The Wardman Wire

The Lib Dems have some more proposals about voting reform over on Lib Dem Voice. On this occasion it is Laurence Boyce proposing “weighted votes”. I’m not going into the detail - Laurence does “political techno-nerd with occasional explosions” far better than I ever will, but this graph will give you the idea.

In outline, the Lib Dem proposal involves “weighting” the votes according to some “criteria”, that is “yet to be defined” (Mr Gordon will love it).

The problem we currently face is that, without such technical arrangements in place, the electoral system is a very blunt tool which can be hopelessly unresponsive to pressing problems.

Pressing problems such as getting Lib Dems elected, presumably.

It’s a bit like trying to fix the economy when one only has access to the crudest levers of power, or like trying to cure an illness with only the most primitive drugs.

Ah well. That’s crude drugs such as marijuana and alcohol sunk as a solution to the illness of attendance at Lib Dem conferences then. May I suggest you try some political speeches? They’ll never come back. Sorted.

In such situations, one may certainly make a difference – a big difference even – but there are likely to be some rather unpleasant side effects.

Yep

More controversially perhaps, the scheme discriminates between the sexes.

Why is that controversial? They have been doing that for years (even when it was proven to be illegal). Remember all women shortlists….

I’m thinking that maybe if we were to give women a greater priority earlier in life, then we might not find ourselves fighting quite so many disastrous and un-winnable wars around the world.

Hmmm. Bouadicea, Joan of Arc, Mrs Thatcher, Hillarious Clinton, Janet Street-Porter. Maybe not. I’m tempted to suggest weighting the votes according to the weight of the candidate, but that would not go down well with Nanny McFee-Brown. I suppose we could try using the reciprocal of the body-mass index of the voter (if we can accept a PM selected by supermodels). My comments are below.

Riposte

As usual the Lib Dems have half a solution. As usual it is the wrong half.

My initial reflection is that that we already have this system. I live in “Dennis the Menace” aka “Beast of Bolsover” country, so any centre-right vote is weighted rather lightly around here.

My solution involves the thorough application of modern technology, resulting in lower electoral overheads and the minimisation of time delays. So it will make elections simple, and get rid of the social scourge of rich men attempting to make money from the electoral process; it is not a game.

Laurence’s suggestion is simply more technocratic gunge on top of the organisational gunge with which we currently have to cope. I first proposed my solution fully six months ago in a conversation about compulsory voting, but I’ve extracted a short quote below.

Simplify! Simplify! Simplify! As William of Ockham would say.

The Perfect Voting System

For voting I would streamline all the admin by using a system proposed by the author Isaac Asimov more than 30 years ago.

Statistics would be so advanced that the determination is not by a crude mass sample - as in a traditional vote.

Rather polling allows the balanced representation of the entire country by choosing a correct single voter who can represent everyone fairly, and make the determination.

No mess. No waste. No administration. No Scottish count cockups. And 168,000 fewer Civil Servants.

Sorted.

Even New Labour or the Scottish Executive can’t get it wrong if they only have one vote to count, surely.

Ockham’s Razor

On the subject of Ockham’s Razor, I’ve been wielding it a bit too much on the Wire in the last few weeks.

But here’s what happened when George the Gorgeous Galloway tried to wield Ockham’s Razor too vigorously to introduce South-American socialism into his own policies:

Tags: lib dem, laurence boyce, liberal democrat, proportional representation, george galloway[tags]lib dem, laurence boyce, liberal democrat, proportional representation, george galloway[/tags]