How is stv different from av

STV is a preferential voting system. Ease of voting depends on the size of the constituency and the number of candidates.

Counting is a complex process. The electoral system is difficult to explain. Voting and counting are simple, quick and familiar. The basics of the system are easy to explain It would require some changes to the way MPs vote in parliament. A few. Some voters will still find that their first preference candidate never gets elected. There are no wasted votes. Every 'Party' vote cast makes a small difference to the result of the election.

The voter can vote for the party of choice and the candidate of choice without the one compromising the other. STV - Parliament would be populated with MPs from different parties in numbers broadly proportional to the votes cast for the parties.

It is not possible to say if this would reflect the present plurality system or whether the mix would in time reflect overall voting trends. With DPR Voting there is an imperative for every party to win at least one constituency in order to exercise its full party vote value. If a party does not win a constituency but does exceed the voting threshold it is limited to one MP with a single vote Automatic election.

It is hard for Independent MPs to be elected because many votes will still be cast for a party label. In addition the candidate has a much larger constituency to campaign over. SMCs are smaller geographically, and have smaller numbers of constituents Being smaller they encourage personal and local involvement in politics.

The MP can be better aware of, and responsive to, the concerns of constituents. Individual candidates can be known locally, even if they are not nationally prominent. Election campaigns can be conducted by small organisations at lower cost per candidate.

Smaller constituencies encourage local involvement in campaigns rather than central control. Personal contact between MPs, candidates, and constituents is easier, and thus more likely. MMCs typically have 5 members and are therefore 5 times bigger size of total electorate, but also geographically than single member constituencies Having several MPs elected for your constituency means the constituent has a choice of MP to contact.

Having several MPs elected for your constituency means the direct line of responsibility between MP and elector is blurred Larger MMCs disadvantage Independent candidates who may have limited campaigning resources.

An MP may have to do much more travelling in a larger constituency In an inner city MMC the geographical size of the constituency may be manageable, but in rural areas the sheer size of a 5 member MMC may make it impractical for constituents to visit their MP, or vice versa, so MMCs are reduced to, eg, 3 member constituencies The degree of proportionality of the system depends on the interraction of the size of the MMC and the number of political parties contesting the election.

Some MPs are directly elected as constituency MPs, some are elected by the party list method, which may be a regional list.. In MMP and AMS sufficient additional MPs are appointed from Party Lists by a calculated method the method can vary slightly so that the expanded parliamentary parties have approximately the number of votes that reflect their PR share.

All MPs are directly elected as constituency MPs. One MP for each constituency. The Party vote in the General Election determines the 'proportional number' of votes each parliamentary party should have in Parliament.

These votes are shared out amongst the elected members of each parliamentary party. All the MPs of a particular party will have an equal share of the Party's total number of votes. Election from the List is by an agreed formula. The closed party list system reduces voter choice in favour of party control. There are no Party List MPs.

DPR does not require constituencies to be redrawn. The system works with the same constituency boundaries and the same number of MPs. Different rules apply to different systems for dealing with such a situation. There is an imperative for every party to win at least one constituency in order to exercise its full Parliamentary Votes.

Direct Party and Representative Voting is a form of Proportional representation PR which has the simplicity of the existing 'First past the post' system, maintains the single member constituency, and requires little change to the existing voting system. DPR Voting - simple, practical electoral reform. Return to home page.

The election is divided up into separate contests in local areas, constituencies. Voters are asked to choose a candidate to be the local representative in parliament.

Candidates may or may not be representatives of political parties. The indirect consequence, but the main purpose of the election, is the choice of a party to form the Government, and the selection of the Prime Minister follows from this.

The result of any election depends on many factors, but it is easy to forget that one of the major factors is the electoral system that is used. Electoral systems differ in the way they translate national votes into legislative seats. The result of an election depends in part on how people vote, but also in part on how the votes are counted.

Majoritarian systems such as First Past the Post FPTP may produce an election result with a big difference between the share of the votes each party wins in the election, and the share of votes that each party has in the parliament.

Proportional Representation PR systems try to reduce the disparity between a party's percentage of the national vote and its share of the parliamentary votes. The purpose of the election is to elect a person to represent the constituency local area. This is not directly a vote for a political party. However candidates are usually also representatives of their political parties.

In the election there is only one winner. For convenience it is said that the Party of the MP wins the constituency, but this is only indirectly the case because technically it is the individual who wins. A weakness of such an electoral system is that it cannot be certain whether such a vote is an expression of support for the candidate or the candidate's party. Does this matter? The voter's dilemma The overall election result is taken as the sum of the results expressed as constituencies or 'seats' won by each party of all the individual constituency contests.

