Alternative Voting

Well, I'm bored waiting for the latest How I Met Your Mother to load on megavideo, so I figured I'd share my views on AV, regardless of how I'm currently unable to vote on it (age). Yeah. This one's political.

So, the system Britain currently has going is just a standard 'you vote on who you want to win' and the first to obtain a particular number gets to rule the country. Sounds simple enough. Nothing wrong with that. Wait... How many parties?

Through many many varied methods of how the country should be run, although they're now just very slight changes, people often wind up with the odd member of a really obscure party voted in as an MP. This leaves a good amount of gaps unfilled to reach majority.

Let me explain. Say there's 299 placed avaliable. To gain majority, you'd need 150. With only two parties, you can have 150:149 and the left party wins. However, adding in a third party people vote for can end at the slight 149:149:1 vote. Nobody has majority, so the voting tanked.To rectify this, one of the parties could teem up with the third one, giving the needed 150. This is coalition.

However, we seem to have noticed that it's not really that fair. Instead of nobody leading us that we voted for, we have two people leading us we didn't. This generally ticks off half the population.

The alternative voting idea is that you order the parties in preference and the first party to reach 50% wins. For example: if a vote is 40% 35% 25%, they would take the least voted for pile and look at each votes second choice. This is then redistributed, so the leading ones get, I dunno, 45% 55%, and then the right hand party wins.

To me, this makes more sense then the 40 teaming up with 25, and ticking off 55 percent of people, doubly so for 20 percent whose votes have been considered dumb. Basically, if you don't get the most liked, you get the least hated.

If this wouldn't sway me, the idiocy of the No to AV reasoning really sways me to Yes. They say "It's far too complicated for the public", and yet I summed it up in a single paragraph. They say "It will let in smaller parties such as the BNP", but I fail to see how votes throughout saying ' I don't want him' will result in him getting in. They say "it will make coalitions more common", to which I just ask "how?" It appears someone doesn't understand it, and he's running the No campaign.

Well, How I Met Your Mother finished loading, so I'll leave it at that. Remember this decided how I vote, so do me a favor. Toodles! ...Never saying that again.