A simple concept poorly explained

Democracy at work.

It appears that hidden in the news reports of late, behind the Japanese meltdown and pensioners falling of boats in the arctic, that there is to be a change in the way we vote at general elections and the like.

How my frazzled brain has interoperated this news is as follows.

The current voting system work on the principal that if someone gets more votes than the others – they win and there are those in the seats of power to have decided to take offence at this. A majority is declared if one party has at least 51% of the vote.

Mainly due to the fact that in the last election everybody voted equally and there was no clear winner and we were left with the option of having another bash at it or form a coalition government. And the latter is what we got for better or worse.
The big wigs in charge of these things decided that what was needed was another way of voting to make it impossible to have this silly business of joining parties together to beat up another party and make a fairer way of picking a winner.

The most simple and easiest of answers would be to have all the political parties and their representatives work harder and be more open and honest about what they do and how they do it so that the British people could once and for all make up their mind who they wanted to lead them for the next four years until the next election.

This of course is an absurd idea.

We can’t simply have members of parliament earning their wages and expenses like normal working folks, there by encouraging more people to actually get off the lardy arses and physically vote for somebody, thus decreasing the risk of minimal voting whilst increasing the chances of a more representative spread of political hopes amongst the population.

It would be quite undemocratic to expect a public funded and public appointed official ACTUALLY working for the benefit of the people who voted them into power for their greater good rather than treating the seats of Westminster as a career path for the chosen few.

No. No. No. that won’t do at all.

What the British people need is definitive way of voting that is fairer and simpler than that and requires much less work and effort by those that would be voted in.
And here it is.

The alternate vote.

In essence, the way this proposed alternate voting (AV) system would work is by having a voting slip with all the parties on it. You pop into one of little booths and instead of just putting a tick next to the party or name of the person you actually want to have power, you put a number 1 next to the party you want to gain power. You put a number two against the party you want to come second and so on.
All the votes are counted and the party with the least votes is out. They are led away by a grown up and told not to worry but it’s the taking part that counts and if they did want to win, maybe they shouldn’t have been so racist in their propaganda.

The votes of the party that lost are looked at again and whatever those slips say for their second choice is added to the parties and the new lowest scoring party has to sit in the corner and eat some more jelly.

This continues until there are only two opposing parties left and one chair. The music is started again while all the votes are counted one last time and the party with the most votes and sit downs first wins!

This systematic musical chairs is continued until there is one clear winner, which after seeing this explained on the bbc news such a patronising way that was a cross between a children’s math puzzle asking the kids which is their favourite flavour of crisp and a Derren Brown trick – it seem that no matter who you vote for cheese and onion crisps will always win.

In any competition the one rule that stands out – in fact what makes it a competition is the fact that somebody wins. By fudging the results and recounting until everyone is either for or against is a stupid way to run a country.

Unless you want to live in some kind of pseudo dictatorship (which might not be a bad idea) do not vote for the current first past the post voting system we currently have and most of us don’t bother using. Don’t even vote for the new Alternate Voting system that those squares in London want you to not bother going out on voting night for.

Instead let’s use my system for voting...

The clap-o-meter.

As with the last general election, all the candidates of each party appear on some kind of X-factor style TV show, Ant and Dec to be supplied by ITV for a nominal fee, and are given three minutes to speak to the country as a whole.

They can do what they want in this three minute window.

They could tell the public about what their party wants to do in the next four
years if allowed into power.

They could slag off the other parties and claim they are the best of a bad bunch.

They could juggle dogs.

It doesn’t matter.

Three minutes is all they have.

By the end of the three minutes Simon Cowell or Jeremy Paxman would make some kind of cutting remark and the politicians can start to cry or tell a little sob story about how they are doing for their mum who is in hospital dying of embarrassment or
whatever.

Or they could snipe back with a carefully cutting remark of their own.

Either way, they have to leave the stage.

Once all the acts... I mean parties have done their party piece (geddit) the phone lines are open and the voting begins.

People can vote from the comfort of the own sofas either by text, telephone or the RED BUTTON. As well as extra bonus points being awarded for true skill and talent by the studio audience.

By 10pm, all the votes are in and counted by a computer and bosh!

Such and such is in power.

I guarantee there would be a higher rate of voting than popping down to the local junior school on a wet Thursday night and most people would vote one way or the other, leaving us with an outright winner.
Of corse in the highly unlikely event of there not being a clear winner, we could always have a fight off for the two highest scores teams.
This would be in way of best of three fights with those big cotton buds they used to have on gladiators.

I’d watch two middle aged toffs scrap it out to see who will waste more money on middle management courses for NHS administrators because the guy in charge is a winner.

He – or even she – beat up someone else with a big foam stick live on TV. And that’s the kind of guy you want as a leader.

All in all it doesn’t really matter, because most of us even bother going to the voting polls when an election does come around because we will all be far too busy moaning on and on about whichever party does get in will only put up the price of beer fags and petrol etc...

And that is what really matters here. We just want a good old moan about politics.

Now carry on with your day.