And The Winner Is….?
Say what you like about First Past The Post, but you know who the winner is without the need for 8 recounts or electronic voting machines. Complexity is the key feature of AV, STV and PR…
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Norman Tebbit has a humble brag:
“We Maastricht rebels were derided and abused for opposing the single currency by the wise, clever, Guardianista soft centre left establishment from whom we now hear so little on the matter.”
The last Quango in Paris says:
Mr Bryant and Mr Watson managing to make the whole hacking affair look like a farce – the more they moan the less I care about the whole subject! So partisan it beggars belief at all costs. They cannot rise above it ! If I was to call the PM a ‘liar’ I would want to be VERY sure.
We Like safe seats.
One person, one vote, counted once.
That’s AV! Take it you are voting yes then
Ok , A sensablie post about AV , Guido , My mind is still open , FPTP is simple , I accept.
ps thought you was giving us the winner of the caption comp
But the point is AV and STV aren’t actually complicated for the voter, all you have to do is rank candidates in order of preference, something any cretin can do especially since most of the time people would only rank 2-4 candidates.
Granted STV can be mildly complex to count up, but that’s the reason people are employed to do it and a very very large number of countries manage to do so perfectly fine.
Similarly AV isn’t actually complex to count at all, you put people into piles based on first preference. Smallest pile gets redistributed due to second preferences. Continue until someone gets greater than 50% in any given round.
Simple
Hmm…I see no reason to vote for parties that I do not wish to get in. Their preference for me is zero. So one vote is all I would provide on any ballot. This whole business is simply tosh
Well you can still just put one preference on the ballot
That would be known as the UKIP option!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When a system has a less complicated alternative, the less complicated version is almost always better.
Occams Razor slices PR and AV voting systems off.
Fix the real problem, the PARTY system, not the non-problem voting system.
Elegant, as well as simple (my, how those luvvies love the rococo swirls and swaggers of AV).
Did you use a computer to post that or a stone tablet ?
AV IS complicated because you DO have tactical voting.
To stop your bottom choice getting in, you now have to figure out if your second choice has more chance of picking up second choice votes from other parties than your first choice, and then you have to figure out where second choice votes go depending on which candidates get knocked out when, and whether you have to put your second choice as your number 1 if it looks close to keep the candidate in. Do that though, and you risk never casting a vote for who you really wanted in the first place, as your actual favourite candidate gets knocked out.
Try it on a flow chart sometime. Writing numbers in order is easy. But the mechanics of AV is algebra.
You cannot harm a candidate by putting them on your preferences, the simple fact is in almost every seat, the way people will vote under AV will be either 1.) one of the two main parties in that seat as first preference (in which case any subsequent preferences are irrelevent) or 2.) one of the parties massively trailing the two main parties followd by one of the two main parties.
There will be very few cases where you have to make complex tactical decisions under AV (perhaps 3 way marginals). In comparison under FPTP there will be far more complex tactical decisions to make
e.g.:
http://www.libdemvoice.org/how-complicated-is-the-alternative-vote-23643.html
An my example of a 3 way marginal would be a more complicated tactical decision under FPTP, because then you have to accurately asses chances of success and how other people will vote with absolute precision if you want to get rid of a particular candidate. In comparison under AV you can have two stabs at it by ranking two of the three candidates that have a chance of winning to ensure the other gets removed.
“But the point is AV and STV aren’t actually complicated for the voter, all you have to do is rank candidates in order of preference, something any cretin can do”
But 40% of the electorate can’t even express a single preference in General Elections under the current system. ” It will do their heads in” to have to try and evaluate all the candidates and put them in rank order. If AV goes through expect to see massively reduced turnout at elections!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You want have to evaluate all the candidates and rank them in order, only as many or as few as you want. Yes for those voters that can’t count higher than 1 it will be terribly difficult, but I imagine even with the dire state of our schools that is a small demographic…
Plus the 40% are not voting because of disenfranchisement, apathy etc. Not the inability to put a cross on a ballot.
Maybe it’s simple to rank humbug over gobstoppers (or the other way around), but I’m damned if I know how to rank one
hoonhuhne over another.Minor point — I think it was actually one count and seven re-counts. Not eight re-counts.
I’ve been gazing at it for a while. Still not sure who got in.
This sums it up
http://order-order.com/2010/07/05/monday-morning-cartoon-4/
It’s April Stella.
Is it Stella Creasy’s birthday?! I had no idea…
Hope you get something nice for your birthday , Am sure some other windowlickers will pass on some suggestions.
FFS , Typical socailist, thinks everyone owes them everything.
To be fair, I would definitely shag her.
Why the F’uck does she think having a strop every time something goes wrong will sort it?
