British Election 2011- You so stupid!
 

So election day is here, Britain is voting on its electoral sytem.
On the one hand we have the current system First Past the Post, a system ridiculed all over for being unrepresentative and archaic. Basically you vote for a regional MP, whoever wins in the region gets a seat in the house, there is no national tally. Such a system is disproporitanetly advantageous to rural parties and local issue parties and prevents large change in parliament- only a few seats in every parliament are generally going to change To make matters worse the electoral boundaries have been changed a bit recentely, meaning the Tories should be set for years to come
On the other hand we have the alternative which is instant run-off voting which is a national system, you can rank multiple candidates in order of preference then tehy tally up the first preferences, if some parties don't make the thresholds they kick them out then use those peoples secondary votes. While not the ideal system it has two major advantages:
1) It is representative of the entire country, you don't have just a few small swing seats which have all the power and everybodies vote counts. Currentely my vote is actually worthless because the Tories win my seat with about 90% of the vote every year. No matter who I vote for it does nothing. In addition it makes it easier to institute change, small broad changes in voter thinking can be represented at the ballot box.
2) You can vote for who you actually want to vote for. Currnetely if you support a small party you are probably not going to vote for them because then you are wasting your vote. With proportional runoff you can vote for them because even if they don't get in you can dcrop your secondary vote for one of the big parties.

FPP's only advantage is that it allows big parties to stay in power forever and to gerrymander the system, as the Tories did recentely. And yet- current polls show a 70% victory for FPP.
I take back what I've said about people just needing education People are stupid. Where's a repressive dictator when we need one.

E: Did have hilarious inappropriateness with the Scottish National Party using "Let's get together" as its campaign song- considering their ideological centre is indepedence of Scotland that seems an odd choice.

Currently searching for that "ideal voting system" myself so I can properly bitch.

Full-on direct democracy would be cool using the Internet, but given what's happening to Sony, I could see some 12 year old kid in Guam deciding Canada's 2012 budget or some shit.

Actually, that would be awesome.

Well there isn't one ideal system, systems have different advantages. I particularly like MMP personally.
But whatever the ideal system is, it's blatantly not FPP unless your one goal is seeing Tories in power.

Proportional representation is sort of ok. Not that it hasn't got a lot of problems, infact I can think of a few improvements right now. But it's deffinitely better than FPP.

Let's give everyone guns, last person standing is prime minister is better than FPP.

It would be survival of the fittest. That's like evolution, man.

Also hard to manipulate! High government turnover. No entrenched elite.

Back from voting- my ballot had both the scottish socialist party and the socialist party of scotland. Classic old left

Unless you bury the bodies in a trench.

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It's seems relevant to me to see a referendum on this just after Canadians just got screwed (harder than ever, though hardly the first time) by FPP. Never mind ideal, I'd just settle for "democratic."

I wouldn't call any commentary on this type of issue bitching, myself.

From NZ perspective, we had FPP got rid of it in the mid 90s for MMP, best decision ever. Parliament so much more open, so many new parties hae viable shot, no crazy gerrymandering. It's good shit.

Isn't NZ debating to get rid of MMP right now?

Though my knee-jerk assumption for that would be it's the conservative parties trying to get rid of it or some crap.