(no subject)

[naath]

Today we got to vote for pointless PCCs... I think the whole thing is a thoroughly stupid idea but I voted anyway on the theory that it was better to vote against the racists than to spoil my ballot on the theory that the whole thing is a pointless waste of time.

Also I think supplementary vote might be the stupidist voting system of all time. I think everything about this election sucks.

At least there wasn't a queue for voting.

Comments

[happydork]

At least there wasn't a queue for voting.

I think that may be the only positive thing I've heard anyone say about this.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Supplimentary vote is surely strictly better than FPTP? I would prefer it in the general elections even if we didn't get proper AV...

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

There was for me! Well, there was one woman ahead of me but I had to wait.

[chess]

I don't know; it has some of the disadvantages of AV (and while I thoroughly support AV, it does have some): more complicated, makes it more likely that someone will treat those second preferences like they are wholehearted support and claim a greater mandate than they have.

If you know how to use it, it can fix tactical voting (you put the person you want to vote for first and the person you want to vote for tactically second), but if you don't know how to use it you can still end up 'throwing away' your vote because of the bizarre way the counting is done.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Maaaybe. I dunno. 'cos it's only the first 2 people in round 1; which makes it hard to decide about voting for 4th/5th/6th/etc place candidates. In a three way election it'd be great.

[passage.livejournal.com]

It distresses me that people still don't know that there's no such thing as a voting method with more than two candidates that doesn't have tactical voting. Just because the tactics are about altering the order of elimination rather than about identifying potential winners doesn't stop them being tactics.

[passage.livejournal.com]

In that it fails monotonicity as well as independence of irrelevant alternatives?

[naath.livejournal.com]

Some voting methods make non-tactical voting much more useless though - and SV has the additional disadvantage that it is easily confused with different preference voting systems that have very different tactics.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah, the old british question, does one person count as a queue? :) At least, I've not heard of anyone having difficulty voting, which is pretty good: I've never actually experienced that, but it's pretty galling when it happens :(

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think even if it's useless it's good to get people used to expressing first and second preferences. And two preferences seems simple enough most people can probably grasp it. Although maybe "first choice" and "not this guy" would be better...

I'm not sure how it would compare to AV in practice (they both have the problem of not electing compromise candidates, but somewhat ameliorating the "Wrong lizard"/"I voted for Kodos" problem), especially whether it's different in a plausibly seven-party vote, or a typical three-party constituency.

[chess]

I was using 'tactical voting' as a shorthand for 'the most common form and useful form of tactical voting, which you basically waste your vote without in FPTP', not 'all kinds of tactical voting ever'.

I believe you get much better results (from a single voter's perspective) from AV (and even from SV, although tactics are more effective there than in 'proper' STV or AV) by just inputting your actual preferences than you do from FPTP, such that most people would not really need to worry about the fact that you could theoretically game the system if you tried really hard and knew a lot about other people's voting patterns.

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

Zero people counts as a queue, it's just a queue with nobody in it :)

[da-pol.livejournal.com]

Now, question is, would SV be more useful if one of the alternatives was NOTA? You don't get to claim a mandate if you're outvoted by NOTA :-)

[naath.livejournal.com]

By NOTA you mean RON?

Yes, that would be good.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

I don't know, NOTA seems quite popular in this particular instance.

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

This is the first time since I legally could vote that I have failed to do so. Sadly, tiredness and pressure of trying to catch up with my work after illness have conspired to leave me completely uninformed about the candidates available, so any vote I cast would be random.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I scraped my finger on the zip at the top of the ballot box! Does that count?