OK, a judicious tantrum can sometimes make a difference, but she seems to threaten everybody and anybody with official complaints and the courts.
She should realise that grown ups don’t need to do that.
Who the f*ck is this woman?
And who cares?!!!
An electronic voting machine is not the same as an electronic counting machine.
Does it churn out a piece of paper that then has to be taken away and counted manually?
Or does it connect to a computer that counts the votes?
Paper trail, depends on the machine. Voting machines were abandoned in Ireland due to lack of transparency, no trust in the results. I can’t be bothered to look up how much they cost, but it was enough. After the abandonment the machines were stored at enormous expense in climate controlled warehouses. Who had the warehouses? Don’t even go there. Make an offer, I think they are still available, Be generous, the Irish need the money.
I think voting will soon be abolished in ireland due to the lack of transparency!! Anyway it belongs to the EU and IMF now. No need to trouble the Irish people with silly questions about their future!!!!!!!
With the ‘best’ ones it doesn’t really matter what they do, as long as they make a phone call out. And again, it doesn’t matter what ‘voting results’ if any are transmitted in this phone call or not. Because the ‘result’ is a number sitting in a little file somewhere on a central server (or perhaps obtained on the night by a little real-time input routine for added excitement), which number promptly disappears down the bit-bucket with no logging, journaling, or back-up.
If you don’t understand that, you really don’t know how frightening it is.
+1
It’s tax time. It’s also a time when right-wing political bloggers are setting the agenda for massive spending cuts that will hurt most Britons.
Here’s the truth: The only way the U.K. can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and the N.H.S., invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.
which then means the rich leave and we have even less income!! The simple fact is the public sector is bloated and needs to be culled.
Release public sector workers on Exmoor and let the shooting begin.
So the best way to cope with a debt crisis is to incur more debt?
Hmmmm….
How can you take 50% of someones earnings and then ask for more? Wanna go back to the 70s?
They take a lot more than 50%
Corp Tax
+ Employer NI
+ Employee NI
+ Income Tax
+ VAT (it’s a tax on employment they’re the ones Adding Value)
on the way into an employees account.
Then VAT
Council Tax
TV-Tax
Stamp Duty and other taxes on savings.
etc.
All add up to lots more than 50% of the average wage extorted by the state.
I was just quoteing the headline rate
No more Boom and Bust,
The rich must and will pay more to compensate for the mess they made of my very sucessful economy. They ruined it all with there digusting greed, I give them an inch and they helped themselves to a mile.
75% tax because its the right thing to do.
Thank you
GB
Go back to your unicorn farming. The government is bloat personified, there’s gallons of superfluous staff at the Arts council to cut just for starters. Then there’s all those “vital” staff with diversity in their job-title. Then there’s making it easier to sack lazy/dangerous/unqualified NHS staff and cutting the pay of way over-paid GPs.
For a start, the super rich are the most mobile, attempts to tax them will result in a fall in income.
The only way to shrink the deficit is to shrink the metastasised state back to about 20% of GDP where it can perform useful functions instead of subsidising failure by punishing success.
Shift the balance of taxation away from incomes, employment and investment and towards property and watch the economy fly.
That was the first of ten points of the communist manifesto wasn’t it?
You know Marx and Engles and stuff.
Here are the 10 measures the proletariat will use to bring about the full realization of the communist utopian dream, once they have the political power:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
Not true. We could afford all that if we pulled out of the EU, STOPPED MASS IMMIGRATION. abolished oversea aid and stopped dropping bombs on foreigners!! Vote UKIP!!!!!!!!!!!!
But does a voting system matter when we career Mps that havent worked in the real world that are only thier to get on the gravy train to steal taxpayers money , Mps are only there for thier own intrests , Lets face it a backbench mp gets 64k a year without expenses yet the avrage wage in the UK is 23-25k , Can they really justify taking money from people with low paid jobs ?
Is the Taxpayer getting value for money when niether party belives that 600 billion a year in tax recipets is not enough for 60 million people ?
To quote Dave “What on earth are you doing? Stop it”
It is not your money , it is taxpayers , Your job is to protect and spend taxpayers money WISELY , I ask any Mp from any party to come on here and say with a straight face that parliament does this .
I generally agree with Guido, but PR is NOT complicated at all: just not necessarily desirable…
…….unless your name is kinnockio and you happen to have been given a truck load of shares in the company proving the counting machines ! Its always important to highlight issues the bbc might be tempted to overlook !
Every system is subject to the same issues with regards to wrongdoing. I’m just highlighting the point that PR is as good as FPTP in terms of clarity and simplicity: it’s all the halfway house solutions that try to be too clever by half that are complicated, messy and fundamentally dishonest.
