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Comment by minot | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for the voters in the UK. LD got trounced in this election but in the previous two elections they had 22 and 23 percentage of votes.

In 2010, Conservatives had 47% of the seats with 36 percent of votes. Labor had almost 40% with 29% of the votes. LD had 8% with 23% of votes. Even in 2015, they had 1.2% of seats with 7.9% of votes.

If you have almost a quarter of the population voting for you, you'd think you can make things happen. What went wrong with the referendum? What could the YES proponents have done differently? More importantly, has the damage been done? How long do UK nationals have to be quiet about alternative voting now?

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It is my understanding that AV was a horrible compromise, desired by no-one (even the smaller parties).

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats was king-maker and part of the coalition (deputy PM) in the last government. With a smaller party in power, this was seen as a crucial opportunity for electoral reform.

Ultimately, Clegg blew it - and I don't think this is an exaggeration.

What we are left with is the SNP needing 26,000 votes per seat in the Commons, and UKIP needing 3.9 million votes per seat. Only 30 million votes were cast in total!

This can be said to be deeply undemocratic, regardless of your political persuasion.

What could the YES proponents have done differently?

The LDs not only got the compromise proposal rather than a properly proportional one, but failed to secure an agreement that their coalition partners wouldn't campaign against it. With the two largest parties and most of the press against it, it was always going to be a No.

If you want voting reform, you absolutely must convince the Labour party to support it. It would be nice to get some positive press too, but the press are basically a free-floating rightwing attack faction of their own.

Maybe the example of Scotland's non-proportional result could be used to convince Labour.

We already had a referendum about it four years ago - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote... - and it was overwhelmingly in favour of the status quo.

I am very convinced that a full proportional representation would be very much better than the status quo. Can we have a referendum again? When would be an optimal time?

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