My belief in the need for a single transferable vote electoral system in this country, based upon multi-member constituencies returning up to 10 MPs each, has never wavered ever since.
If it’s part of Spud’s bedrock beliefs then clearly it is wrong. So, that’s that decision easily made then.
Am I the only one to suspect it won’t be that hard to turn up an example where he claimed something different?
There used to be a denizen of this parish – Noel Scoper – who was a dab hand at doing just that. Hopefully he has not departed this mortal coil, but given the evil of Starmer/ Burnham, and frankly, the horrors of the last 29 years, which have been akin to an illegal occupation of the country, he may have.
I will say Murphy has been fairly staunch in his support of PR – and for him STV, with its diffusely unaccountable power, which enables the politicisation of all aspects of life is, barring a North Korean style dictatorship with him at its head, probably his dream gig – an ideal climate for someone who doesn’t do very much useful work and is heavily into politics to flourish, which is why I oppose it so viscerally, whatever its form.
…returning up to 10 MPs each…
So instead of 650 we’ll have 6500 of the buggers? We’re going to have to increase ammunition production…
Not necessarily – I presume with multi member constituencies they would be bigger geographically to balance it out. Might be a problem of course in sparsely populated areas such as the north of Scotland, but hey ho. At least it would be better than having an additional closed list system where the party chooses who is on the list and their position (and hence who is going to get “elected” from it). Of course it’s obvious why people like the Lib Dem’s would be in favour of PR (as they think they’ll be “in” no matter how the votes fall), and presumably some in Labour think it may favour them – though I am less sure.
All voting systems are unfair, so trust Murphy to choose the daftest.
The Irish ( ie British colonial ) system has always fascinated me, but it still didnt stop the FG/FF uniparty from ruling for all those years. ( And allowed that fat twat Varadker to be Teashop ).
T-shirt, if you please.
I’m surprised he wants decent-sized multi-member constituencies, because I’d have thought the main beneficiaries from that would be Reform.
I’d have thought the ghastly single-member STV system the LibDems tried to foist on us under the coalition with the ‘Conservatives’ would have been more his sort of thing.
But of course he is a bit thick, so he might not have realised that. Or is just confident that Reform will be banned by the next election.
Judging by this conference I’d say in fairness to him that’s a very strong prospect to be fair – once Danny Tommo is imprisoned for 10 years (Possibly longer) by whatever Kangaroo Body they use they’ll feel emboldened.
The Lib Dems believed this would happen, but once you get AV, people will vote differently. People who like some minor party might put Communists or The Ayn Rand Party as first choice. Because it isn’t a wasted vote. Even if they then put Labour or Conservative as seconds.
Maybe all the people who think “LD, as more chance of winning” find that actually, the Greens are the first choice, not the LDs.
As someone once pointed out: I prefer political deals done in smoke-filled rooms before the election not after it.
As we are witnessing in Germany, PR is a conspiracy against the people.
I disagree, no one is always wrong. A leftie told me that everything in the Daily Mail is wrong – I pointed out that if the RFU were like him Saracens would have got away breaking the salary cap.
For rightwingers the BBC have broken a few immigration scandals.
You have obviously never listened to or read anything by the late Roy Hattersley.
STV with ten-member constituencies? He’s excelled himself here.
Ireland uses the same system with up to five members. In the five-member Carlow-Kilkenny constituency, it took 16 counts at the last election to produce a result.
For a 10-member seat, you could easily double that. It could take over 40 counts, over quite a number of days, if a significant number of candidates stood.
Surely that could be automated with punch cards?
Didn’t the Yanks try that? I seem to remember it didn’t shorten the process.
That’s because they let their chads hang.
ISTR that some Democrat official in Florida was caught with a vote-punching machine in his car during the recount:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1374635/Democrat-hid-voting-machine-in-his-car.html
The US has delays because the districts are in a game of reporting chicken.
The first to report loses, because the other districts then know how many votes to “find” (manufacture/lose) to produce the desired result.
Notice that the areas not in contention report pretty quickly.
Are you asking voters to use card punches to vote 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ……49th?
Or do you want the tellers to spend the night transmitting the data from the ballot paper to punched cards before some machine lifts the data from them? If the latter how do you know that the punched cards mirror the ballot papers?
