FPTP explained.

[pseudomonas]

Comments

[tig_b]

This is a great, I hope it gets an even wider audience.

[pseudomonas]

Pass it around :)

[robert_jones]

How far would AV help with the problems described?

Problem 1, that Leopard gets elected with only 20% of the vote seems inevitable in a pluralistic election. Under AV whichever candidate got elected would have received no more than 20% of the first choice votes, so it would still be true that 80% of the electorate would prefer a different king.

Problem 2 is that FPTP leads inevitably to two party politics (which is why British politics is much less pluralistic than it was 50 years ago ... oh wait). No doubt minority parties would get more first-choice votes under AV, but they still wouldn't actually get elected, so I'm not sure how much difference that would really make.

As I understand the scenario, if AV had applied in this election, snake would have dropped out first and his voters would have transferred to tiger. Then turtle would have dropped out and his voters would transfer to gorilla. The owl drops out and his votes split between tiger and gorilla (8% and 5% respectively in the first analysis). That leaves Monkey 18%, Gorilla 34%, Leopard 28% and Tiger 21%. Moneky and Tiger then drop out, and Monkey will prefer Gorilla, while Tiger will prefer Leopard, so Gorilla wins by 51%, exactly as in the FPTP scenario once the two party system is established. If the only variable is how Owl voters split between Gorilla and Leopard, then it seems to me that the Gorilla and Leopard will alternate being king, as under FPTP.

I don't really think Gerrymandering is a big problem in this country, but to the extent it is, I can't see how AV would help.

So, as far as I can see the only advantage of AV over FPTP is that it avoids the spoiler effect. Tiger's 15% of the voters can put Leopard as second choice and the latter will win against Gorilla in the run-off. But that brings us back to the question of whether it's better/more democratic in this scenario for Gorilla or Leopard to win. Since Gorilla received 49% of the first-choice votes, and Leopard received only 36%, it scarcely seems clear (despite my general pro-Leopard bias) that Leopard should win, even if the remaining 15% of the voters might think him the better second choice. It's true that 51% of the voters want some sort of big-cat to be king, but since they can't even agree among themselves which big-cat it should be, shouldn't we choose the gorilla who at least has the definite support of 49% of the voters?

[pseudomonas]

There's no "can't agree" modelled here. This scenario assumes that all voters know who they prefer over whom.

[robert_jones]

I see that, and I agree that it's a flaw in the scenario (which is clearly a gross simplification in many other ways), but I don't understand the relevance to my comment.

[(Anonymous)]

Why does everybody says the lion is king of the jungle. What jungle? He lives in a Savannah. Then I am the queen of Sri Lanka. Never been there or lived there.
The speaker is American. I am not sure if this British voting system or American.