in any number of votes, you don't have to do them all; and in Australia the parties issue "how to vote" cards so if you don't care very much you just take it along and tick the boxes as your party tells you to.
Negative voting would produce entertainingly huge negative votes for fringe rightwing parties.
Because you (i.e. that voter) weren't paying attention and didn't bother to understand the process. I suspect I should have made it clearer that I included the last case to show a problem with the system, which is that it would making voting slightly more complicated and I suspect people would object to that.
And yeah, it's not an ideal solution, just an idea I had.
It would be interesting to see how it compares to other systems on various criteria.
I think it wouldn't solve the problem of tactical voting (as damerell says; if I'm in a marginal seat, even if I use my -1 against a party I don't like, I've still got the dilemma of whether to use my +1 for a tactical vote or the party I like best).
I also don't think it would solve the problem of vote splitting - although it might reduce the problem (if a similar candidate is introduced, the +1 vote is split, but people can still use their -1 on the same other candidate).
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In fact this is sometimes called the Australian system, so you might have come across it...
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The only advantage is simplicity. I'm also working from the assumption that for a lot of people tend to have maybe a definite favourite, maybe a definite "urgh, not them" and not much in between.
I know that, despite actually looking at this a few hours ago, I can't even remember who was standing where I voted, other than Lab, Lib, Con and BNP. And I'm sure there were more candidates.
Reply
Reply
Negative voting would produce entertainingly huge negative votes for fringe rightwing parties.
Reply
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Because you (i.e. that voter) weren't paying attention and didn't bother to understand the process. I suspect I should have made it clearer that I included the last case to show a problem with the system, which is that it would making voting slightly more complicated and I suspect people would object to that.
And yeah, it's not an ideal solution, just an idea I had.
Reply
Reply
I think it wouldn't solve the problem of tactical voting (as damerell says; if I'm in a marginal seat, even if I use my -1 against a party I don't like, I've still got the dilemma of whether to use my +1 for a tactical vote or the party I like best).
I also don't think it would solve the problem of vote splitting - although it might reduce the problem (if a similar candidate is introduced, the +1 vote is split, but people can still use their -1 on the same other candidate).
Reply
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