Why not put them into a scanner-photocopier and scan images of each page, then use OCR-type software to identify where the marker-pen blobs are?
You put all the images up on the website, then anyone can find their own and check it was recorded correctly, and people can write and use their own software to re-process them and look for anomalies.
Secret Ballot which ceases to be secret if anyone can look up afterwards how he/she voted. What makes you imagine that no-one will demand to look over Mr/Mrs voter’s shoulder to see how he/she voted?
Easy. Every ballot has a unique index number on it, and on a tear-off strip at the bottom. You get given a blank ballot at random, handed to you face down. Tear off the strip and keep it. Mark your vote in secret. Put the ballot in the box.
Then when the votes have been fed into the machine for the count, you can go into the website, type in all but the last two digits of your serial number, and get a page with 100 ballot images on it, one of which is yours. Only you know which one.
See above – this vote is worth buying because you can show that strip and the buyer can match it to a publicly available vote.
Which means you can buy somebody else’s strip from them.
Or if you think it’s a particular problem, you can ask the poll workers to give you a strip that will match to a dummy vote that will be subtracted from the count later.
Every polling method has ways to cheat. And votes can be bought or coerced anyway. The buyer can ask you for a photo of the ballot paper, for example. Or there is voting by mail. Or the allegations of family voting in the Gorton and Denton by-election…
A related issue: with secret ballot your vote isn’t worth buying because you can’t prove you voted that way.
Public vote is certainly worth buying, depending on the district.
Exactly why absentee ballots should be heavily restricted.
No. One of the most important criteria for elections is that it should require collusion between a very large number of people to subvert the process. Counting paper ballots in view of overseers from all political parties provides that. Any kind of automated count runs the risk that the counting can be subverted.
If you have double the number of votes per elector and double the number of candidates then the time to sort it out will be FOUR times as long. One could not just ask a few local government employees to work an evening’s overtime and then ask them to come back the next day after pausing at 2 a.m. – it’s a big hotel to cater for them in seclusion for a week – and you could not use any volunteers from the private sector since things might go wrong if they didn’t turn up for work for three days.
Been there and done it many times john77. Oz has preferential voting for the lower house and our state wide upper house federal Senate votes pretty much resemble that multi candidate constituency thing. I used to work as temporary staff for elections, rose to the dizzying heights of Officer In Charge of the polling place for my sins.
We’d sort and count and generally we had at least the initial results by midnight. Hand written ballots, no punching here. Then I’d drive the boxes to the Returning Office with all the paperwork. It’s not that hard, just a very long day.
I gave it up when the money wasn’t enough for my time. But yes, it can be done.
My second best story from that time was the lovely old woman who wanted to vote for that nice Mr Hawke. Bob Hawke had retired ten years before (and it was his former seat) . But we were required to assist voters. The rank and file referred her to me, I filled out her ballot from the Labor how to vote card, she was happy.
But have you done it with STV with five parties with ten candidates each? AFAIK Outside Queensland it’s two or three parties and the occasional loner.
STV you have to count the first claim votes, re-allocate a %age from each winner who passed the threshhold on the first count to his/her second choices, see if anyone gets past the threshhold after the re-allocation, repeat with his/her surplus votes, when that stops eliminate the lowest-placed candidate re-allocate his/her votes to his/her second choice (or third or fourth choice if that one is already elected, see if anyone is now elected and re-allocate a %age of his/her votes to second or third or fourth choice, see if anyone else is elected and if not eliminate the now bottom candidate and so on and so on for up to forty iterations – and, of course, you’ve got scrutineers from each of the fifty candidates prepared to argue about the validity of any vote that is not a perfect replica of the model.
STV systems I’ve seen don’t do that reallocation between rounds: if your first choice is still in, on each subsequent round your vote stays with him/her/them. It’s only when your given choice falls out that your vote is reallocated to the second / third choice on your ballot.
Yes, I can see how the system you described would be much more cumbersome and time-consuming
My understanding is that Ireland still gets the final count done by about Tuesday, with the first count on Saturday. Granted that’s not as good as either UK FPTP or continental PR, but miles better than the US.
