For those of you that do not have the pleasure of owning a healthy grill, the concept is that you cook your food on a sloping hot plate. This means that as the food is cooked, all the fat and excess liquid is drained off the food (with mine it drains into a removable bowl).
The benefit of this is that you can buy and eat food that if cooked traditionally, would normally have nasty bits in it and be unhealthy, without those drawbacks.
To bring it back to politics, this is a perfect way of thinking about FPTP, AV and PR.
By filtering out the extreme vote, FPTP is effectively draining away the 'fat and nasty bits' leaving the most supported in place.
With PR, you 'eat the food' as it comes. You get the good bits, you get the nasty bits. Nothing has been changed from how it was given to you.
...then we come to AV.
AV also 'drains away the fat and lard' however, in the worst of both systems, it then poors it back on top of the 'healthy food'.
With AV you'll have the respectable parties courting the views of the extreme parties in order to try and gain the second preferences of their voters.
Unlike PR, you will not have good bits and bad bits represented, you'll just have goods bits with a layer of lard over it all.
FPTP may mean that not everyone's views are represented, but this is because those views do not represent a large enough proportion of the voters in that area. I do not see what is wrong with that in a democracy.
Much like finding the median can sometimes be a much better way of finding the average than the mean.
Vote No to AV for healthy politics (centuries without extremists)
D,
ReplyDeleteYou do realise that the BNP put forward candidates in just over half of the constituencies in the 2010 election? This means that in the other >300 constituencies those people who would have voted BNP would have had to vote for another party. So almost half of the country already experiences what you have described!
What's the solution? Should there be a BNP candidate in every constituency, to prevent BNP supporters from using their vote for any other party? Or maybe people with extreme views should be banned from voting? What do you think should be done?
Anthony
D,
ReplyDeleteI see what your saying, I don't agree with it but i understand where your coming from but if you were to look at how FPTP worked in Papua New Guinea by going here - http://www.aceproject.org/main/english/es/esy_pg.htm you can see the drawbacks of FPTP or any system you just described. Most candidates were elected with under 20% & 1 candidate elected with less than 7% of the vote. Now 7% sounds extremist to me.
That doesn't happen here but with an ever increasing number of parties, it maybe a few decades down the line - shouldn't we stop it before it gets that far.
Anthony, extremists come in all shapes and sizes, with AV you are encouraging them to participate more and more, I don't think we should encourage them to be the tiebreakers.
ReplyDeletePriggy, I have looked at Papua New Guinea, and the first thing I noticed is that they have a very complicated tribe system which is partly the reason so many parties exist. FPTP keeps parties to a minimum as it is without infringing on everyone's right to vote once for one person.
You say it gives the worst of both systems - when really in this example it just the same as PR - you have to eat it all.
ReplyDelete"FPTP may mean that not everyone's views are represented, but this is because those views do not represent a large enough proportion of the voters in that area. I do not see what is wrong with that in a democracy."
FPTP allows vote splitting - meaning that the majority's vote gets spread over several (or even two) parties and one party can unfairly win as a result. So that scuppers that argument I'm afraid.