This way of counting the result does not necessarily reflect the actual balance of votes cast but nevertheless determines which party or parties will form the Government.

This counting method, in effect, ignores all the votes cast for losing candidates. The system is often called the 'winner takes all'. The votes for each party can be added up to give a total across the country, or across regions. This determines by simple proportionality how many votes each parliamentary party has in the parliament. For the prospective voter, every vote counts.

Each PR system then has different ways of determining who should be the representatives of the people in the parliament. There is no separate ballot for the individual cadidates. The Representatives, the members of the parliamentary party are 'elected' from a list of party candidates. They can put numbers on as many or as few as they wish. If more than half the voters have the same favourite candidate, that person becomes the MP. If nobody gets half, the numbers provide instructions for what happens next.

The counters remove whoever came last and look at the ballot papers with that candidate as their favourite. This process repeated until one candidate has half of the votes and becomes the MP. Voters can vote for their favourite candidate without worrying about wasting their vote. Unlike hosting a run-off vote to decide the winner, the Alternative Vote uses a single ballot and avoids the need for tactical voting to stop a disliked candidate getting into the final round.

As extremist candidates on the political fringes are likely to be the first to be excluded, the Alternative Vote tends to work against candidates who are polarising and help those who are broadly liked.

Join our email list to get up to date analysis of the broken system sitting at the heart of the political system. Skip to content Menu Search. Ireland ERS Cymru. What is the Alternative Vote? This is a fully proportional system that matches MPs to votes. The number of constituencies is reduced to a third or a fifth of the current number and their size is increased, so that we can elect 3 to 5 MPs at a time in each local contest.

As in AV above, voters mark their choices 1 top choice , 2 second choice , 3 and so on. If they like, voters can choose candidates across different parties, so as to exactly match their personal preferences. A complex counting process operates that allocates seats in an order to the candidates that have most votes, so as to get the best fit possible between party vote shares and their number of local MPs.

Over the country as a whole the results should be proportional. Want to know more about how this magic counting system works? These next two paragraphs are for you. Any party with more than a quota gets an MP straightaway; a party that has two quotas, gets two MPs, etc. Every time we give the party an MP, we deduct that share of votes from its total.

Here we shift into the AV method of knocking out the bottom candidate, and redistributing their votes see above — and we keep doing this until one of the parties still in the race has a quota and wins the next seat.

STV would seem the best system but it needs to be accompanied but a directly elected Prime Minister who forms his cabinet with people from outside elected parliamentarians. This will provide a check and balance between the legislative and the executive.

I sense that a lot of people will do independent research on AV in coming months, in order to navigate various disingenuous comments and vested interests that we keep reading about. Correction to the above — the Tories actually received Apologies for the typo. The problem with AMS is that it is essentially two separate systems bodged together somewhat inelegantly. For example, in the last London Assembly elections the Conservatives received That should equate to 9 seats on the 25 seat Assembly.

The Tories won 8 seats under FPTP, but then because the top-up system is completely separate, received a further 3 top-up seats, giving them two seats more than their support should justify. In other words, the system intended to provide an element of PR actually made the result disproportionate to what it should have been.

Because Regional Top-Up calculates the top-up MPs in proportion to the overall vote, it much better reflects the first choice of voters across the Parliament. It is also a simpler voting system and ends the two-horse race nonsense that AMS still encourages. Obviously there needs to be a reform in the current system it seem ridiculous that the party holding the lease seats in the election appeared to hold the most power approaching first the conservatives and then labour.

Clearly there needs to be an alternative method of allocating the first past the post which is fairer than the current system.

From the results above depending upon the system the outcome of the election would have a different result. In order for this to change all parties or the majority would need to agree with the new proposed system.

I not sure if you would ever get that agreement however a change is required to estabilish a fairer system. So the voter has to try and guage how to ahcieve a local effect in the first past the post election, at the same time as producing an effect at the regional level — which is pretty impossible to do for many voters.

There are no AMS systems that I know which use a single vote for these reasons. By the way, AMS systems usually use X voting, one X being placed on the local ballot and one on the regional ballot. Clay — thanks for the extra information you give on where Approval Voting has been employed. It seems to confirm that no country uses this for general elections. One powerful reason why Approval Voting may not work for national-level open elections is that it requires people to vote for all those candidates they approve of withholding their votes from those they disapprove of — hard to do if the people involved are not already well known to citizens.

This is wrong. It is strategically identical to Plurality Voting. Approval Voting has been used for large contentious elections. You speak to the importance of ease of understanding and auditing — yet IRV is essentially the worst single-winner system in this regard.