#AVreferendum: The Naysayers

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#AVreferendum: The False Economy of Insignificant Time Savings

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#AVreferendum: Celebrity Endorsement

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Sneak Preview! Those New Voting Machines The #No2AV Campaign Keep Banging On About #Yes2AV

Full blog post here (complete with graph!).

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#AVreferendum: Nick Clegg's Bloody Nose

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Beginner's Guide To "First Past The Post": An illustration of how much your opinion really matters. #AVreferendum

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Graphs! Why Electoral Reform Is Needed (even if you don't think AV is the right step to take)

Close, isn't it, between the top three?  Pity their seats in Parliament don't reflect this:

It's no surprise really, that Nick Clegg sold out to the Tories in order to secure the smallest chance of some meagre electoral reform he once described as "a miserable little compromise".

The problem is that the Lib Dem supporters are spread fairly evenly over the country, as opposed to the Tories who you'll find more in rural areas, and Labour supporters concentrated in urban areas.  So the Lib Dems come second everywhere in our "First Past The Post" system.

It's even worse for the smaller parties who have some significant support, but not concentrated in any one location.  The Greens should have 6 or 7 seats by proportion of the vote.  They have just one, and they were extremely fortunate to get that.

So you get this sort of ratio between votes received and seats won in Parliament:

This is not a fair system.  You cannot honestly disagree with that.  You might argue that AV isn't the right change to make, and I'd agree it's not ideal.  It's not a big improvement.  But it's the only option we're being given, and it's an improvement, however small.  (You might disagree with that bit.)

If we don't make that change now, we'll be giving the main parties a mandate to claim that the public are happy with the way our elections are run.  And I certainly don't think you can agree with that claim.  Not on a voter turnout of 65.1% in one of our closest elections in years.

If you want all these bar charts in one handy image, you can find them here.  Data from the BBC website.

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Brains to AV #Yes2AV

Yes, I'm going all political for a few weeks (some of the time).  We have the best chance we're likely to get in years to improve our electoral system very very very slightly.  It's almost not worth getting excited about, except if we don't make this small change now, we'll give the main parties an excuse to sweep the issue under the carpet saying the public don't want change.  It's not often we get national referendums in this country - the only other UK-wide referendum was in 1975, on continued European Community membership.

Let's not waste this opportunity.  "Yes" to Fairer Votes on 5 May.

I'll be posting a few comics and graphs over the next couple of weeks based on AV, hopefully explaining why change is needed and why I'm voting yes.  I'll be double-posting everything on here and over on my blog.

Here's my original sketch of the Brains To AV spoof, before I decided to make it look like the official No2AV posters:

Zombie image came from here.
Blank No2AV template came from here.
And here's my favourite of other people's efforts.

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