[EM] Why is wikipedia so biased pro-IRV?

[James Gilmour]

Kristofer Munsterhjelm  > Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 2:29 PM
> 
> I'm not a UK politics expert, but it seems this is a minimal 
> concession,
> of the sort one would see in negotiation. AV/IRV doesn't really lead to 
> multiparty systems, if Australia is to be any judge. Instead, you get 
> two large parties and one middle sized party (as in Australia's Labor 
> and LibNats), which is an improvement from Plurality, and definitely so 
> from the point of view of the Liberal Democrats (who could become the 
> middle sized party).

The UK already has a multi-party system  -  all under FPTP.- at least as measured by votes.  Of course, not as measured by seats  -
but that's FPTP.

US members might be interested to know that more than two-thirds of the 649 MPs elected in the 2010 UK general election are minority
members  -  elected with less than half of the votes in their individual constituencies (electoral districts).  See:	
  http://www.jamesgilmour.f2s.com/UK-MPs-GE-2010-Minority-Members-12Jan11.pdf



> AV+ or STV/MMP would have been better, but alas.

STV-PR would certainly have been better than AV (= IRV) from every perspective.  But AV+ would have been a disaster.  Remember, AV+
was designed deliberately to distort the seats-to-votes so that one or other of the two largest parties would nearly always have an
overall majority of seats for only a minority of the votes.  Full MMP would have been better in terms of party proportionality, but
that is all.  MMP, with two very different kinds of elected member, brings a raft of new problems which would be high price to pay
for party PR.  We have MMP in the Scottish Parliament (we call it AMS), but we want to change to STV-PR.

James Gilmour



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