Yeah they clearly bet the farm on it, lost it, and got hammered in the election. But had it passed, the Lib Dems could have been reaping the rewards for decades, since they'd almost certainly gain more seats.

More sad, surely, that the UK population (and I speak as one) are stupid and easily led. We are. We really are. I despise us.

I'm not sure that we are that stupid. I think that many people agreed with me that AV was a needlessly confusing system that the LibDems wanted only because it would boost their electoral chances in a country where there were at the time two left of centre parties and one right of centre one.

(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 didn't want AV. It was the least-worst system we could talk the Tories into voting for a referendum on. We wanted STV.

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

> 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.

> (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].)

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

>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.

For elections to President of Ireland, there is only one 'seat' available. And it is elected under PR-STV. The PR-STV system works fine with only one seat. You select the quota the same way, you do transfers the same way. Ireland uses PR-STV for single-member constituancies just fine.

This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person. It's not possible for someone to be 40% blue party and 60% red party, because there's only one of them. So, in Ireland votes for the president, and for by-elections to replace a single member use AV.

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.

> This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person.

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.