I still don't understand why the referendum is on AV and not PR. Most votes get thrown away because of this silly county-based system. If you live in a county which is heavily weighted towards a particular party, you do not have a meaningful vote.
As the press would say "it's a dirty coalition compromise" which you can read as "it's a pragmatic decision based on the political landscape of the day taking in to account the moral perspective of all involved acting as elected officials"
Minority governments do not last very long and with Labour on the wane there was a significant possibility of a subsequent election giving the Conservatives a majority; at best, there would be an opportunity for a Lib-Lab majority. The Liberals' power is often overstated by principled idealists, but for pragmatists it was a good choice: 75% of their manifesto is becoming Government policy, compared to 60% of the Conservative manifesto (http://guildfordlibdems.org.uk/en/article/2011/486213/75-of-...). Of course, the remaining 25% matters a lot more to many people than the 75% they implemented...
I feel you cannot state that Labour in any way desires electoral reform.
It doesn't exactly get you proportional representation, but it gets closer than AV or FPTP while still allowing you to vote for individual people rather than party lists and it allows you to legitimately have representatives for your region while maintaining decent proportionality. I really think it's a nice system. I like the idea of having regional representation - so that you have your (Congresspeople|TDs|MPs). I like the idea of being able to vote for minority parties. I like the idea of those minority parties being able to get close to proportional representation. STV seems like a nice compromise there. You get to have your representatives for your area bringing local views, you get to vote for people, and you get closer to proportional representation than AV and FPTP.
Germany, for example, has a (pretty complicated) voting system that insures that every constituency has one representative (that's half of the parliament, the other half has, technically speaking, no constituency but they are obviously still from somewhere).
Everyone gets two votes, one for a representative from the constituency (whoever gets the most votes wins and will definitely be in parliament), and, more importantly, a second vote which determines the proportions of the parties in parliament. (Seats that parties cannot fill with directly elected representatives are filled from the party list.)
That second vote decides about the government (proportionally!), the first makes sure that every constituency has someone in parliament they can write letters.
This voting system is called mixed member proportional representation and here is the link to its Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_member_proportional_repre...
Anyway, right now it's AV or Continue As You Were. That's the choice we Brits have to make TODAY, and I do hope that any of you reading this will make sure that you do vote.
Voters have two votes: one on the left and one on the right. "Hier 1 Stimme" means "Here 1 vote". It is still just an X in a circle but twice instead of once. Most people when shown this grasp it immediately.
A similar Scottish ballot is on the left here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures...
The trick is to get people to care about it so they become curious and reject the assertions of "it's too hard". The Yes campaign attempted this initially but did a poor job, in this case it turns out much easier to explain the thing than to pose half-truth arguments why people should care!
And ultimately, the population follows the parties -- unless you are a LibDem supporter you probably don't especially want to see the LibDems holding the balance of power in every parliament for the next fifty years.
If that epic ballot paper isn't confusing then I don't know what is!
If that ballot paper is confusing then you shouldn't be allowed to vote.
What I would say is that the mechanics of AV are more (pseudo?)non-deterministic than the Scottish Parliament system of PR. With PR - seats mirror votes more or less. With AV, nobody really seems to know how things will turn out, and even less representative massive majorities can occur. So in a way AV is more complicated in that sense.
I'm still wondering why I voted for it to be honest.
AV will help somewhat in the long term, as people are more free to vote for the smaller parties without quite the same risk of losing seats for the lesser evil of the large parties, but it will still leave a substantial number of people without any meaningful representation.
I'm originally from Norway, and I much prefer the Norwegian system: PR with multi-seat constituencies where each constituency is a reasonably small geographical region, combined with a small number of seats that are allocated in order to more closely approximate the countrywide vote totals amongst the parties that got more than 4% of the vote (personally I think the 4% limit ought to go too).
It maintains a regional link, while at the same time getting a far more accurate representation of how people vote.
I support AV over FPTP because it will force the larger parties to be somewhat more mindful of other voters and because it may allow some opposition parties to grow faster because of less tactical voting, but whatever the result, I will still be without anyone representing my interests.