Of course, many jurisdictions in the US deliberately make it take a long time in an attempt to hide the blatant fraud. We also vote for multiple offices on one ballot which might have something to do with things taking a bit longer even when the results are reasonably obvious.
I remember we had people in Sheffield adamant that they were disenfranchesed because they couldn’t vote for Tony Blair.
Murphy is a modern version of a ‘broken clock’.
In the old analogue days, the hands stayed still and were right twice a day.
These days, a broken electronic clock is just a blank screen, showing nothing.
Whatever voting system Spud or anyone else recommends, it cannot surely be any worse than what we have now where 80% of the electorate didn’t vote labour but we end up with a massive labour majority……….
Oh, yes it can! Look at Russia
To be fair, Russia does actually have a fair election system, where people can go and choose whichever candidate they prefer from the ballot.
Where it falls down is the classic “how to be a dictator” play of disqualifying* anyone but the “right” candidate so there is only the one on the paper.
* where disqualification can be because they are in prison for breaking new laws, or they are dead after suffering an inexplicable accident like falling out of a hotel window, or they’ve gone into exile to avoid the above, or …
TBH, I’m slightly surprised the great orange one over in the US hasn’t signed an executive order banning anyone who’s ever said/written anything “unkind” about him …
That’s more a Clinton/Biden/name any other Dem move, usually through spurious impeachments, bullshit FBI investigations, changing the law and bringing absurd criminal and hilarious civil cases, or, occasionality, assassination.
Luckily for the world they are oceanically incompetent cunts, so the Teflon Don steams on.
Or accidentally brutally cut their head off while combing their hair.
OK, I’ll admit I voted for election reform when we had the referendum.
I know STV has a lot of issues, such as creating unstable coalitions where minority parties get a non-representative amount of power, but the current system doesn’t work all that well either.
As people have pointed out, we can have a government with a big majority, where many more voted against them than for them. At the next election, I can’t help thinking that the conservative (small c) vote will get split between Conservatives and Reform – meaning that neither win a seat and allowing (probably) Labour to take many seats with a minority of the votes.
At least with STV, people can vote for “someone other than the big parties”, knowing that if (as is likely) that candidate doesn’t get through, their transferred vote will go to the “big party” candidate they consider least bad. In that respect, it gives independent and small party candidates a much better chance.
Hmm, on second thoughts, do I really want to give the Greens a better chance !
The referendum failed because the system proposed was too obviously designed to boost the Lib Dems and turn them into a permanent government with a choice of coalition partners. The electorate could see through it.
The simple solution to the “more people voted against than for” is the French FPTP system – if no candidate gets more than 50% on the first ballot, the top two go into a run-off (in the French system this is usually one week later), so the winner is certain to have the support of over half the voters. The main drawback is that it prolongs the election uncertainty over a week rather than a day.
I apologise for posting this every time there’s a PR discussion, but if you haven’t seen it, there’s a brilliant takedown of PR by no less a person than Karl Popper, written nearly 40 years ago here (no paywall).
That’s essentially the 2011 AV system, but run on seperate days.
Transferable votes, multi-member constituencies. Too complicated. Stop the fucking about and go straight for a one-party state. There is one name on your ballot paper and you are allowed to vote Yes or Yes. Think of the savings just on vote-counting.
Well we currently seem to have a transferable cunt system.
10-member seats is too big, you’d have a ballot paper with 70+ names on it. The ideal STV seat is 3, with occasional 2s and 4s to fit the population geography.
3-member STV constituencies would just entrench the parties in power; I would expect normally most constituencies under that would return either 2 ‘Labour’ or 2 ‘Conservatives’, plus 1 ‘LibDem’. 5 seems the minimum to allow new parties to break through.
Gamecock isn’t sure what ‘transferrable’ means.
Does it mean the Democrats show up with boxes of ballots the day after an election they lost?
People tend to vote against rather than for. Why not make this explicit?
Ranked choice, but you rank from most hated to least. The person least hated by the most people, i.e. the one at the bottom of this list, gets in.
No doubt there are failure cases for this, as there are with all voting schemes.
Another idea is a third chamber, whose job is to remove laws rather than pass them.