- Perkins Warns Steele: 'Republicans Are Not the Only Game in Town', ABCNews.com, April 8, 2010.
2. DAVID CAMERON is in many ways a rather traditional Tory. Unlike some of his more ideological colleagues, he prefers to take the world as it is rather than rage that it is not as he would like it. He quickly concluded after May 6th that allying himself with the cause of modest electoral reform was a price worth paying for power.
For the Liberal Democrats, changing the first-past-the-post voting system that discriminates against them has long been the holy grail. The Conservative promise of a referendum on the alternative-vote (AV) system trumped a superior, but ultimately undeliverable, offer by Labour of more radical reform. A coalition was born.
AV is not proportional representation. It allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets more than 50% of first-preference votes, the second choices of those who supported the weakest candidate are redistributed repeatedly until one gets an absolute majority. The Electoral Reform Society, a pressure group, points out that AV can produce results as perverse as first-past-the-post. But if it had been used in this year’s election, the group thinks the Lib Dems would have won 22 more seats than the 57 they got—all of them, interestingly, from the Tories.
Labour offered to enact AV and conduct a referendum on a much more proportional system, the single transferable vote (STV). Under STV votes are cast for candidates in big, multi-member constituencies, by order of preference. If the voter’s first choice does not need the ballot, either because he can be elected without it or because he has too few votes to get in with it, the ballot is transferred to the voter’s second choice, and so on. STV would virtually guarantee that no single party could achieve an overall majority at Westminster. If it had been in operation for this election, the Conservatives would have won 246 seats, Labour 207 and the Lib Dems 162, the Electoral Reform Society estimates.
【Only game in town?】相关文章:
★ 英语自学方法大全
最新
2020-09-15
2020-08-28
2020-08-21
2020-08-19
2020-08-14
2020-08-12