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by mtgx 3644 days ago
Theresa May would be a scary successor indeed, and may even top Cameron as the worst UK leader.

UK needs to vote conservatives out, and it needs to reconsider switching the voting system (this time to a proportional representation one).
2 comments
tonyedgecombe 3644 days ago
They probably will at the next election, the trouble is the alternative is looking pretty pathetic.
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gadders 3644 days ago
A referendum was held on proportional representation (one method, at least) and was rejected.
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fnord123 3644 days ago
Alternate Voting is not a method of proportional representation. It is another voting scheme. The Liberal Democrats wanted a vote for Proportional Representation and the Conservatives agreed to a referendum, but on the rubbish AV scheme instead. Many many people voted against AV because it wasn't as good as PR and didn't want to change multiple times.

PR is superior to AV and FPTP and should be implemented. It shouldn't even have a referendum. It should just be done.

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dragonwriter 3643 days ago
> Alternate Voting is not a method of proportional representation

Alternative Voting (AV) is a single member district voting system that produces results where the representations of policy views in the elected parliament are more proportional to the views in the electorate than first past the post, and thus is a method of enhancing the proportionality of the election system for a parliament when the status quo is FPTP.

It do so less than Single Transferrable Vote (STV) in multimember districts (AV -- known more often to US audiences as Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] -- is just the single-member-district case of STV, which supports any district size).

Its relationship to other PR schemes where not all candidates are directly elected by-name by general election voters (the most frequent being Party-List Proportional and Mixed-Member Proportional) is complicated -- those schemes optimize for proportionality of partisan composition of the legislature, but provide weaker accountability of individual politicians to the general electorate.

But PR itself isn't a system, its a (continuous valued, not even binary) feature of an electoral system. You can't "implement PR", you can adopt a system that increases (or decreases) the degree to which you have PR.

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tonyedgecombe 3644 days ago
Many people voted against AV because the Liberal Democrats proposed it.
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