Stephen Turner Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2005 4:07 PM > > According to recent issues of "The Independent" > (serious London daily paper), there is now momentum > building for voting reform for the House of Commons > (first-past-the-post, single-member constituency at the moment). <cut> > IRV, Mixed-member proportional (the New Zealand > system), and the actual systems used in neighbouring > countries are all mentioned: no mention of anything > likely to be favoured by most members of this list > (Condorcet, approval).
Practical reformers in the UK want to obtain a properly representative House of Commons. That rules out ALL voting systems based on single-member districts. Those who are recommending IRV here (UK = "Alternative Vote") are perhaps really opposed to reform but feel they can no longer hold back the tide, or have an extreme belief in the alleged merits of the single-member district as creating a special bond between the elected member and the electors, or just don't understand that the IRV results might well be every bit as bad as those from FPTP in terms of overall distortion and instability. The main focus of voting reform in the UK (proportionally representative councils, assemblies and parliaments) is quite different from that in the USA, primarily because, until very recently, we had no direct elections for single-winner public offices (like city mayor). Even now we have very, very few of them. There are none in Scotland, in comparison to 1,222 councillors (to be elected to 32 Councils by STV-PR), 129 MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament, elected by a regional version of MMP PR), 59 MPs (Members of the UK Parliament, elected by FPTP) and 7 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament, elected by closed-list party-list PR). So from a Scottish viewpoint, the House of Commons at Westminster is the outstanding anomaly. NB We don't like MMP for the Scottish Parliament elections and want to replace it with STV-PR. Northern Ireland already uses STV-PR for ALL of its public elections except the election of its 18 MPs to the House of Commons. I would not expect there to be any public discussion of Condorcet or Approval in the UK. These systems are not, so far as I know, in use anywhere in the world for public elections. In contrast, IRV has been used for public elections for more than 100 years and is used by millions of UK voters every year, in trade union and similar elections. James Gilmour Edinburgh, Scotland ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
