Dear all

One of characteristics of the British voting system is the FPTP which as
Quentin points out is wrongly named.  The effect of this is to amplify the
small voting majority and there are arguments on both sides as to whether
this is beneficial or not.  At the moment, the demography favours the
Labour party whereas in the past it has favoured the Conservative party.
Personally I prefer the present bias but it does seem to be essentially
unfair.

'FPTP' makes voting a very crude exercise.  Essentially if there are 3
candidates, the voter can only choose 1 in 3 and generally voting is like
bad driving - very defensive and therefore negative.

I am no particular advocate of many voting systems - particularly not of
full PR which leads to rule by the small parties often of extremists or
zealots - but one system that for some reason or another was ignored by
the Jenkins commission in those heady days of 1997 is the multimember
consituency or MMC.

In this system, there may be say 2 seats, each party can put up up to 2
candidates and each voter has 2 votes.  That way, with 6 candidates in the
simple example, the voter has 15 possible voting combinations. This would
give much finer resolution for the electorate.  Otherwise the voting would
be the same as at present - just the counting would be a little more
complex.

I would expect the effect would be to reduce the extreme majorities seen
and to help the smaller parties a bit but as it would also reduce tactical
voting, the effect may not be as dramatic.  It would in fact encourage
positive voting.

MMC does not suffer from some of the disadvantages of STV and other
complex systems and it retains the strong link between MP and consituency.
Of course there would have to be half the number of consituencies.

Arguably the number of seats/candidates/votes should be one less than the
number of large parties - so 2 in England, 3 in Wales and Scotland.

We used to have multi-member constituencies but they were done away with
years ago.

Any thoughts or is this done elsewhere?

Best wishes

John

John Logsdon                               "Try to make things as simple
Quantex Research Ltd, Manchester UK         as possible but not simpler"
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+44(0)161 445 4951/G:+44(0)7717758675       www.quantex-research.com


On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Quentin L. Burrell wrote:

> John wrote (in small part!):
>
> > Admittedly, with a 'first past the post' system and more than two
> > significant parties, it's unlikely that the winning party would ever get
> > more than 50% of the votes, but at least the electorate could ensure that
> > 'every voice was heard'.
> >
>
> One problem is that FPTP is no such thing - there is no post to pass!
>
> The analogy with a track event is wrong, the current system is analogous to
> a field event where the best "score" wins.
>
> To set a post that has to be passed requires something like STV?
>
> Quentin
>
> Dr Quentin L Burrell
> Isle of Man International Business School
> The Nunnery
> Old Castletown Road
> Douglas
> Isle of Man IM9 4EX
> via United Kingdom
>
> www.ibs.ac.im
>
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