By Tim Roll-Pickering, who is a research student at Queen Mary, University of London. The current Australian general election will attract more attention in the UK than usual because Australia uses the Alternative Vote (AV, known as “Preferential Voting” down...

This week Westminster has been preoccupied by possible changes in the voting system. The bill to give the people a referendum vote on whether to move to the Alternative Vote system or not was granted a second reading on Monday. The history of this measure is complex. It failed to get a Parliamentary majority in

The Electoral Reform Society web site gives an excellent summary of the pros and cons of the Alternative Vote system. On the same page you can click on other voting system names for similarly clear summaries.

Although for national parliaments the AV system is only used in Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea (recently adopted in the last two), it is being tried for some local elections in America. In the UK we already use AV for elections for mayors, and the system has proven to work well where there are two

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Fiji's military ruler defied international pressure to announce elections by Friday, confirming that he would not hold them for at least five years and setting the stage for his country's ouster from a South Pacific bloc....

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free site, Lib Dem shadow home secretary Chris Huhne argues Labour has got it wrong in proposing a referendum on the Alternative Vote: only the Single Transferable Vote will remedy the unfairness of the present system. Here’s an excerpt: [The Alternative Vote] is very similar to first-past-the-post in two key

The House of Commons yesterday voted by 365 votes to 187 to hold a UK-wide referendum on changing the voting system next year from first-past-the-post to the alternative vote. The Lib Dems reluctantly voted for the alternative vote, as the most modest of improvements on the current, broken system. But the party, in the person

Iain Dale yesterday posted a piece attacking the Alternative Vote system which doesn’t bode well for a well informed campaign. That’s a shame because there’s a sensible debate to be had – with Lib Dems being the first to admit that the Alternative Vote system isn’t the best of all possible options, though most would

I'm a big supporter of AV - the Alternative Vote system as used in Australia. To be more accurate I'm a supporter of proportional representation - which AV isn't - i.e. an electoral system where the share of seats you get directly relates to the share of vote. I'd prefer AV+ (single member AV seats with a "top-up" of list seats to make the overall share of seats equal to share of votes, basically ...

Pah, who needs the Alternative Vote when you can go for the Venetian electoral system, as explained by The New Yorker: Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back