Thursday 28 April 2011

Are people really this stupid?*

According to the leaflet distributed by No to AV, the candidate you choose on "Your ballot paper" always wins! Or did 62% of the leaflets they sent out show "Your ballot paper" with the X against Candidates B, C, D or E but Candidate A still winning?

By their own admission (on the previous page of the leaflet), 57% of people preferred Candidate B to Candidate A and thus under AV, Candidate B would have won.* That's a rhetorical question by the way. Clearly they are, as they appear to be falling for this bullshit.

6 comments:

James Higham said...

Proportional please, so minorities can hold the major parties to ransom.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JH, that's not an option. You can choose between FPTP or AV. AV is better, end of.

Neil Harding said...

Mark, it will be really depressing if the NO campaign win. 2 main reasons - 1. the YES campaign didn't explain how simple AV is, allowing the NOs to bamboozle everyone. And 2. the NOs had no scruples whatsoever, no lie was too big and the Indie/Guardian/FT couldn't match the firepower of the Mail/Express/Sun/Times and most of the local press. Plus a third reason - 130 Labour MPs and 1000s of Labour councillors who put their own safe seats above what was good for their party and the left as a whole.

Mark Wadsworth said...

NH, I might respond "130 Tory MPs and 1000s of Tory councillors who put their own safe seats above what was good for their party and the right as a whole."

Tim Almond said...

Neil,

What I can't grasp is how easily people have fallen for it. Duverger's Law shows us that people generally tactically vote in an FPTP system, something that people should feel unhappy about having to do, yet they're rejecting a system that offers to break them out of it.

The only people who should vote for FPTP are the beneficiaries of it, and that's a tiny group of people who have power within the Labour and Conservative parties and their friends (like journalists).

The AV camp and the Tories that repeated their lies have been total shits and have lost any of my basic respect for people. I knew that most MPs were self-serving shits, but assumed that at some level they had some patriotism, some desire to do a job for the country.

The only way we'll get reform is by mercilessly damaging political parties with vote splitting until they finally have to accept it and back a campaign for reform. This suits me as it means voting UKIP.

And yes, I've lost all respect for the Conservatives. I'd always assumed they were self-serving shits, but at least had some sense of doing something for the country. I now consider them as little more than traitors after the poisonous lies they've repeated.

Robin Smith said...

Yes. This is why its a waste of time.

People appear stupid because they do not have time to think with care about what they are voting for in the first place.

If that is not resolved the voting system is self indulgence and cop out.