Yes, that's why I said I wept as people left the polling station having thought that's what they were voting about. That's my point. Lots of people didn't know. They thought that's what they were voting on.

My particular hatred was for the people who chanted "One man, one vote", like only being able to express yourself in favour of one candidate was some kind of superior state of being, rather than the kind of democracy you have to introduce to a society coming out of a millenium of dictatorship to get them used to the idea before they can move on to a grown-up political system.

Yes it is. It's what Ireland uses (that and multi-seat constituancies) and it is called PR. (Technically PR-STV).

"PR" covers a lot of voting schemes.

It is perhaps the only form of democracy that's typically less proportional than FPTP.

I support electoral reform wholeheartedly and I voted for AV only reluctantly.

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/alternative-vote

"AV is not proportional representation and in certain electoral conditions, such as landslides, can produce a more disproportional result than First Past the Post (FPTP)"

(I am a supporter of single transferable vote and I didn't see it on my referedum voting sheet only FPTP [rubbish] and AV [?more/less? rubbish but still rubbish].)

We also thought that AV would probably increase the number of pro-PR MPs and therefore increase the chances of getting actual PR later.

Ahh I didn't think of it like this. I thought that AV would allow the Tories and Labour to say that we'd had electoral reform and that would be it for another 100 years... I'm hoping that the pressure will build against FPTP now - especially after the farce of an election we just had.

I do hope that we don't go full PR or even region based PR for the commons though (maybe for the Lords if it ever gets reformed?). Political parties already have enough power in deciding who gets to run. I don't want them controlling the list order as well. I want voters to control the list order with their ballots.

Really? Because AV is what Ireland uses and called it PR-STV.

This is not correct. PR-STV requires multi-member constituencies (as they have in Ireland). AV is single-member constituencies and isn't PR.

STV and AV (and a bunch of variants of each) are closely related, but they do have differences, and repeatedly claiming that one is the other, when they're not, isn't that helpful to the conversation.

Proportional representation is really a matter of degree rather than a binary categorization -- a system doesn't magically become proportional when you apply it to a two-member constituency that would be not-proportional when applied to a single-member constituency.

OTOH, the maximum degree of proportionality you can achieve in an electoral system increases with the number of seats that are elected by the same set of ballots.

STV is an election method defined for any arbitrary number of seats, IRV/AV is exactly STV applied to a single-seat election.

Are you saying that these people were not misinformed? That somehow, even though the referendum was not about PR, and they thought it was about PR, they were still right? Is this some kind of "prizes for all, everyone's correct in their own way" situation?

What's more likely is that the sum of the evidence isn't actually the same.

People will generally vote based on what they know (the evidence that's been presented to them). What they know isn't much for most of the population - it's whatever TV channel they watch, whatever newspaper or website they read.

IOW, anyone who disagrees with GP is, in fact, likely to be misinformed - at least from the point of view of GP.

Ouch. That is quite depressing.