@pintofsimilar asked earlier how a Single Transferable Vote system produces a result that is closer to the will of the electorate than our current First Past The Post system. I said I’d explain and then totally forgot. I just remembered. From here on in, the two options are STV and FPTP and if I refer to PR, that’s Proportional Representation.
I must say at the outset that I’m not a political scientist, I don’t imagine to give the definitive answer as to why this is fairer than FPTP and there are a multitude of variations on both STV and PR, this is a deliberately simplistic overview.
My imaginary constituency for examples is Dunny-on-the-Wold where there are three candidates: Alice, Bob and Carol.
So first, how does FPTP work? Very simply is the answer. The electorate cast their ballots for one candidate and whichever of Alice, Bob and Carol gains the most votes wins. This may be simple but it’s not a very effective way of gauging the will of the electorate as the votes could break down like this (assume no “others” or spoilt papers): Alice: 33%; Bob: 32%; Carol: 35%. Under FPTP, Carol wins in spite of having the support of only just over a third of the voters. That’s unfair just for the one seat in question but extrapolate that out across 650 constituencies and you can see that a party can form a “majority” government on the back of a relatively small proportion of the votes cast.
So, onto STV. Here, voters list candidates in their order of preference, so they may say Carol 1; Alice 2; Bob 3. As votes are counted, if no candidate has 50% of first preference votes, the candidate who came last is eliminated and their votes redistributed among the other candidates according to the second preference. So, lets say the first round of votes went Alice 37%; Bob 30%; Carole 34%. Bob would be eliminated after the first round. If 75% those who voted for him as first preference had Carole as second and 25% had Alice, Carole would win, ending up with 56.5% of votes. This more accurately represents the will of the electorate as she is deemed to be more generally favoured than Alice even though Alice won the first round – and would have won under FPTP.
STV can by applied over wider areas with the electorate voting for parties rather than individuals. In this system, a threshold is set (say, 10% or 15% or whatever – I’m not a political scientist) which is the level of popularity that parties have to achieve to gain seats (the level would probably be determined by the number of seats available). Assuming that not all parties achieve this level on the first round of voting, the party with the smallest number of votes is eliminated and their votes redistributed. If there are still parties below the threshold, the next one is eliminated and their votes redistributed and so on.
No electoral system is perfect. The issue that is being highlighted by the current election is that the UK incarnation of FPTP is one of the most imperfect among all the democracies of the world.
Read more (Wikipedia):
2 comments
pintofsimilar says:
28/04/2010 at 16:52 (UTC 0 )
How does this improve the electability of the lib dems then? I naively thought that the complaint was they got (figures out of thin air here) 25% of the vote but only 10% of the seats. This doesn’t really address that, and surely encourages a third party to position itself halfway between the top two so it can attract 2nd votes from each and satisfy no one?
I think its the application over larger districts that seems fundamentally wrong to me but I’m sure something could be worked out.
James Ogley says:
28/04/2010 at 16:55 (UTC 0 )
It’s actually not favoured by the Lib Dems because it favours them but because it’s fairer. how parties choose to position themselves is actually down to them under any system but a party that doesn’t match up to what it promises gets hurt more under a PR/STV system than FPTP as it eliminates safe seats.
And the figures in some polls are that the Lib Dems could garner as many as around 40% of votes and only have 15-20% of seats under FPTP.