I accept that FPTP is founded on the principle of local MP accountability (a good and legitimate principle) and best representation of local interest, that will return (but not always) strong workable majorities for one single party. I also accept that PR aims to give the most accurate representation of the opinion of the whole nation, and is accompanied by the principle that every MP is a National MP and not a local one, and it will return a plurality of political parties that will have to govern by coalition and consensus. I don’t think there is much wrong with either system, it just depends on what one particularly believes it’s more important, but they are both founded in first principles, however imperfect they may turn out to be in practice.
It’s the other systems that are in essence a fudge from their very inception that I strongly object to, as they are based on a) negative preferences and b) no legitimate principle other than conjuring up a way to declare a winner.
I am open to PR because I don’t like the in-built bias towards Labour in the current FPTP system and the ease with which a rebalancing towards a fairer distribution can be shot down with accusations of gerrymandering (even if they are neither fair nor true). I also think that, on balance, parties of a conservative bent would stand to benefit from it more than the Left would have us believe (how many Tories don’t bother voting in the rotten boroughs of the North?). But that doesn’t make me like AV, STV or STD (I’ve made this up) as a step towards it. PR and FPTP are equally valid systems, depending on what your priorities are, because they are based on legitimate principles. The others are not and don’t deserve the time of day.
1992
Popular vote 14,093,007 11,560,484
Seats won 336 271
1997
Popular vote 9,600,943 13,518,167
Seats won 165 418
First Past The Post really makes sense.
It does with equal sized constituencies: there’s over 60 million people in the UK: for 600 MP’s you need around 100,000 people per constituency. How many Labour constituencies have less than 70,000 inhabitants?
It takes our minds off the ineptitude and complete shambles in Westminster. Lets forget about the billions squandered in the EU, totally ignore the ‘inheritance’ from the Jockanese mafia…wankers.
And surely under Equality law you cannot discrimanate based on earnings, you cant on sex,gender,race, sexual preference etc so why discrimanate on earnings that must be illegal?
If you cant discriminate on earnings, how is it that the government taxes you the more you earn?
Your Irish is not bad at bare-knuckle fighting, selling heather, fabricating explosive devices, drunken violence, turning the English countryside into an open sewer, inbreeding, laying low quality but nevertheless VAT free asphalt drive-ways, defrauding the English benefits system, thieving agricultural equipment, circumventing English planning laws, and making extensive use of the English funded NHS, despite not paying a stolen bean into it.
Sadly none of these elements of your Irish’s skill-sets qualifies them to be run a country, or indeed economy.
Giving them the Euro was akin to giving a pair of professional benefits scrounging degenerates from Barnsley £10000 in cash, and saying invest this money for little tyrone’s and Britney’s education.
So now hard working English tax payers have to throw money at these inbreds so they can keep buying our goods……….the world’s gone mad I tell you
Well put.
All these foreigners need to be got out of England. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it will fuck Irelend even more than it already is. Ha ha ha
Today I will come over a bit queer
And what of the Irish British who are part of the UK and cost £7 billion a year in acknowledged subsidies?
its strange that you rant so at the Irish, who despite the contraction of their economy still have a GDP per capita 15% higher than the UK!!!!
OK, who the clucking fell won in Dublin Central?
you can’t tell from that info: FG or IND.
You can see that LAB were the biggest party to be eliminated, and have their 6k votes given to FG and IND.
Wikipedia page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Central_(D%C3%A1il_%C3%89ireann_constituency)#2011_general_election
I can’t relate the figures Guido has given to what is on the wiki page.
…and I can’t work out Wikipedia’s data: in the seventh count, the result was:
Independent: 7641,
Sinn Féin: 6209,
Fianna Fáil: 5403
– yet the final round shows the party with the MOST votes (Independent) was eliminated and its preferences redistributed to Sinn Féin (2nd place): 6,587 and Fianna Fáil (3rd place): 5,743.
Best not try to understand other countries’ politics, perhaps.
I think there are four winners. Not apparent at first as previous contest was a bye election for only one.
Yeah, it’s how STV works. O’Sullivan (Ind) had her votes (fractionally) redistributed because she had already been elected.
The way it works is that if it’s a multi-member constituency (four in this case), anyone who does really well has the excess votes over the threshold (number of votes divided by [number of candidates + 1]) distributed to the other candidates in proportion. That’s why it’s so complicated to do the maths.
Do we have enough people in the UK who can still do arithmetic properly?
Another dodgy graphic.
That table is pretty meaningless without any sort of description.
Its also not set out in any sensible or logical order.
Its also showing something of extremely nerdy interest – an analysis of where peoples second/etc. preferences go.
Its as if it had been chosen on purpose as the most inpenetrable graph, and without explanation.
