Avoiding the guy everybody hates

Still in Frankfurt. I did manage to catch up on the news here without any further misshaps. I read in the FT that the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition is now a fact and the Lib Dems have secured a referendum on a reform of the voting system. In a previous post (Swedish, sorry) I welcomed this, mainly because I dislike the current system’s strong incentive for tactical voting which messes up the link between voters’ preferences and the actual votes cast. –Even if you look at the voting results, you don’t know what the people of the UK really wants since many votes are deemed to be tactical, i.e. not on their true favourite.

The proposed new system, which is called Alternative Votes System (AVS) is a simpler version of the AVS+ which was previously proposed by a Tony Blair commission on voting system reform. It is probably for the best because the AVS is not very simple as it stands. Coincidently the main benefits of the AVS can be seen by looking at the table I put up before, repeated in English below.

In the AVS, the voter puts a ranking number for as many candidates as she likes. For example each voter would put 1) for the “Like”-candidate and 2) for the “Ok” candidate. Then, the 1s are counted for all candidates. If someone gets a majority of the 1s, he gets elected straight away. Otherwise, the guy with fewest 1s gets eliminated. Then you move on to look who the supporters of the eliminated guy had as number 2 and add votes to this number 2 candidate to see if someone gets a majority. And so on until there is a majority winner.

Assume for example that the voting group A is only slightly larger than B which in turn is slightly larger than C, so when you count the 1s, nobody gets majority. Then, as Charles got the least number of 1s, he gets eliminated. Since the C people voted for Angus as number 2, Angus gets these votes after Charles' elimination. Angus then beats Bernie in the new count and gets elected.

Is this fair? -Or should Charles have been elected? I don't know, the answer is a matter of taste, but since all of the voters' rankings now count there is much less incentive for tactical voting and a much lower risk that a candidate who a majority actually hates is elected.