How might PR work in England/UK?

[Fordian]

Smiled as the BBC have just demonstrated via graphs the ridiculousness of FPTP, 34% of the voters get 420 (?) seats.

But, genuine question, probably based on other countries, how might PR (or AV?) work within our constituency based system?

It won't. We had that referendum although they cocked it up and voted to keep this crazy system. We can't have another referendum because we aren't allowed to change our minds on anything, are we?

And we certainly can't have a referendum just to suit politics on one side.

Yes, this.

Funny all the people suddenly deciding they don't, after all, like PR.

After the absurdity of the Tory governments, where not only did we not have PR, but only one Prime Minister since 2010 first moved into the job by mandate from the electorate (Cameron). The rest were appointed within the Tory party.

And two of those (Truss and Sunak), never got a mandate from the electorate after the fact, either. IIRC, they never stood in a General Election as leader of the party, offering themselves as Prime Minister, and being successful.

But oh dear, now it's suddenly terrible that we have FPTP.

Fewer that 24 hours after Labour won, and you can't move on MN for posters trying to diss everything about the election and individual Labour party members.

I don't mean about policy. Just pointless personal attacks which feel like Gish Gallops.

Tedious.

I asked how PR, or AV might work in the UK.

I haven't 'dissed' anyone or thing. I noted how even the BBC had an article about percentage of votes, versus political representation. That was so stark as to be unavoidable.

So, in good faith, how might it work? How can everyone's vote matter, be it for the people you support or those you don't?

How does PR/AV work in countries that have PR/AV?

Whereas previously you have avoided noticing?

May I ask, how did you vote in the referendum on AV, and what was your opinion of PR then?

If that's a genuine question I don't understand how you don't understand. There are different forms of PR - AV is the worst so it was rubbish that the referendum was about that.

I'm sure Wikipedia can help with the lack of understanding.

But then, that wouldn't have the Push Poll effect, would it?

It does make PR/AV topical again doesn't it?

Clegg drew up a proper proposed system for the referendum on AV. There might be an outline of that online.

In my constituency in Ireland I have 5 TDs. Can't remember how many were on the ballot paper, maybe 12-15. All the votes were added up, and to get a seat a candidate has to get one fifth of the votes until you get to the last seat, whoever has the most at that stage gets the last one.

We also have a single transferable vote, so if your first choice is eliminated, your no 2 choice counts instead. Same if your no 1 has what we call a surplus, their surplus is redistributed. You could actually have voted for all 5 candidates.

Bit harsh there @PerkingFaintly

I have no idea whether OP is a reform shill, but she sounds like she's just shooting the breeze.

Might be worth giving her the benefit of the doubt?

It's been an interesting election.

In Scotland we have an additional members system so there are constituencies and then regional lists. So you could look into that if you wanted to know how it might work in the UK, as it is currently in use here in a UK country.

'Fraid my "benefit of the doubt" has been all used up by the umpteen other threads today which have a whiff of the lamp.

Don't get me wrong, at other times I'd be glad to discuss how elections are run.

Just not prepared to take seriously last night's losers suddenly discovering that FPTP has different issues from PR, which has different issues from AV (because they each have their own issues).

Ah, thanks. That makes sense. I was talking to someone yesterday about it after the BBC pointed out the scale of the discrepancy between votes and seats, and I couldn't recall how we did it in Aus as it's been a while. That sound similar.

"How does PR/AV work in countries that have PR/AV?"

In Germany, the system is basically the same as in Scotland for the Scottish parliament elections. It's called the additional member system.

How it works is that you get two votes. One vote is for your particular constituency and then one vote is for the party that you want to govern.

The vote for the party that they want to govern is the more important one as that decides the final number of seats allocated to each party. Although sometimes people do split their vote, for example if they really like their constituency MSP but don't like their party.

In total there are 129 MSPs in the Scottish parliament. Some of these are elected in constituency and some are appointed by their party.

Who ever wins on a FPTP basis in each constituency becomes the MSP for that constituency. In Scotland there are 73 constituencies and so 73 constituency MSPs

The second vote is then to decide which particular party you want to vote for to actually run the country and it is this vote that decides who the extra MSPs are going to be.

What happens is that they work out how many MSPs of each party there should be according to the party vote (it's called the Regional Vote in Scotland) and then award places to candidates from each party in addition to their constituency MSPs to make up the numbers to the percentage they got in the Regional Vote.

It's probably easiest to explain with an example. This is from the last Scottish election.

The Conservatives won, I believe, five constituency seats (which is 6.8% of the constituency seats) but in the Regional Vote they got 23.5% of the votes and so ended up being given another 26 seats to give them 24% of the total number of seats.

The Green Party didn't win a single constituency seat at all, but in the Regional Vote they got 8.1% of the votes and so ended up being given 8 seats or 6.2% of the total seats without winning a single constituency vote.

The Greens were then in a coalition with the SNP and they are largely responsible for trying to push through some of the more loony things that have come out of the Scottish Parliament over the last few years.