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I don't know who you are because you're posting AC, and your post doesn't make much sense because I've frankly no idea what the fuck you're on about regarding Blair and being one of those people, one of what people? What are you talking about?

But no, I'm not trying to sneakily imply that 72% were in favour, what I'm saying is that whilst you can legitimately argue that AV was democratically rejected, you cannot say that FPTP is democratically supported because there wasn't a big enough turnout to give FPTP a legitimate democratic mandate, but there were more people willing to turn up to say no to AV than there were to say yes to it.

In fact, all the evidence shows that FPTP is not democratically supported, the problem is that AV had even less support. What people really want is something like STV but the Tories made sure that wasn't an option because they knew they'd likely lose the referendum and lose the benefits they personally gain from FPTP as a result:

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

And the slightly more biased:

http://www.electoral-reform.or...

Keep in mind also that these are polls on PR, so a large majority of people (even if you distrust polls after the election the gulf is so wide here that it's hard to suggest there isn't majority support) want PR, something that wasn't an option in the AV referendum. Of the 39% that don't want PR it is still perfectly reasonable that whilst they want to maintain local representatives, they don't want them elected under FPTP, some may even be AV supporters.

So yes, absolutely AV was rejected legitimately and democratically, but that doesn't automatically mean that FPTP has a democratic mandate. The thing that likely has an actual legitimate democratic mandate wasn't on the ballot, hence the 41% voter turnout, and that's why you can't claim legitimacy of FPTP - neither AV nor FPTP were able to command support of over 50% of the electorate.

Not being a Brit, I didn't know that. What system was the proposed replacement?

Sorry, I thought maybe you were as you seemed to have an idea of how our political system worked in a way that most Americans do not.

The proposed replacement was some shitty, over complicated, Alternative Vote ( http://www.electoral-reform.or... ) approach unfortunately, not Proportional Representation like the rest of Europe uses. It would not really have been much better as it still would have resulted in a single party ending up with all the power, unlike PR which forces the ruling party to work with losing parties if they got a sizeable share of the vote.

Yes, if you frame it right, you can get the public to support just about anything. That's why polling is so often useless. I'd say that, in practice, public support for copyright is much weaker than the law as it stands.

I was not talking about polling, I was talking about how if there was ever any sort of referendum on copyright law that most of the British public could be pushed into supporting the current status quo by our media running lots of stories about how "copyright law is needed for our digital economy" in the run up to it. This would also apply if one of the parties likely to win any votes in our electoral system changed it's stance to support copyright reform.

1. Declare a national holiday so all can vote on a day off to eliminate the lines.
2. Get rid of the electoral college.
3. Get Congress to override Citizen United.
4. Take the money out of the electoral system.

#1 will not eliminate the lines, likely it would increase them (not that it's a bad thing). Perhaps we should do like France and do it on a Sunday. Regardless we need more polling locations and staffing = more public money devoted to the electoral process.
Whereas #2 and #3 are worthwhile goals in their own right, I don't think they are as key to the voting issue as changing the electoral mechanics of "first-past-the-post" (FPTP) voting scheme (aka, plurality voting) [1]. FPTP has been widely criticized [1.1] Best options for replacement are Instant Runoff [2] or Approval Voting [3]. By making voting 3rd party feasible, you remove the spoiler effect. By strengthening 3rd parties, you instantly alleviate the "voting for the lesser evil". Money in politics, like trolls on the internet = going to persist forever. What's the problem is that we have an easily exploitable voting system. For example, if you ran a blog without an excellent moderation system, you're soon turned into a spam forum or some moneyed interest will just use your pages for advertising their wares or opinion (see the blogs on many newspapers or youtube - a cesspool that would make 4chan blush). Imagine if slashdot had no moderation.

We need a "moderation" scheme that systematically removes/reforms the voting process - one that isn't inherently broken.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
[1.1] http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/FPTP-bad-for-democracy
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

Arguably the UK has the same issue as they've also had a first past the post system in voting system that has lasted longer than the US system and are actually talking about trying out STV or a watered down version of prop rep.

The details are: under the coalition agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, we will be able to vote on whether we want to move to 'Alternative Vote' (aka Instant Runoff Voting) - details are here http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=55

Politically, the Liberal Democrats and Labour are planning to campaign for it while the Conservatives are going to allow for the referendum vote but campaign against it.

