Vote For A Change

So I went to this vote for a change rally a couple a months ago and I found out about proportional representation. It was totally convincing, so I thought I'd write this down so I can link to it instead of keep telling everyone about it.

Here's the problem. It's way simple - this is how I explained it to my five-year-old daughter.

You have to choose two people to represent your year on the school council. There's Alice, Bob and Charlie. You and all the girls in your class vote for Alice, but all the boys in your class vote for Bob - and there's a couple more boys than girls in your class, so Bob is the one chosen by your class.

All the girls in the other class vote for Alice too, but all the boys vote for Charlie. There are more boys than girls in that class too, so that class has now chosen Charlie.

So now Bob and Charlie are on the school council, voting for all kinds of trouser-wearing, boy-type stuff, even though way more people in your year voted for Alice.

Even without a five-year-old's acute radar for unfairness, you can tell that isn't right.

I know it's not a perfect analogy, but it works, I think. In real life, it goes like this - I vote for the Lib Dems - quite a few of us do - but mostly people around here vote Tory, so they win where I live. At this point, my vote is thrown away. I tried, I failed, I'm out of the game.

So with a proportional representation system, like they have in Scotland (so I'm told), that wouldn't be the end of the story. My vote would be kept, and counted up with the totals from the rest of the country. If the Lib Dems don't get any MPs for specific places, but they end up getting 20% of the votes across the whole country, we add a bunch of Lib Dem MPs to parliament until they make up 20% of it. They don't represent any particular constituency - they just represent people like me.

Doesn't that sound better? Not much different, but a bit better. That's good, right?

Oh, FINE, yes, there are some down sides. Well, there aren't really, but people think there are. This post is long enough thought, so I'll come to that later.