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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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UK Politics
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General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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The Coalition agreed on a referendum on AV as a compromise. The Lib Dems' (and most electoral reform campaigners') preferred voting system is Single Transferrable Vote, which is effectively AV but with multi-member constituencies instead of single-member. STV is used in the Republic of Ireland and delivers proportional results whilst maintaining the existence of geographic constituency links - generally considered two desirable features of a voting system (along with preferentialism, a feature AV and STV both have).
If we could have made the switch to AV then it would have been only a short step from there to STV a few years later. But the Tories campaigned heavily against it, and Labour were highly divided on electoral reform so were officially neutral but in practice a majority of Labour MPs backed the 'no' campaign. So the referendum failed.
@theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne
Neither are proportional. If STV was used as multimember then constituencies would have around quarter of a million voters instead of 90k and parties would get list candidates, either regional, national or UK wide and they wouldn't be elected by anyone.
Things not talked about by PR promoters.
The Republic of Ireland has 39 multi-member constituencies electing 160 members in total (so an average of four per constituency). That achieves almost perfectly proportional results. They have no party lists - each party nominates multiple candidates and you can (for example) choose to rank the individual candidates in whatever order you prefer.
If you translate this into UK terms, it would be the equivalent of merging four neighbouring constituencies into one and then having that elect four MPs. There might be a handful of unusual cases where you choose to take a different approach for reasons of geographic common sense (for example, Orkney and Shetlands or the Isle of Wight would probably remain as they are) but for most parts of the country that hardly seems particularly egregious.
@theinspectorst @i_am_not_a_robot @Syldon @jonne
You can't translate it into UK terms, there's around 4M voters in Ireland, 41M in the UK across 4 countries with greater disparity in density of populations and geographical size.
The average size of constituencies is 73k, so you agree with me that the future size would be around 250k. How is that local representation to a National Parliament?
There would have to be party lists to fudge it into a general proportional result across the Union.