Wednesday 28 April 2010

An Alternative Vote

..to the Alternative Vote system.

Let's have a county-based list system.

Take my own county of East Sussex for instance.

In 2005 it returned 8 MPS
4 Labour
3 Conservative
1 Libdem

The total share of the vote, however, was:
CON 40%
LIB 26%
LAB 25%
GREEN 5%
UKIP 3%

The county could return eight members for Sussex distributed according to the votes cast. If we multiply the percentages to the number of seats (8) we get the following decimals.

CON 3.18
LIB 2.10
LAB 2.03
GREEN 0.44
UKIP 0.21

For each whole number a party makes, they get a Member of Parliament.

Then whoever has the largest remainders get any remaining members.

For instance, here the Conservatives win 3 seats, Liberals and Labour two each. But the Greens get the one remaining seat as their ".44" is larger than the decimal numbers of the other parties.

Surgeries could be held in different parts of the county over the course of the Parliament

This system would retain a politically relevant geographical link while providing a more 'proportional' result.

I'm not wholly in favour of reform, but a system like this might be the best of a bad bunch.

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