undemocratic | Talking Bollocks

Posts Tagged ‘undemocratic

Apr

Why Alternative Vote system is a good idea

A better way to choose our rabble

On May the 5th the British people have a chance to fundamentally change part of our democracy yet for some reason the media has been practically silent about this. There has not been nearly enough coverage and it’s likely that many people will not think that voting is worthwhile.

I think we should get out in large numbers and vote AV and I’ll tell you why.

The current voting system is known as First Past The Post (FPTP). It’s supporters claim that it is simple and straightforward. We all get a single vote to cast for a candidate to represent our constituency in Parliament. After voting closes all the votes are counted and the candidate who has the most votes wins.

This system has the advantage that each constituency gets a representative who has been voted for by local people. It has the disadvantage that, when there is no clear overall favourite, a candidate will be elected who has the support of only a minority of the electorate.

The Liberals have long advocated Proportional Representation (PR). This is a system where all the votes for all the parties in the UK are added up and a number of elected Members of Parliament (MPs) allocated proportional the the number of votes cast for their party. This overcomes the shortcomings of FPTP as smaller parties or parties with support widely scattered through the country are allocated MPs which they would not otherwise have got. It has the disadvantage of breaking the MPs link with his constituency.

But the system which is being put to the British people on May the 6th is not PR. The system which is being proposed is known as the Alternative Vote (AV).

With AV the voters get to rank the candidates in order of their preference. So the voter puts a ’1′ by their first-preference candidate, a ’2′ by their second-preference and so on. They can rank as many or as few as they wish.
When all the votes are counted, if a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes then they are elected. If no candidate gains a majority on first preferences, then the second-preference votes of the candidate who finished last on the first count are redistributed. This process is repeated until someone gets over 50 per cent.

Initially I was skeptical about this and I may have been swayed by the Tories pushing their propaganda that this is a “complicated” and odd system. However, after mulling it over for some time I have decided that, if one is trying to elect a representative, then this is not only a superior system to FPTP or PR but that FPTP can be absolutely undemocratic.

My reasoning is as follows. Suppose you and 59 other people survived a ship sinking and you were marooned on an island. 60 people in all. You decided that someone should be the leader (I leave aside why we think we need leaders for the moment). You decide to elect the leader. You decide that you will all vote and the person who gets the most votes wins.

Suppose 3 people are candidates and one guy gets 50 votes. You’d be fairly satisfied that most people wanted this guy as leader. Both FPTP and AV would deliver this result.

However, now suppose that one candidate received 8 votes, one candidate received 25 votes and one candidate received 27 votes. FPTP would dictate that the candidate with 27 votes would be the leader even though the majority of people would not want him as their leader. In fact the majority of people might think the guy was completely unsuitable but they would be overruled by the minority.

I believe that in this situation everyone would start yelling and people would decide, that, OK, it was obvious that the guy with only 8 votes was not a contender and he should not be a candidate. A second round of voting would be held with only the two main candidates.

Now the people who had voted for the least popular candidate would cast their votes for one or other of the two mains candidates. The outcome of this would be a majority.

In a national election with numerous candidates it is not practical to keep rerunning elections but whoever invented AV has obviously thought of this. AV gives us a chance to rank our first preference and then asks us: if your first preference were to come last then who would you vote for. This is a much fairer system because, as in the shipwreck scenario, it ends up with everyone voting on two candidates and one necessarily end up receiving a majority vote.

The Tories argue that AV is too complicated and strange and that FPTP is more like a sprint race. The Tories are TALKING BOLLOCKS!

FPTP does not always produce a clear winner. If it were a sprint race then, in many situations, all the runners would collapse, never finish the race and be carted off on stretchers. The winner would be declared the guy who got closest to the finish line. It is an absurd system as there are situations where nobody wins yet one guy gets to become an MP.

To continue the analogy, AV is more like a series of heats where the loser of each race is knocked out and the races rerun until, in the semi final, only two runners remain and first across the line is the winner.

I believe that AV is fair and logical because it produces a clear winner voted for by a majority.

So get out and vote on May 5th.

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Feb

Democracy in the Arab world – Everyone’s a winner

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

She wont vote for militant Islam

This evening BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze is discussing the unrest in Egypt. I usually find this program to irritating to listen to. The panelist seem to consider that it is their soul objective to be obnoxious and insulting to the “witnesses”.

In describing tonight’s program the BBC web site asks: “Is it morally justifiable to tolerate or support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes because we feel the likely alternatives might prove worse for the citizens of Egypt.”

My answer is simple: NO! No because it is wrong to support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes. NO because we cannot know what the alternative will be. And NO because we have experience of what happens when revolution finally breaks out in countries where the West has connived to suppress democracy. i.e. the people despise the West along with the dictator which they have just thrown off.

The classic example of this is Iran. In 1953 the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d’état instigated by the United States and the United Kingdom. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was installed as Shāh and propped up by the United States until the revolution in 1977.

From what I have read the revolution was initially backed by a secular movement but militant Islamists used the chance to grab power. Secular Iranians tried to resist but were crushed by the new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. They could have received help from the West but having been responsible for 20 years of their repression we were not trusted and there followed a caustic division between Iran and the West that lasts ’till this day. That is an example of what happens when we support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes because we feel the likely alternatives might prove worse.

We should support the people of Egypt in ejecting their dictator. If they then elect an authoritarian Islamist government then more fool them. At least the responsibility will not be ours and when they are finally in a position to reject authoritarianism we will be in a position to help.

More optimistically I believe that Egyptians will have learned from the experiences of Iran and Afghanistan and will reject outright Islamist rule though Islamists may have some role in a coalition. It is possible that Egypt could finally break the curse that has afflicted the Arab world for decades and start to modernise.

Imagine a middle east of modern democratic countries right on the border of the largest trading block in the world. I am talking of the European Union. While the world obsesses over whether China will supplant America as the largest economy in the world they overlook the fact that the EU has an economy larger than both. With the Arab world modernising trade would take off and this would be great news for Arabs and Europeans.

The financial crisis has caused market uncertainty and companies have been nervous about initiating capital projects. Investors are also unenthusiastic as many assets appear overpriced; there is even talk of a Chinese asset bubble. Consequently some sectors, such as insurance, are awash with capital.

If democracy were to blossom then this capital could find it’s way to infrastructure projects in the Arab world. There was speculation in The Economist in 2009 of solar powered electricity generation in the Sahara with the electricity transported to Europe across the Mediterranean. That is not going to happen while the region is ruled by unstable dictators.

Lastly consider the effect on the Arab / Israeli conflict. Today the subtext of much of Israel’s argument is that the Palestinians are just Arabs who are used to being oppressed and the Palestinians are no worse off than citizens of other Arab countries.

Imagine if Israel were surrounded by thriving democracies. Israel would be forced to confront it’s oppressive and racist policies toward the Palestinians. Could The United States continue to support the siege of Gaza or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? Shame on them if they did.