UK says 'no' to alternative vote

[T_i_B]

Source: BBC

UK voters have rejected a change to the voting system - a major blow to Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg after heavy election losses.

Counting continues but more than 9.8m people have voted to keep first-past-the-post, more than 50% of votes cast.

The No campaign is on course get a decisive 69% of the vote - leading AV campaigner Chris Huhne conceded the rejection had been "overwhelming".

But more than 9,873,000 No votes have already been counted - the 50% threshold after which the Yes campaign cannot win. The official result will not be announced until all results have been declared - expected at around 2000 BST. So far more than 300 areas of the UK have voted No, while those which have voted Yes are still in single figures - many of which are in London.



Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13297573

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YIPEEEEEE!!!!! :bounce:

[sasha031]

1. maybe I got lost in UK politics long ago, but I thought the libs were good once

[T_i_B]

2. They were very good once

But Nick Clegg appears to be on a mission to ruin the Liberal Democrats. The AV referendum was the big concession he got when he took the Lib Dem's into coalition with the Conservatives and his support for AV was something that certainly drove a lot of people to vote No.

Well that and the fact that AV is not all that great a system. I'd much rather stick with FPTP and voted No accordingly.

[sasha031]

3. thank you for the update

:)

[regnaD kciN]

4. FPTP is what gave us the WONDERFUL results in Canada...

...where a whopping 40% of the vote gave the country a Conservative majority with the chance to shove Harper's agenda down the throats of Canadians for the next four or five years. :puke:

[T_i_B]

6. AV is not really proportional representation

Proponents of AV supported it in the hope that it would prop up the Lib Dems enough to force a referendum on full PR in the future but it doesn't change the fact that the number of MP's elected, rather then the proportion of votes decides the government.

Personally I always saw the "this is your ONLY chance to change the system" argument as a tacit admission that the Lib Dems have cocked up their role as junior proponents in the coalition and don't have much of a future. It's the Lib Dems whose main policy for many years has been electoral reform (of which they would be the sole beneficiaries). That argument also had more then a little bit of scaremongering about it as well.

[brooklynite]

8. Point to an example where Preference Voting works on a national level...

I'm aware its applied in some localities, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to sell the concept to any national electorate.

[JackRiddler]

5. If the Liberals had been a plot to destroy proportional representation for a generation...

they couldn't have done a better job of it. They entered a rotten coalition against what most of their voters wanted, made every possible concession to the Conservatives, and got only this one lousy referendum that wasn't even on porportional representation but what Clegg himself earlier called a bad idea (which was used against them in the referendum).

[Vidar]

7. Bravo Brits!! They apparently haven't drunk as much of the propagandists'

"kool-aid" as many of our countrymen.

[T_i_B]

9. Best analysis yet of why Yes2AV lost

http://www.liberal-vision.org/2011/05/08/the-humiliation-of-the-yes-campaign/

The scale of incompetence by the YES campaign simply cannot be overstated. It is so vast and so staggering that it won’t merely fill column inches for days, if not weeks to come, it will be the subject of PhD theses for decades to come. It is unlikely that a wilful infiltration of the YES campaign by the NO side – at the most senior levels – could have resulted in a more calamitous result. The enormity of this professional political campaigning disaster is without parallel in modern British history.

The YES campaign was eminently winnable. But it ended up being run by readers of the Guardian for readers of the Guardian. Readers of this newspaper are about 1% of the voting electorate – and are also a statistically extreme group. Their views do not chime remotely with mainstream British opinion. There is no purist Guardian editorial proposition that could ever come close to winning a referendum in the UK.

From the outset, the YES campaign was all about the tiny coterie of people who feel strongly about electoral reform. The emphasis was on these people “having fun” and being invited to comedy evenings. In email after email from the YES campaign, the quirky behaviour of this “producer set” was celebrated and the “consumer set” ignored. So, some bunch of local activists who had written the letters Y, E and S in big letters on a beach were hailed as creative geniuses. Others were highlighted for running a particularly successful street stall. From the point of view of any observer, it was all about “them”(the micro-percentage of constitutional reform obsessives) never about “us” (the people). None of this self-indulgent madness won a single vote for the YES side, but it probably lost thousands.

Matthew Elliott’s NO2AV campaign took a totally different path. They realised who their base was and utilised them, but – quite brilliantly – reached out immediately to their key target electorate (essentially traditional Labour voters and supporters.) If Elliott had spent his first weeks in post writing to hard-core Tories about how marvellous and clever they were, he may have lost. He didn’t. He made it his number one aim to build a coalition with Labour and deployed his left-wing allies superbly. Ed Miliband was left looking like a weakened man who couldn’t control the more charismatic and compelling beasts in his party like John Reid. This ability to build a wider coalition from the outset, rather than retreat into the comfort zone of centre-right, free market politics was central to the NO campaign’s success.