I'm just back from visiting ConHome, in search of my nightly fix of daft defences of our glorious first-past-the-post voting system. Yet again, I wasn't disappointed. At first I thought Ed Hall was seriously trying to compare those who point out the unfairness of FPTP with a tearful three-year-old stamping his feet and demanding that he be allowed to watch Bob the Builder again, but no, it's even better than that - the comparison is actually with Hall himself, and how he feels about the 'unfairness' of electoral reform. A few unkind souls might suggest that's rather revealing.
Pointing to the example of the forthcoming London mayoral election, which will use a system similar to AV, Hall claims -
"If the leading candidate doesn't get 50% of the first preference votes, then London's Mayor will be chosen by the second choice votes of the electors that voted for the political wings of fundamentalist Christian, Karmic flying and neo-Nazi parties. That is not just unfair, it's plainly irrational. It gives undue weight to the voters who chose to use the election as a platform to promote their fringe views."
No, it doesn't, Ed. It gives precisely the same weight to every single voter, which is how - in my naivety - I always thought a democratic system was supposed to work. But I can certainly understand Hall's confusion, given that his only previous experience is with a system that saw Russell Johnston elected MP for Inverness in 1992 on 26% of the vote. To use Hall's terminology, first-past-the-post gave 100% "weight" to the one-quarter of people who happened to vote for Johnston, and literally zero "weight" to the three-quarters of people who voted against him. I dare say some of the latter group were sorely tempted to go off and indulge in a bit of foot-stamping afterwards - after all, in those days they didn't even have episodes of Bob the Builder to distract them from the injustice.
Whether Hall realises it or not, what he's actually arguing against is not the idea that fascist-inclined voters and "Karmic fliers" should have a greater say than the rest of us, but rather the idea that they should even have an equal say. That may be superficially attractive to some, but it's an argument against universal suffrage, not AV. Hall doesn't seem to have spotted that under FPTP, fascist voters are already able to decide the outcome of elections, either because they've switched tactically to a mainstream candidate, or because there is no BNP candidate and they consequently have no choice but to vote for a mainstream party. If he finds that so distasteful and "unfair", I presume Hall will be proposing fundamental changes to the current system to - somehow - ensure it can never happen again in future? Mysteriously, it seems not.
But if you think Hall's argument can't get any weaker, you're underestimating the man. He goes on to compare the self-evident 'fairness' of the current system with the way TV talent shows work -
"In modern politics, a winner should be a winner. Try it round your dinner table or next time you watch the X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing. Everyone votes for their favourite book, film or act: surely the candidate with the most votes wins? How would the BBC or ITV possibly explain or justify a programme format with public voting in which the candidate that got the most votes did not win?
'Thank you for calling Britain’s Got Talent. Your vote for the Trapeze Sisters has been counted. Now you can choose a second choice contestant instead. If The Trapeze Sisters don't win, your vote will be transferred to your second choice contestant. Press 2 to register a second preference vote.'"
Oh dear. I'm afraid, Ed, that the voting system for Britain's Got Talent and Strictly Come Dancing is much closer to AV than first-past-the-post. If it worked like the latter, Strictly wouldn't have run for ten or fifteen weeks or whatever it was - there would have been just one programme and one set of dances, at the end of which Ann Widdecombe would have been declared the series winner, on the grounds that her 14% of the popular vote was fractionally higher than any other individual. Your average dinner-party would deem that much fairer than what actually happened, apparently.
Comically, Hall seems to spot this gaping hole in his reasoning almost before he finishes uttering it -
"Of course you do get to vote again in the TV formats as the candidates are knocked out, and the next week's programme starts, but do we really want General Elections every week until we get a winner? That would be the only way to give equal weight to everybody’s second choice votes."
No, it wouldn't, Ed. There's another ingenious way of achieving just that, and you'll be thrilled to hear we're about to hold a referendum on it. It's called AV, or to use its US name, Instant Run-off Voting. The Americans call it that because it produces much the same effect as successively eliminating the least popular candidates and holding subsequent run-off votes until someone wins a majority, but without any of the additional time, hassle and expense. If what I've just described is Hall's ideal - and unless he's guilty of intellectual dishonesty I can only assume it must be - then why on earth is he supporting the status quo in this referendum?
Showing posts with label X Factor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label X Factor. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Saturday, November 27, 2010
How Strictly Come Dancing teaches us that AV would be a mildly good thing
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame has written an article for the New York Times about what he sees as the flaws in the voting system used by Dancing with the Stars (the American carbon-copy of Strictly Come Dancing). It's quite an amusing piece for its earnestness and attention to the finest detail, although given my devotion to the Eurovision Song Contest I may not be in the best position to make that observation! But if you've ever wondered how Ann Widdecombe finds it so easy to survive in Strictly despite being placed bottom by the judges week after week, Nate has the answer for you -
"Suppose, for instance, that late in the season, when there are five couples left, four of the five teams receive 9’s across the board from the judges, and the final couple instead receives straight 7’s. In terms of the way the judges normally vote, that is a rather clear verdict: the low-scoring couple has had an inferior performance, and should be eliminated.
