Our favourite topic: Voting Systems!!!!

[Grumble]

I might be misunderstanding this bit of your post, so sorry if so, but devolved parliamentary elections are not 'local elections'.

So, deciding which voting system to use can be quite tricky. And properly fully understanding it may be too. But at the end of the day for most of them you go into the voting booth and go right, I like this person the most, then this one next and so on. I think electoral systems should be accessible and understandable but arguing against them compared to less effective and representative ones is another kind of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good (like TimW mentioned earlier).

Local is the wrong word perhaps, but they’re a tier below Westminster elections.

Well yes of course a lot of people will say that a lot of the really important stuff isn't included, but they are still a vote for education, aspects of taxation, justice, health, housing, planning, transport, environment etc etc...so I think you are drawing a false equivalence there.

Whoah there, local elections cover a lot of this ground too, they’re more important than most voters give them credit for tbh, and I’m not trying to diminish them or any election that’s not a general election. I’m just saying that most people aren’t particularly engaged with this and if the Daily Mail tell them it’s bad (and they will) they’ll believe it. It would be an angle of attack for the Tories into an election, on an issue that is pretty hard to explain compared with the other issues at stake.

Giving people some more experience of using STV or whatever for themselves would be a good thing. It makes it seem more natural when the time comes to push for it as the way to elect MPs.

[Millennie Al]

I quite like the system in New Zealand.

It gives parties the number of seats that their 'party' votes says they should have. Means eg the Greens would get more seats and so would parties like UKIP. But that's democracy.

Perhaps some of you more knowledgable guys could point out the downsides.

Parties should not get seats as parties are anti-democratic. A very important property of a fair voting system is that everyone's votes should be of equal power. Parties give more power to party officials (or possibly just members) who select candidates. In the case of closed-list sytems, this influence is very strong, while in other systems it is weaker. In STV you vote for a person, not a party. Their party affiliation is useful to them as a form of advertising because it means they are endorsed by a party, and generally get funding from party members. However, the party gives them no advantage in counting votes. While this does not eliminate the corrupt influence of the party, it's as good as we're going to get in a society with freedom of association and freedom of speech.

[Millennie Al]

Due to these structural biases in FPTP, no matter how good Labour's polling is they should assume they have exactly one parliamentary term to effect democratic reform (and whatever other important fixes they want to introduce). If you want the country to have a more representative, less biased electoral system there simply isn't time for faffing about with practice elections.

Unfortunately, I think no party will ever introduce a fair electoral system. This is because no party has a reasonable expectation of routinely having the support of a majority of the electorate. With FPTP this means that the major parties can routinely expect to get into power as sole governing party. With a fair system they would almost always need to form a coalition. So it's not in the interests of a party to introduce a fair electoral system even though it is in the interests of the country. There is a slight chance that a coalition government might do it, but only if all partners thought it likely that they would end up at least coalition partners in many governments. In the UK, that means the LibDems would support it as they could partner either Labour or the Conservatives, but Labour and the Conservatives see that as a dilution of their power.

[discovolante]

Local is the wrong word perhaps, but they’re a tier below Westminster elections.

Well yes of course a lot of people will say that a lot of the really important stuff isn't included, but they are still a vote for education, aspects of taxation, justice, health, housing, planning, transport, environment etc etc...so I think you are drawing a false equivalence there.

Whoah there, local elections cover a lot of this ground too, they’re more important than most voters give them credit for tbh, and I’m not trying to diminish them or any election that’s not a general election. I’m just saying that most people aren’t particularly engaged with this and if the Daily Mail tell them it’s bad (and they will) they’ll believe it. It would be an angle of attack for the Tories into an election, on an issue that is pretty hard to explain compared with the other issues at stake.

Giving people some more experience of using STV or whatever for themselves would be a good thing. It makes it seem more natural when the time comes to push for it as the way to elect MPs.

Alright. You said upthread that local elections are less important as they don't decide national policy. Which isn't true of devolved parliament elections. If your concern is the English press then maybe the starting point could be some form of PR in the House of Lords...