Ralph Said:

Single transferable vote online elections?

We Answered:

online voting is just begging for fraud.

Viola Said:

What is single transferable voting system?

We Answered:

Single transferable vote (STV) is a preferential voting system designed to minimize wasted votes and provide proportional representation while ensuring that votes are explicitly for candidates rather than party lists. It achieves this by using multi-seat constituencies (districts) and by transferring votes that would otherwise be wasted. STV initially allocates an individual's vote to his or her most preferred candidate, and then subsequently transfers unneeded or unused votes after candidates are either elected or eliminated, according to the voter's stated preferences

Bertha Said:

Should we have a system of proportional representation, based on a single transferable vote, in the UK?

We Answered:

This was, I believe, advocated by Robin Cook, who fell off his twig, like John Smith. Should one suggest they might have been pushed this is greeted with incredulous scorn; so contemptible is the propaganda environment in this country. The US uses assassination as a basic technique in the rest of the world but clearly they would never do it here.

Big thing about single transferable vote is that you can vote for who you want without worrying that you'll 'let in the conservatives' or whoever it is that you don't want to let in.

As you know the voter simply numbers the candidates in order of preference on the polling sheet. So:

1 Dog lovers party
2 Fascists in caravans
3 Labour
and then put nothing next to 'Conservative'.

Should the dog lovers and the fascists not get many votes your vote is transferred to Labour and you have not risked letting in the Conservatives.

This throws a spoke in the wheel of the US technique of giving us near identical parties to vote for, all US fronts, but making a sufficient difference that you have to vote for one to keep the other one out.

Jamie Said:

what is single transferable vote and who is elected by this voting?

We Answered:

It's designed to minimise wasted votes (1. any vote which is not for an elected candidate. 2. any vote which does not help to elect a candidate.) and provide proportional representation insuring that votes are for the candidates and not for the party lists.

Ron Said:

How is my vote represented to a seat in the House of commons?

We Answered:

The UK is divided into 650 constituencies. Each one elects one MP. Each party puts up a candidate in each constituency (or in the case of smaller parties, as many constituencies as they are able to) and that's what you had on the ballot paper on Thursday - the list of all the candidates to be your MP. You write an X next to the name of the candidate you want to be your MP, and whoever gets most votes in the constituency wins and becomes your MP.

Single Transferable Vote is very different and a lot more complicated. You have much bigger constituencies, each one electing more than one MP (they use it in Ireland, and each constituency elects 3, 4 or 5 MPs). This means you get much bigger ballot papers as each major party will want to put up 3, 4 or 5 candidates as appropriate. There is no X: you number the candidates in order of preference. The counting takes place in several rounds and the best thing I can do to describe how it works is just say read this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_tran… . The basic idea is that you have a single vote that is transferable (hence the name) if your favourite candidate gets eliminated early on in the rounds of counting - your vote gets transferred to your second preference, or your third if they get eliminated too, and so on. Therefore you still have some say even if the person you most want comes bottom of the poll.

A good example of how odd this can get happens in Australia. The Senate there is elected by STV and each Australian State has 12 Senators. Half the Senate is elected every three years, so the voters are electing 6 senators at a time. This means you get incredibly big ballot papers, sometimes with 50 or 60 names on them. It is also a requirement in Australian elections that voters number every single candidate or the vote is invalid! So what actually happens there is that all the parties are listed too, each party registers what its preference list would be, and all the parties appear on the ballot paper too. So voters have a choice - either they can just vote for a party, or they can number all the individual candidates. Not surprisingly, over 95% of Australian voters just vote "above the line" for a party and leave the long list alone.