SPIN
Why is this Coalition so unwilling to talk about the billions we pay into Europe?
Why is DFID so protected when rampant corruption & waste are endemic there?
Why do we have £3 million a day for a new vanity war in Libya & £6 million a day for the old vanity war in Afghanistan?
Why are British soldiers, sailors & airmen being made redundant when the heir to Balir is setting us up for Orwellian perpetual war?
Blue Labour out – & they will be.
This Coalition is fragmenting by the day – & the May elections will make the thin ice under Clegg practically fluid.
The simplest way of electing our MPs would be to pull their names out of a hat… it’s simple, cheap, would eliminate safe seats and turnout isn’t an issue.
Unfortunately, the simplest system isn’t always the best… pulling names out of a hat would produce a “winner”, much as FPTP does but it doesn’t mean that that person actually has the backing of the people who they represent.
Are you suggesting that the Alternative Vote (AV) System of selecting an MP would mean that those selected would have the backing of the people they represent?
If so perhaps you can explain how.
But how would we select the Hat to be used? What colour should it be? What day does the pulling out take place? Whatever system you use there are going to be really big issues!!
Guido , I know you are not a Cricket fan , But after your countries impressive perfomances at the World Cup , Ireland and getting a kick in the bollocks by the ICC , I do hope you maybe use some of your resources to uncover the dodgy deals at the ICC and give Ireland the chance to progress.
http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,12341_6852752,00.html
Ps ICC is not the Internatnal crimanial court but the Internatnal Cricket Council.
Agreed Billy, this is a crazy and cruel decision which needs looking at in depth…
Zimbabwe are 11th ranked with the top 10 getting into the next World Cup so Ireland miss out for not having Test status!
Under AV, how are the votes for ‘none of the above’ redistributed if nobody gets 50%+ straight off?
If you do not express a lower preference then you have disenfranchised yourself at that particular preference level.
If simplicity is a key feature why don’t you start campaigning for a return of the monarch ruling over all – surely this is the simplest system for deciding who is in power?
Here bloody here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here is a more detailed Link.
http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007B&cons=85
Comments.
The winner would have been the same under Fptp, so why bother to go to all the expense of changing the system?
What is “Quota”?
Turnout 45%.
How do they announce the results?
Just the winner?
Number of votes of each preference?
How do they announce the number of votes for those candidates who have been eliminated and have had all their votes transferred to someone else?
How long do recounts take?
Recounts can take days. In some constituencies they have had up to 12 recounts, I kid you not. I was wondering how long it would take Guido to mention the Irish elections. This new lot are the same as the last lot. Many of them replacing uncles,fathers and brothers. It’s a real family stitch-up. They are allowed to employ their families as well.A newly elected TD who was on an anti-corruption platform has just employed his four months pregnant wife as his PA.She was entitled to a whole array of maternity benefits as his PA the moment he was elected. Absolutely shocking. Guido need only spend a few hours a week looking at what is happening in good old Eire to find a far higher incidence of cronyism,waste,double-dealing and downright dishonesty than he could ever find at Westminster
“Say what you like about First Past The Post, but you know who the winner is”
You could say the same about dictatorships but is that a good reason to have them?
Don’t worry. With a little practice I’m sure even English people will be able to grasp this.
Knowing who the winner is is pretty easy when you include the first preference numbers, unlike what you posted. Plus it’s not a recount. that would imply redoing the count for each preference. They also didn’t use machines to count the votes. Nice bit of low grade tabloid journalism. Ignore inconvenient facts, bring up matters unrelated to the issue.
A silly way to illustrate the point Guido. Your table has nothing to do with the count in Dublin Central – it is an analysis of the transfer rates between parties upon terminal transfer.
Who knew?
I did, because I knew that the final results of that Irish by-election held under AV are tabulated here:
http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007B&cons=85&ref=
I also knew that if I wanted to I could click on “Transfer Analysis” and get to the table you’ve chosen to reproduce, and then click on “Count Details” to get back to the tabulation of the results which very clearly shows the answer to the question “And the winner is?”.
I could even click on “First Preference Votes” if I wanted that information.
Surely you should be seeking to inform people, not seeking to exploit their limited knowledge on what is after all a rather specialised subject.
It is the ultimate in comparing Apples to oranges with Orange being better than Apple as anyone knows!
Sadly if you compare Apples to Oranges, The Lemons end up winning!! Thats how AV works.
Indicate the people you want in the order you want them.
The first one to 50% (or as near as damnit) wins .
What’s complicated about that?
I’m lukewarm about AV, but the feeble arguments of the No campaign are making me warm to it.
Dictatorships are even simpler and uncomplicated.Real democracy is worth the effort