----- Original Message -----

From: David A. Holtzman

To: election-law@mailman.lls.edu

Sent: Friday, May 06, 2011 3:50 PM

Subject: Re: [EL] a "thumping" in the U.K. AV referendum

In Los Angeles, the League of Women Voters advocates using the “alternative vote.”  We call it “instant runoff” or “ranked-choice” voting.  Many politicians do resist it, since the existing system has served them well.  Nevertheless, some members of the L.A. City Council, just two shy of the number needed, were willing to put it to a vote in March.

Voters here would likely have embraced the change, because ranked-choice ballots allow better expression of voters’ preferences, and instant runoffs (elimination of last-place candidates until a candidate receives a majority of the votes for candidates who remain) make elections fairer — and spare everybody the costs of a separate runoff election day.

While the British Prime Minister belittled the proposed election method as “only used by Australia, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea,” he left out neighboring Ireland, and paid no attention to the method’s success in San Francisco and Oakland, and at UCLA, where the Undergraduate Students Association Council recently voted unanimously to retain it.

  -- David A. Holtzman
President, League of Women Voters of Los Angeles

(I wrote this in response to the L.A. Times story, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britain-election-20110506,0,3383863.story)


On 5/6/2011 2:15 PM, Rob Richie wrote:

Yes, indeed. British voters sent a message that they don't want a voting system that will cost them 250 million pounds, give some voters more votes than other voters and give the currently despised Liberal Democrats ongoing power to control government. Now what they would think about the alternative vote as it actually is, who knows...

One must accept the voice of the people on this, of course, and it does demonstrate that new voting rules can have difficulty withstanding over-the-top miscategorization, particularly when coming from people (like the David Cameron for the Conservative Party and some of the "old lions" of the Labour  Party that opposed AV) that people want to believe in.

For folks recognizing the origins of our electoral rules in Britain, however, there is an important story to be told in reading the article Rick circulated to the bottom. For one, the genie is out of the bottle as far as a neat-and-tidy two-party system there. The Scottish National Party won a majority of seats in Scottish assembly elections, for example, and the two major parties (just like in last year's elections) continue to share a growing share of votes with other parties (last year, a third of voters didn't vote for the two major parties, and more than half of districts were won with less than 50%).. Plurality, "top of the heap" voting isn't meant for such a political reality, so the conversation about what to do about it will continue whether the Tories want it to or not.

Second, the UK is far ahead of us in using alternative voting systems in key elections. Scotland and Wales used "mixed member" proportional representation (MMP_ yesterday, for example. MMP is an intriguing method developed with American leadership in Germany after World War 2 that combines winner-take-all districts elections with proportional voting, one also adopted in a national referendum in New Zealand in 1993. Northern Ireland yesterday used the choice voting, AV-type single transferable vote system to elect its regional assembly and local governments, as Scotland does in its local elections as well. Next year, London will elect its mayor with a form of the alternative vote (simplified to voters having two rankings and candidates needing to finish in the top two to win) and MMP for city council.

So onward, despite a lot of disappointment in our reform world,

Rob Richie

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Rick Hasen <rhasen@law.uci.edu> wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/06/av-over-yes-campaign-routed
--
Rick Hasen
Visiting Professor
UC Irvine School of Law
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William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law
Loyola Law School
http://electionlawblog.org
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