rionaleonhart | Not-Really-Subliminal Message: Yes To AV.

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Not-Really-Subliminal Message: Yes To AV.

Yesterday, I absently thought 'hmmm, I wonder when the new series of Waterloo Road is going to start?', and I looked it up, and SURPRISE, IT'S TOMORROW (by which I mean tomorrow from yesterday's perspective, i.e. today). What on Earth, Waterloo Road? The sixth series only finished a month ago!

Still, I'm not complaining. Spoiler blackout for

reipan's benefit; highlight to read: Except I am complaining, because after turning the television off at the end I sort of freaked out and cried a bit. WATERLOO ROAD HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME. I was so happy to see you again and you turned around and punched me in the gut. Sam I love you so much :( :( :( :( :(

Not-really-spoilery notes on the episode (7.01):

- TOM IS CLEAN-SHAVEN. WHAT. For a while it was in danger of making me like him a bit less, because he was clean-shaven way back in the first two series, when he was an arsehole. For all I knew, all his morality was contained in his stubble. But apparently he has not regressed in character, which is nice.
- Josh has lopped off all his beautiful curls and it is a tragedy. :(
- Sambuca looks completely adorable in her reading glasses! Everyone who made fun of her is an idiot. Guys, if you mock her she might take off her glasses. Have you seen what she looks like in those glasses?
- I want Sam to be the Doctor's companion. She would be wonderful. Somebody write this.

On a much more serious note: AV referendum day tomorrow, UK voters! If you haven't yet decided how you're going to vote, do me a favour and vote Yes?

AV, in case you're not clear on it, works like this:

- Voters rank candidates in order of preference.
- If a candidate has over 50% of the vote, they win. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is knocked out and the votes for that candidate pass to the voters' second preferences.
- Repeat until one candidate has over 50% of the vote.
- Winner!

It is not nearly as complicated as the No campaign is making it out to be. (Here is a rather excellent video explanation with cats!)

(Special invisible browser ink that can be read only by supporters of the left: under FPTP, the current system, the Conservatives have an unfair advantage because they're the only viable right-wing party; the right are united behind them, and because the left-wing voters are split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats the Conservatives can sail past the divided votecounts of the other parties, even if the majority of voters in a constituency are on the political left. AV makes a lot more sense, in my eyes. Then again, I'm not a Conservative.)

The No campaign is exaggerating the cost of AV, incidentally. The £250 million figure being bandied about includes the £91 million being spent to have the referendum in the first place, which is happening whether you vote Yes or not, and the £130 million cost of the electronic vote counting machines that there are no plans to introduce. Basically, the No campaign is a pack of outrageous lies and actually makes me quite angry.

ALSO, 'UNDER AV THE CANDIDATE WHO COMES SECOND OR THIRD COULD BE THE WINNER': TOTAL NONSENSE. YES, UNDER AV THE CANDIDATE WHO WOULD COME SECOND OR THIRD UNDER FPTP MIGHT BE THE WINNER. You may as well just say 'under AV the results will be different!'

THAT'S SORT OF THE POINT OF VOTING REFORM.

So, yes! AV referendum tomorrow. Please vote Yes to AV? Or, you know, you can vote against it if you really want to. I'll still love you. But please do consider voting Yes.

(My evil plan comes to fruition! Step one: accumulate blog readers; step two: influence political outcomes. YEAH.)

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For all I knew, all his morality was contained in his stubble.

I think that might be my favourite sentence ever committed to print.

It was so strange to see him clean-shaven again! He looks so young!

I HAVEN'T HAD A CHANCE TO WATCH IT YET!! But I am excited, Tumblr exploded with Waterloo Road related 'omgz' earlier.

Damn my mobile broadband dongle.

I'm writing fanfiction instead, until tomorrow when I'll be in decent distance of a tv XD

I did some phone bank work for the Yes to AV campaign last week; mostly what I learnt is that old people have voted overwhelmingly (based on the ones I spoke to) for No. Some of these people, when asked about the referendum, actually had no clue what they were voting on in the first place. I have a suspicion that this was because the elderly rely on mail-outs for political information due to a lack of internet access. Because of this lack of internet access, they can't verify facts, so basically if the No campaign wins tomorrow, it will be ENTIRELY BECAUSE OF MISLEADING OLD PEOPLE so they are dicks*.

*This statement may well be totally made up but THAT IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT THE NO CAMPAIGN HAVE BEEN DOING ALL ALONG SO THEY DESERVE IT.

Oh, this makes me sad. I think a good part of the reason I'm so very invested in the outcome of this is because the No campaign has been so misleading. Whilst I want AV, I'd be able to cope if it failed to pass because of informed voters deciding to vote against it. If it gets shot down by people who have been misled by made-up numbers and emotionally manipulated by irrelevant pictures of babies on life support, I am going to be furious.

I'm really bloody angry about it! Four flipping years I've been waiting for the slightest hint of electoral reform and it's probably not going to happen thanks to a campaign full of vested interests, armed with a pack of lies. Grr.