There's huge political interests at stake: for the Liberal Democrats (as our traditional third party) and other third parties, they'll benefit from not being passed over in a tactical vote situation where people who would rather have the Liberals but vote Labour to keep the Conservatives (or BNP and other far-right parties) out. For Labour, electoral reform will probably come with boundary changes that will benefit them by creating more urban constituencies likely to vote for Labour. Under most AV predictions, the Conservatives will lose seats under AV, so naturally they oppose it.

It'll certainly be interesting to see whether the political parties manage to keep up the pretense that their stances aren't self-serving...

You seem to be ignoring my main point that representativeness is precisely what people desire out of a multi-seat election and monotonicity is desirable in a single-seat election.

You're right about the UK, it's generally Labour against the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats are the third-biggest party, but they're often a second choice so they're under-represented (since you can only vote for one). Wiki has a list.

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/ -- it might get somewhere, but it will probably take a long time :-(

The UK needs voting reform too, see http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=103 for instance (or articles on BBC News).

Under the current system many people think that voting for e.g. the Green Party or an independent candidate is a waste of their vote.

Well, there are certainly campaigns to reform the UK voting system, focused mainly around AV+ or STV (my preference), but currently we're told there is no widespread suppost for reform to the parliamentary elections - why then, people are creating DIY proportional voting is something that is ignored.

IIRC the UK and US are the only two countries (there may be one other) that still use the "first past the post" system - its rediculous.

In the UK Labour said they would fix the voting system in 1997. Now they are saying that they have fulfilled that promise because they use proportional representation in various regional and EU elections, but the election that really matters, the one for Westminster, is still in the dark ages.

The Independent newspaper is pushing the issue, see this article.

For example in the UK, where they have an equally unsophisticated 'First Past the Post' system as opposed to Proportional Representation (aka Single Tranferrable Voting), the third party Liberal Democrats have been saying for years that if they ever get elected they will bring about a PR system. AFAIK, thanks partly to the implosion of the Conservative Party, the Lib Dems seem to be on the way to becoming the main opposition party within the next ten years and are starting to make noises that maybe they won't tinker with the FPTP system after all.

The only way STV voting can make any in-roads in the US would be as follows:

1. But a measure on the ballot for Californian State Assembly elections to adopt STV
2. Reveal to the country the benefits of STV by ending the polarisation of politics up in Sacramento
3. Sell STV to the rest of the country as the road out from this abusive, out-dated, corrosive and childish left vs right shouting match between "stupid white men" who commit "treason" and "slander" in the land of "Lies and the lying liars who tell them."
4. Adopt STV in congressional elections to end polarisation and counter the effects of gerrymandering.

My personal preference for government elections is the Approval system, which eliminates the vast majority of the problems with Plurality without introducing worse ones, like a complicated ballot sheet (remember, a significant percentage of Floridians couldn't handle the ones we have now!) and violations of monotonicity.

If voting was compulsary in the UK, those who didn't want to vote could at least put a spoiled ballot into the ballot box and no-one would know. Could you do the same in Brazil? Presumably the e-voting machine won't let you enter an invalid ballot or an abstention?

Interestingly, the UK Electoral Reform Society recently produced an extensive report on new voting methods, and one of their recomendations was that any electronic voting machine should allow a voter to submit a blank vote (although it should present a warning first).

The other solution sometimes open to those who are forced to vote but don't want to, is to cast a vote for a joke candidate. For example, in the UK we have something called the "Monster Raving Loony Party" who put up candidates for a laugh. Do you have such things in Brazil?

When I think of a better voting system, I think of a cascading-vote type system. You rank the candidates from your favorite down to the one whom you would not let pet your dog. Then, the votes are tallied and the candidates who got the fewest votes are tossed out and those ballots are re-counted using the next-favorite candidate that is still in the race

This system is used widely in the unions in Britain, and many other places. It's known as Single Transferable Vote (STV) or the Alternative Voting System. (more info available here)

The main difference between STV and the system you describe is the addition of a candidate known as RON (Re-Open Nominations). Voting for RON is an active vote against candidates, whereas abstaining (not voting) is a vote for apathy.

It works quite well, although it's hard and time-consuming to count the votes. But, no country use it as a national voting system, which probably says something.