An Unusually Political Post

Today is referendum day on the Alternative Vote. Should we or shouldn't we?

I'm not going to go into whether we should or shouldn't because many better people than I have written lots of interesting looking words on the subject. Instead, now that the time to vote has passed, I thought I'd pass high handed comment on the debate itself from the comfort of my well cushioned ivory tower!

The whole campaign seemed to have been very emotive, focussing less on the facts than on things like this:


Interestingly, both campaigns seemed to claim that if you voted the other way, you were stupid and probably just didn't understand what you were doing. This last piece of rhetoric in particular is the one that I saw rolled out in almost every debate I've witnessed, from Prime Minister's Question Time to Facebook and even in the office.

The net result was pretty much confusion. Here's what I might have done:

I'd commission a series of one-off editions of popular 'voting' shows such as 'The X Factor', 'Strictly Come Dancing' and 'Britain's Got Talent'. All of these shows effectively use an incredibly slow version of the AV system, albeit normally spread over an entire series.

For each show, have viewers vote their preferences AV style and then, using the '1' vote as the FPTP option, show viewers the difference the two systems make.

Each show will either end up with the same clear winner, showing that AV or FPTP hasn't really made a difference; or they'll have two different winners showing the practical difference between them.

After four or five of these shows, viewers will have a pretty good idea of which system gets them the result they want and then they can head down to the polling station happy in the knowledge that they know exactly what they're voting for!

Still, it's pretty much over now. All that remains is for the votes to be tallied and the results announced.

For the record, I decided to pretty much ignore the campaigns and make up my own mind.

And just in case you're worried that this blog post has been a little too serious, here is a poorly rendered picture of me being bummed by a Nazi who is also me, which may give you a clue as to how I voted.