Having voters write more on the ballot paper increases the information about what people want that gets put into the system, but it doesn’t guarantee that the information will be turned into government policy.
At the moment, small parties can influence policy by having larger parties adopt their best (worst?) ideas in order to avoid having votes drained off them. Under AV, that won’t work any more, as small parties would no longer deny votes to their supporters’ second choices, and they may stay small for reasons like voting for them being seen to be weird, or because they’re single-issue, or whatever.
Thus, AV could possibly result in there being less representation of minority views than currently. Whether things would actually work out this way, and whether it would be a good or a bad thing, I don’t know.
It’s certainly possible. However, I think that large parties will still adopt smaller parties’ best ideas in order to attract preferences of their voters. Where now, say, Labour might bring in an environmental policy of the Greens in order to attract Green voters, under AV they might bring the same policy in so when the Greens get knocked out, their voters will have given Labour a high preference.
The existing method works for any small parties, but the method you describe only works for small parties with some kind of cross-party appeal but not for extreme splinters off major parties. That’s probably a good thing.
I’ll be voting Yes but...
Having voters write more on the ballot paper increases the information about what people want that gets put into the system, but it doesn’t guarantee that the information will be turned into government policy.
At the moment, small parties can influence policy by having larger parties adopt their best (worst?) ideas in order to avoid having votes drained off them. Under AV, that won’t work any more, as small parties would no longer deny votes to their supporters’ second choices, and they may stay small for reasons like voting for them being seen to be weird, or because they’re single-issue, or whatever.
Thus, AV could possibly result in there being less representation of minority views than currently. Whether things would actually work out this way, and whether it would be a good or a bad thing, I don’t know.
It’s certainly possible. However, I think that large parties will still adopt smaller parties’ best ideas in order to attract preferences of their voters. Where now, say, Labour might bring in an environmental policy of the Greens in order to attract Green voters, under AV they might bring the same policy in so when the Greens get knocked out, their voters will have given Labour a high preference.
That’s what I’m hoping.
The existing method works for any small parties, but the method you describe only works for small parties with some kind of cross-party appeal but not for extreme splinters off major parties. That’s probably a good thing.