On May 3, London, England, again used Instant Runoff Voting to choose a Mayor. Here are the results. In the first round, no one had more than 44%, but the Conservative nominee, Boris Johnson, obtained a majority in the second round of counting. The Green Party nominee placed third in the first count.
For London Assembly, 25 members are elected. Fourteen are elected from single-member districts, and eleven at-large. The eleven at-large seats use proportional representation. Four parties won seats in the Assembly: Labour 12, Conservative 9, Green 2, Liberal Democrat 2. See here. Thanks to Thomas Jones for the links.
Was a good election, bad campaign.
There was a couple of issues for one constituency* with the ballot counting machines and a bit of human error that led to the results not being released for quite a number of hours, hopefully they can improve on it for next time.
Electronic counting in England is only used for the London Mayor and Assembly elections, although some Irish and Scottish elections also use them and for the most part have done their job well.
* All the votes from London in these types of elections all end up in the same place to be counted, it was just bad luck that one particular constituency counting had all the problems.
Its also noteworthy that the Scottish elections on Thursday runs under the Single Transferable Vote.
IRV = THE method to elect powermad Stalin/Hitler clones to single person offices.
Should use NON-partisan Approval Voting for executive / judicial offices.
London mayoral election uses what they refer as the Supplementary Vote in which voters may express a 2nd preference. Voters must guess which candidates will finish in the Top 2 or their vote will be discarded. In this election, only 53% of votes transferred, even though Johnson and Livingstone were obvious favorites.
All 25 seats on the assembly are apportioned proportionately. But 14 are elected by individual constituencies, and these are counted against the party total.
Shares: Labour 12; Conservative 9, Green 2, LibDem 2.
Since Labour won 8 constituency seats, they received 4 additional London-wide members; Conservative won 6 constituency seats, and then were given 3 additional seats. Green and LibDems had no constituency winners and were each given 2 London-wide members.
It is possible for a party to win more than their share of the total seats at the constituency level. When this happens, they keep the extra seats, and it is somewhat less proportional.
There is also a threshold in place. Parties with less than 5% of the vote do not receive any seats. In this election, UKIP would have elected a member, but for the threshold (and LibDems would have only received 1).
The P.R. in the London Assembly, even with its defects, is a ZILLION years ahead of the Stone Age ANTI-Democracy minority rule gerrymanders in the U.S.A. and Canada.
P.R. NOW —
Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes required by each seat winner.
Move excess winner votes down, move lowest loser votes up — pending head to head math.
The claim “Boris Johnson obtained a majority in the second round of counting”
is wrong, or at best misleading. The total number votes cast in round #1 for
the 7 candidates was
971931+889918+98913+91774+83914+43274+28751=2208475.
A “majority” of that would be 1104238.
However, Boris Johnson fell 49K short of that with only
1054811 as his “final total.”
It often is falsely claimed by “instant runoff” advocates that it delivers a “majority winner.” There are many refutations of that false claim, in fact probably it fails
more often than it is true. Another refutation is the fact that IRV can elect X as the “winner” i.e. “best candidate” but if instead asked to select the WORST candidate… it would also select that very same candidate X. Under those circumstances, would you insist X is a “majority winner”?
Don’t spread bogus propaganda abut voting methods. The world has enough problems without that one too.
Indeed, under the London mayor voting rules, Johnson could have won the mayorship with only 15% of the vote. IRV propagandists would then claim as usual that he had a “majority.” They’d be wrong. My advice to you, as a voting Sage, is do not follow their lead into the land of error.
# 6 and 7
How about —
IF NO real majority, then declare a vacancy ??? – to be filled for a short time by appointment by a REAL Democracy P.R. legislative body.
NO Real majority = monarchy/oligarchy minority rule — with ALL the resulting damage to civilization.