What is the “alternative vote” system

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Produced by a friend of mine a rather amusing explanation of the “alternative vote” electoral system:

I still remain unconvinced that it’d be a change for the better.

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2 Responses to What is the “alternative vote” system

  1. Woman on a Raft says:
    2010/06/09 at 10:14

    Nicely explained.

    The devil is always in the detail. AV always seems to be fair only in the sense that nobody gets what they really want, and re-allocating the votes from the least-popular candidates gives a disproportionate voice to the smallest number of agreed voters.

    This produces the comical reasoning that it is logical to put your preferred candidate in the second preference and hope that nobody else wins on the first ballot.

    I’m also not convinced that other voting systems are better than FPTP – they just have different drawbacks. In the end it comes down to what you can live with in the particular situation. One thing I am clear about, though, is that PR and AV systems are not panaceas and should not be promoted as such,

    • Giolla says:
      2010/06/10 at 19:24

      I really can’t see that it’s much of an improvement over FPTP except that it means more people can in some way claim to have voted “for” the winning candidate.

      Though amusingly unless you are obliged to vote for more than one candidate a campaign of people all only voting for one candidate would rather bugger it up. Actually it should still be quite possible for no candidate to have over 50% of the votes unless you have to rank every candidate in turn – at which point it’s not much of a vote if I’m forced to vote for everyone to some extent.

      Would agree though PR/AV seems to be just swapping one lot of problems for another and without really tackling the “how to get rid of bad-uns” problem and other such more awkward issues