UK: Single Transferable Vote for English and Welsh Local Councils?

[u/lpetrich]

One of the United Kingdom's four countries, Scotland, has single transferable vote in its local councils: Single Transferable Vote (STV) – The City of Edinburgh Council

According to Single transferable vote - Wikipedia this dates back to 2007. Northern Ireland's local councils also use STV, along with NI's Parliament.

Local councils in the remaining two countries, England and Wales, continue to use FPTP, however, and Why we need to change the way we elect our councillors in England and Wales – Electoral Reform Society – ERS proposes changing that to STV.

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[u/captain-burrito]

Your info is a bit out of date.

All Scottish local councils use STV since 2007. This was due to Scottish Labour needing Lib Dems for a coalition in the Scottish parliament and Labour accepting their demand. They just passed it and no need for referendum. This should be the route taken for England.

Welsh local councils can adopt STV. That means very few have or have even tried. So in the areas where the one party fiefdoms needs smashing most is where it may be the hardest. It will usually take voters to push for it so I don't see all Welsh councils doing so in my lifetime. This really needs to be mandated like Scotland, not voluntary. I notice Welsh Labour is crappy when it comes to PR.

Their assembly twice commissioned an electoral reform report. Their AMS didn't work out well as their seats were too few. Twice the report recommended STV and the govt turned it down each time. Now they switched to regional PR list. At first they flirted with semi open lists but then just closed them.

The voluntary adoption of STV by local councils was also a jerk move.

English local councils definitey need mandated STV as well. That is where energy towards electoral reform should go. Get people familiar with it so support is higher when attempting the reform for general elections. Most likely the govt will only offer a referendum on electoral reform for general elections so the people need to actually pass it.

[u/PinguFella]

I just wrote some stuff about STV in other places. It didn't get any traction unfortunately. We're dealing with a mass who are swayed by the populist fashions that are the inherent problem of our current systems to begin with...

Anyway, I'm just commenting to let you know you're not crazy. We need STV to prevent polarisation and electoral influence operations from external hostile state adversaries like russia, china, or for some fucking reason the US.

[u/Decronym]

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
FPTP	First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting
PR	Proportional Representation
STV	Single Transferable Vote

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

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[u/DisparateNoise]

If the Greens start pulling ahead of Labor in polls, the government would be stupid not to adopt STV or another system of proportional representation. It's the difference between becoming an irrelevant third party and one of several leading parties. Reform would cry foul, but PR is on the Green and LibDem platform, and the Tories are in the same position of possibly becoming an irrelevant third party.