I really hope some detailed breakdowns of how people voted based on age/race/political affiliation/geographical location etc. get released at some point because I want to see if my suspicions are correct...

I still don't understand this AV thing. Talk about percentages or numbers and I can't take it in no matter how it's worded. :(
I also had no idea voting is tomorrow. I guess I'm not voting then.

Here is an excellent video explanation! With cats! Please vote yes.

I think that's confused me more than ever.

But... I don't even know how to vote. I mean, physically, how to cast a vote. Shouldn't I have received something telling me about this if I'm supposed to vote on something? But I haven't. *is completely bemused*

Oh, how strange! You should probably have received a polling card telling you where to go. Bizarre. I suppose you could contact your electoral registration office, but they might be a touch busy tomorrow, and if you don't have strong feelings on AV you might not want to go through the hassle.

AV basically works like a TV talent contest. The person with the fewest votes gets voted off the 'show' until everyone's eliminated but the winner. That's it!

But... *looks blank* I don't get how that's different to what we have already?

(I'm sorry! My brain is just not wired the same as most peoples', I'm sure. There are things I can never take in.)

Our current system in the talent show metaphor: here are contestants. Voting takes place. The contestant with the largest share of the votes wins; there are no rounds of elimination.

AV: here are contestants. Voting takes place. The contestant with the smallest share of the votes is eliminated. Second round of voting, in which everyone who voted for the eliminated contestant in the first round switches to their favourite of the remaining contestants instead.

Basically, AV makes sure that nobody's vote is wasted, even if their favourite is unlikely to win outright. And I think that's a good thing; it means that nobody's forced to vote for a party that isn't the party they really want just because it's 'safer'.

Have you seen this yet?

I just saw that after posting this entry! It is rather fabulous. Might edit a link in, actually; it explains it more clearly than I did and with more cats.

I might be messing up the numbers when it comes to figuring out if your evil plan worked or not - I was going to vote yes anyway. (Even before the No campaign got into swing, but I think if I'd been undecided, their campaign would have made me vote Yes... the whole 'AV is WAAAAY too complicated even though we use it to elect our party leader' thing just smacks of 'oh no, you plebs'll never get it, don't worry about it and go do some guttering or something')

We got a ridiculous 'no to AV' leaflet through our door a couple of weeks ago. There's a page headed 'Here's why you should vote No', explaining FPTP ('You vote. Your vote is counted. The candidate with the most votes wins') next to AV (excessively wordy explanation of how AV works).

There's no actual reason you should vote No given. What it's saying, as my brother pointed out, is 'Here's why you should vote No to AV: you're stupid and you can't understand it.'

Heh, we got a similar one too.

There was a good bit in Private Eye recently, a two column piece, on the left 'the Yes campaign explain why you should vote yes' *list of actual points given by the campaign*. On the right: 'the No campaign explain why you should vote no' *big picture of Nick Clegg*.

Vote yes! For us poor disenfranchised foreign England-dwellers who hope to one day get British citizenship! (It's a niche, I'll admit).

Earlier, I tweeted "No offence, but if you vote No, I think you're 20% douchebag" and one of my friends was like 'I'm not a douche...but I am voting No' and gave her reason as she didn't want to give the Lib Dems more seats. Which I guess is fair, except that relies on the Lib Dem getting votes - the ability of which I imagine is heavily diminished.

Basically, AV = Yay-V when it comes to tomorrow's referendum.

Boy, I wish I could vote in this referendum (damn being on the wrong side of the Atlantic...!)

I've heard it said that, although MPs may get in through FPTP, AV is what they use within their parties to allot leaders/positions...

I've used an AV-alike voting system and it's really not at all complicated for the voter. It's high time we had voting reform!

Well, it's not quite AV that the Tories (and probably the other parties) use, it's a similar multi-round system I think. More in common with AV than FPTP anyway.

I'm voteing yes!
I also got sombody to switch from No to Yes by saying "If you vote No you'll be makeing Tory Dave a happy man"

Hooray! You are doing good work.

UGH THANK YOU FOR YOUR AV POST. I hope someone sees it and decides to vote.

(By which I mean vote yes.)

I may be voting Yes to AV with...well, whatever writing utensil the polling station deems fit to provide me, but I will be voting Yes to PR in my heart ): I can't help but feel that if the current political party elected into power within a democracy doesn't want what is objectively recognised to be a more democratically representative system in place because they wouldn't be elected under it, then we have a flawed democracy.

...But that's just me handing out my political opinion like cheap cigars, so! Instead: awww, kitties ♥

This is possibly due to my laziness and not looking into this whole AV thing properly (or at all), but you are the first person to explain AV to me in a way that I understand. They way you put it makes it sound so incredibly simple, so why is it that every time prior to now I've left an AV conversation in utter confusion? Anyway, thank you for clearing that up for me. I think that if I do end up voting tomorrow (which is in question only because I have a huge deadline to worry about on Friday) it was always going to be yes if only because all the left-wing people I know or know of believe yes is the better vote, and all the right-wing people I know (i.e. my family, who are wonderful people if misguided in their views) are going to vote no.

