| London elections |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|08:08 pm] |
Tomorrow (1st May) is the elections for the London Mayor and Assembly. These happen every four years, and always on a Thursday.
Wikipedia is good enough that I don't need to write a great piece on how they work, but I do need more than 140 characters so I'm writing this here rather than twitter.
London mayoral election, 2008 is elected by the supplementary vote system. You have two votes - a first choice and a second preference.
In most elections it seems to be between two candidates. You may really like the candidate from a smaller party, but you are aware that it is going to be between the Labour and Conservative candidates. If it is close your vote for the Greens could give it to the Tories! With this voting system you can vote Green 1, Labour 2. You are not saying you particularly like Livingstone, but you can still say you prefer him to Johnson, and you don't have to worry that a vote for the Greens could mean that Johnson gets it.
The London Assembly election is more complicated! The assembly is elected by the Additional Member System which is designed to be more proportional. This means that you again don't have to be forced into voting for the major parties, minority parties *can* get elected as it tries to reflect the percentage of the vote across the entire capital, whilst still giving you a local representative. 14 members represent local areas and 11 are cross London to make it closer to how everyone voted, percentage wise.
I like these sort of elections as they mean that you can have a more finegrained vote than in a normal first past the post contest. You could vote to give the government a bloody nose, and still take account of the fact that you see the official opposition are worse! |
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