[EM] a history of sin

[Richard Lung]

The Career Politicians Persecution of Transferable Voting.


Writing about election fraud is like trying to compile a history of sin. 
Certain features stand out. The hatred of career politicians for a 
voting method called the single transferable vote, a freely competitive 
election method, which threatens to put democracy before incumbency.

1916 was the worst year in British history, when conscripts were dying 
by the million on the Western front. To get on with winning the war, the 
British government set aside constitutional reform, as the business of a 
Speakers conference on electoral reform, whose decisions it promised to 
abide by. After all, contestants don’t referee the rules of the game. 
The conference unanimously voted for the single transferable vote, in 
return for concessions, like the exorbitant (and passed) lost deposit 
for not winning one eighth of the vote.
But that year, the Asquith Liberal government was overthrown by a 
Lloyd-George coalition. The new government went back on the promise to 
abide by the conference decisions, and singled out STV for a House of 
Commons vote. This was like asking turkeys if they favored Christmas. It 
also set a historic precedent for career politicians cheating on fair 
election method, with the result that Britain and much of the 
English-speaking world are still stuck with an illiterate x-vote from 
the Middle Ages, which the other half of the world (wrongly) think good 
enough to stick their people with, for their proportional elections, 
instead of a transferable vote. (JFS Ross, Elections and Electors.)

In 2004, the Canadian province of British Columbia held a citizens 
assembly on electoral reform, which eventually chose STV, when they got 
wise to the more touted career politicians PR; to the intense opposition 
of said politicians. The provincial government rigged an ensuing 
referendum, with two 60% thresholds, so that first past the post votes 
counted one and a half times more than STV votes. Nearly 58% of the 
votes for STV was therefore counted a “defeat.” (Further sabotages 
followed, which details I can’t go into, tho I have, to some extent, 
elsewhere.)

Roy Jenkins, chairman of the so-called Independent commission on 
electoral systems, privately approached the new Premier Tony Blair, with 
a modest form of STV. Jenkins later told Paddy Ashdown “Blair wouldn’t 
give us single transferable vote (STV).” (The Ashdown diaries 1997 – 1999.)

All the world knows the “Jenkins system” as “AV top up,” a system 
Jenkins himself didn’t even want, an unwinnable system, the Labour 
Parliamentary party rank-and-file refused to submit to a referendum.

In 2010, the Tory party refused to give the Liberal Democrats a 
referendum on more than the alternative vote, a monopolistic 
single-member system, that does not give fair results. The 2011 
referendum was disgracefully conducted without any rules of fair play, 
like the BC referendums; like the “battering ram” referendums by Tammany 
Hall type Machines, against STV/PR in American cities, mainly in the 
inter-war period.

Regards,

Richard Lung.