Today is an important day in the UK. It’s a day we get to choose our voting system. Do we keep the First Past The Post system that we’ve had for the last 50+ years? Or do we update it to the more representative Alternative Vote.
I’m mad on Politics, I studied it for a year in college and it inspired me much more than I ever expected. It opened up my understanding of everything that went on around me and made me even more opinionated! In that first year we studied all of the different voting systems and I wrote one of my exam essays on the pro’s and con’s of each, so I’ve been particularly enthusiastic about this vote.
I want change. FPTP doesn’t work with our modern political system. It is designed for a system with two political parties so that whoever gains the most votes, has the majority share of the total votes cast. We no longer have that, we have 3 main parties and several other minor parties. This means that the votes are spread more thinly, and often the party with the most votes has far fewer than 50% of the total votes cast. So by some simple maths that means that the majority of the population voted against the winning party. How on earth can this give the party a legitimate mandate to form a government and run our country? It baffles me.
For me AV isn’t ideal, but it’s a step in the right direction. And it’s how I’ve voted today. Below are a video and a podcast that explain how AV works, and why we need it. They are far more eloquent than my rambling type could ever be, so I’ll leave it to them.
Whether you agree with me or not, go and vote! We won’t get another referendum on this for 20 odd years, so grasp the opportunity to have your say.
http://youtu.be/Jm5IBhrq_PU
by The Independent on Mixcloud
