That sounds crap, would probably put us back into TwDC and look where that took us, just look at the list for the last mayor, every candidate from all parties were from Newcastle.
The current system works well when you have two broad church parties, but when you have four or five parties it breaks down and can give strange results. Take the last election ,Labour actually got fewer votes than they did in 2019 but won a landslide, because the other votes splintered. Looking at the polls as they stand today, Reform could get 28% of the vote and have a larger majority than Labour currently have. This would not reflect the will of the voters as 72% would have voted against them. So n that basis I would suggest that we need to change the voting system to suit a multi party world. That is the easy bit, the hard bit is what do you change it to? Pure PR , we all cast one vote and the seats are divided up on the percentage of votes cast for each party. On the positive side, you get what you vote for. On the negative side you get the politicians each party wants to give you, as they would be taken from a list held by each party not the electorate. You can obviously break this system down to smaller units such as regions, but to give a true proportional outcome these regions would still need to be small. A mixed pure proportional and individual seat model. In this system you retain individual seats, but they would be much larger, so you can elect independent MP’s and also have a local connection between where you live and your MP. If day 1/3rd of the seats are elected on this basis, the remaining 2/3rds are allotted to each party in such a way that the final outcome reflects the proportional votes of each party. While this gives you a locslmMP say one for Sunderland, there would be twice as many appointed by the parties. Single Transferable Vote systems. These are those where you rank candidates in order of preference and can be single MP, or multiple MP seats. In single MP seats you remove the votes for the candidate with the fewest votes and allocate 5hese to the second preference, then repeat, allocating second, or third preferences to the remaining candidates, until one has 50% plus 1 of the votes cast. In multi member seats you do the same, but once the first seat is filled you allocate the second preferences of the elected candidate. There are several ways in which the threshold to be elected candidate be calculated in multi member seats some complex others not so complex. Alternative vote, in this system you give a first and deconstructed preference. After the initial count, if no one gets 50% of the vote you allocate the second preference votes from any candidate outside the top two. Obviously the candidate with most votes after the reallocation is elected. The French use a variation of the alternative vote system, in this they have a single member election and any candidate with 50% of the votes is elected. A week later they run a second vote this time with only the top two candidates on the ballot. This allows people to use their alternative vote knowing who is likely to to win. in any of the single, or multiple seat options you can have a separate list vote as well, where you vote for a Party not a single candidate, based on these votes each party has a list of candidates and they are elected based on these votes each ranking order their Party applies. The numbers elected on this list system can either be on a purely proportional basis, or used to top up the number of MPs elected via the directly to make the final outcome more proportional. There are other systems as well, so while we need to move to a PR system we have to also think about which system we want.
For those that want PR... Chile's presidential election will go to a run-off vote in December between a Communist Party and a far-right candidate, after a first round on Sunday produced no outright winner. Jara is a member of the Communist Party, but many see her as centre-left in practice. She was a minister in Boric's government and her platform has included pledging to increase production of lithium - a metal vital for electronics - as well as raising the minimum wage, building new prisons and deploying the army to protect Chile's borders. Kast is a conservative lawyer and former congressman who lost the 2021 election's run-off to President Gabriel Boric. This is his third time running for president. The father of nine has promoted a tough crackdown on immigration, including a Trump-style "border wall". He opposes abortion even in cases of rape, has criticised environmental and indigenous activism, and wants to shrink the state. His brother was a minister during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and his father was a member of the Nazi party.
It was voted against, but the referendum was effectively fixed (but when are they not?). They offered 2 choices: stay with "first past the post" switch to the worst possible version of "proportional representation" unsurprisingly the answer was "stay as we are". If they'd asked, do you want to: stay with first past the post investigate a more representative alternative they'd have probably got a different answer
I am not sure we would have done. A lot of the vote was from people wanting to punish the Lib Dem’s for going into coalition with the Tories.
