AV voting but only want one candidate?

[BonzoDooDah]

I'm trying to weigh up the pros and cons of the AV system. What I am struggling with is:

If you only support one party and disagree with the other options - i.e. wouldn't vote for them under (pretty much) any circumstances - what happens to your vote versus everyone elses? e.g. if I only wanted to vote for UKIP and completely disagreed with all the other parties would people who vote for say LibDem then Labour have a greater say in the electoral system?

Do people who are undecided or are more middle ground then have more of a say in the voting process than I would?

Do you have to rank the others?

Can anyone help explain? Thanks

You don't have to rank the others if you have no preference between them, so you would just put "1" against UKIP and leave all the others blank.

If your preferred candidate got the least votes, they'd be knocked out and the ballots for them looked at again. If you had put a second preference, your vote would go to that party instead, but since you hadn't, your ballot paper would just be put aside at this point and not used any more.

You get as much say in the process as you feel you want - if you feel that, with the UKIP candidate being knocked out then you totally don't care which other party wins, then that's what you get!

People who are less "fussy" and have some preference between the remaining candidates continue to be part of the process.

But each vote is still only a single vote - its just that it has moved away from someone who has been knocked out, to someone who is still in the running.

Listening to a piece on the radio this morning about the Australian AV system, the comment was that the parties that do best under AV are the centre parties. The ones with the broadest appeal. The more extreme parties (like UKIP) can often poll quite a lot of votes in the first round but are rarely anyone's 2nd or 3rd choices. So they tend not to win the contest. But a more middle-ground party polling well in the first round can go on to win because they get voted 2nd or 3rd place by enough people. That's presumably why the Lib-Dems think it's a good system for them.

As said above, you don't have to vote for 2 and 3 if you don't want to. Your #1 choice will count in the first round but not in subsequent counts. You're no worse off than you are now if you make that choice.

Thanks! (Just want to say I'm not a UKIP Supporter - it was an example only)

I can see why, then, you'd want to have at least some other rankings if your choice was a marginal party. Interesting the split between the major political parties on how they feel about it.