Excuse me rambling, I hope some of that made sense. My head's feeling a bit scrambled right now. Basically, thank you for helping me come to a decision about this AV thing.

I'm so glad this entry could help! I hope you do get down to the polls tomorrow (or technically today now, I suppose), but I wish you luck in your deadline whether you do or not!

Thank you! I think you've persuaded me to go, to support my fellow liberals. You should feel proud. Have a cookie.

Bah, I wish I actually still lived in the UK. AV is awesome and I'm glad we're actually voting on trying to get that put into place!

Unlike in America, where everything is still crap. Politically, anyway.

I can't vote in your referendum, but I learned interesting things about how your country works so that was fun? Also I spent a lot of the cat video alternately amused by the graphics and bemused by the narrator's accent.

Voting yes anyway, but this is a good post and you should feel good!

It's really good to see a nice clear explanation rather than just the point that Cameron won't like it.

(That is just a happy side effect!)

Have already voted, bb. And yes, I voted yes. Hee.

It kinda makes me laugh because you can so tell people's political inclinations from which way they vote - Tories, no; Lib Dems, yes; Labour, meh.

I'm in favour of anything that makes a country's election less 'yeah, we got one-third of the vote, but we'll get half the seats, while the group that got almost 25% of the votes gets only 10% of the seats' and a little more 'we know how numbers work'.

Having now watched the 'AV' youtube video (with added cats), I'm convinced to vote yes for HAPPY KITTEHS.

j/k, it sounds much better than FTPT because votes actually count more. Now I need to find my polling station. I think it's a school, so I think it's only going to be open from about 4pm :/

I voted yes! I've been going around all day telling my peers to VOTE, VOTE, I DON'T CARE WHICH WAY YOU VOTE well really I'd rather you voted yes but IF YOU STRONGLY BELIEVE IN VOTING NO THEN THAT IS STILL BETTER THAN NOT VOTING, because I think that voter apathy is an even bigger issue than which voting system we're using.

We got a "No to AV" leaflet through our door with a super-shifty picture of Nick Clegg on it, in a kind of "DON'T SUPPORT THIS MAN, LOOK AT HIM WITH HIS SHIFTY EEEEYES" sort of way. Jo has just out the picture and stuck it on our light switch so that it looks as if shifty Nick is turning on the kitchen fan. FOREVER.

(I need to talk to you*! Call me later?)

*not about anything bad! I love you.

WELL NOW I'M CERTAINLY NOT GOING TO YOUR HOUSE.

(Later because you're busy now? I could theoretically call you now. Is this about weekend-related plans? Yuffie called me with a proposal that sounds fine to me; have you spoken to her?)

(Later because I didn't know when you were going to get this! Now is fine. Yuffie has called me too, but I wanted to chat with you about things.)

I know, I know, all Josh's beautiful hair, gone D:
OH GOD THAT ENDING. I just... I finished watching the episode about five minutes ago. I'm still crying and my hands are shaky.

It was so awful! I hadn't realised I had such emotional investment in Waterloo Road, but I am really, really not okay with this.

boo, hiss, alternative voting! i voted against it. but that's because i don't like the way it works - if i wanted a certain party in power, i'd vote for them, i don't want my vote going to somebody else! also, i'm a conservative, so first past the post can stay as far as i'm concerned. bleh. but i agree, the No To AV campaign is ridiculous.

It's not compulsory to put down your other choices! You can number as many or as few candidates as you like! But I suppose there's no point trying to persuade you if you've already voted. (And I knew you were a Conservative supporter, so I thought you'd probably vote against it.)

To be honest, I've just gotten to the point where you could not even fathom the immensity of the fuck I no longer give about politics in general. I only voted at all because, as my dad quite rightly said, if I didn't vote I couldn't complain about it.

I think I might just go live in the lolitics fandom for a while and content myself with fanfiction and pretend the real world doesn't exist.

Just so you know, literally minutes after reading this last night I went to the living room to watch the news with my parents & my mother mentioned that she was thinking of voting no. Inspired by your post (and also, I admit, the utterly reprehensible leaflets from the 'No' campaign that came through our door) I went off on a rant about how AV was fairer and better and actually quite simple and many, many sensible people were for it etc.

After we went to vote tonight, she confessed I'd changed her mind into voting yes. ^_^ You're now even politically influencing by proxy! Be proud!

I'm so pleased to hear this! Well done you. (Argh, those leaflets. I am offended by how flimsy their arguments are.)

The no campaign consisting of 'You won't understand it' 'Don't you hate Nick Clegg?' and LIES makes me angrier than anything.

Thank you for the cat video! I just looked at the description and it has a DISCLAIMER ABOUT DOGS NOT BEING INHERENTLY RIGHT-WING, which delights me more than is probably reasonable.

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Not-Really-Subliminal Message: Yes To AV.

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let me have a go at explaining it

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