But in reality the low-scoring team would need to receive only 24 percent of the votes from the home audience — just barely better than the 20 percent they would get if the audience voted completely at random — to be guaranteed passage into the next round. It doesn’t matter if 24 percent of the audience thought they were the best-performing couple — and the other 76 percent thought they were the worst one! They would still advance to the next episode."
On the latter point, isn't that one of the obvious fatal flaws with any first-past-the-post voting system? Perhaps that irony wouldn't seem so obvious to an American political commentator more used to two-horse races, but it just so happens that is precisely the problem with FPTP that a 'Yes' to AV would remedy, even if it wouldn't address the far greater problem of disproportionality.
Silver goes on to make a series of detailed suggestions about how the voting arrangements on Dancing with the Stars could be improved, such as encouraging the judges to use the full range of possible scores between 1 and 10, rather than clustering most of the contestants between 6 and 10. That's fine in theory, but if the American show is anything like Strictly, the studio audience would probably start a riot if the weakest couples were routinely being given 1s and 2s.
The real problem with the show's voting system has always been the phenonemon of a couple placed in the middle of the leaderboard by the judges finding themselves being abruptly eliminated, simply because the public have a greater incentive to vote for couples at the bottom of the pile who are perceived to be in greater danger. At least this year with the scrapping of the dance-off we've been spared the tedious weekly ritual of the judges sanctimoniously announcing that "it is a travesty that you're in the bottom two, rather than X, Y or Z", neatly ignoring the fact it was partly the said judges' over-the-top criticisms of X, Y and Z that motivated the public to pick up the phone and save them. The obvious solution to this problem is surely to withhold the judges' scores until after the public have voted. I can't see that would detract from the show very much - The X Factor gets by quite happily without the judges scoring each performance out of 10.
But Strictly is just such a peculiar programme. Whatever the horrors of X Factor, at least it's a talent show in the truest sense of people being there on the basis of their talent. The Strictly philosophy is to randomly round up a group of people who for the most part, quite naturally, can't dance - and then get a smug Australian expert to scream abuse at them for weeks on end about their inability to dance. The producers pick contestants for their fame and popularity, not their dancing potential - and then the judges and the show's more humourless devotees work themselves into apoplexy because other people mysteriously treat it as a popularity contest, not as a "serious dancing competition". Bizarre.
UPDATE : Having thought about this some more, I've realised that either the American show must have a slightly different voting system, or else Silver must have misunderstood it. In Strictly, only the judges' rankings of the couples matter, not the raw scores. If anything, that makes it even easier for Widdecombe to survive.
"Suppose, for instance, that late in the season, when there are five couples left, four of the five teams receive 9’s across the board from the judges, and the final couple instead receives straight 7’s. In terms of the way the judges normally vote, that is a rather clear verdict: the low-scoring couple has had an inferior performance, and should be eliminated.
But in reality the low-scoring team would need to receive only 24 percent of the votes from the home audience — just barely better than the 20 percent they would get if the audience voted completely at random — to be guaranteed passage into the next round. It doesn’t matter if 24 percent of the audience thought they were the best-performing couple — and the other 76 percent thought they were the worst one! They would still advance to the next episode."
On the latter point, isn't that one of the obvious fatal flaws with any first-past-the-post voting system? Perhaps that irony wouldn't seem so obvious to an American political commentator more used to two-horse races, but it just so happens that is precisely the problem with FPTP that a 'Yes' to AV would remedy, even if it wouldn't address the far greater problem of disproportionality.
Silver goes on to make a series of detailed suggestions about how the voting arrangements on Dancing with the Stars could be improved, such as encouraging the judges to use the full range of possible scores between 1 and 10, rather than clustering most of the contestants between 6 and 10. That's fine in theory, but if the American show is anything like Strictly, the studio audience would probably start a riot if the weakest couples were routinely being given 1s and 2s.
The real problem with the show's voting system has always been the phenonemon of a couple placed in the middle of the leaderboard by the judges finding themselves being abruptly eliminated, simply because the public have a greater incentive to vote for couples at the bottom of the pile who are perceived to be in greater danger. At least this year with the scrapping of the dance-off we've been spared the tedious weekly ritual of the judges sanctimoniously announcing that "it is a travesty that you're in the bottom two, rather than X, Y or Z", neatly ignoring the fact it was partly the said judges' over-the-top criticisms of X, Y and Z that motivated the public to pick up the phone and save them. The obvious solution to this problem is surely to withhold the judges' scores until after the public have voted. I can't see that would detract from the show very much - The X Factor gets by quite happily without the judges scoring each performance out of 10.
But Strictly is just such a peculiar programme. Whatever the horrors of X Factor, at least it's a talent show in the truest sense of people being there on the basis of their talent. The Strictly philosophy is to randomly round up a group of people who for the most part, quite naturally, can't dance - and then get a smug Australian expert to scream abuse at them for weeks on end about their inability to dance. The producers pick contestants for their fame and popularity, not their dancing potential - and then the judges and the show's more humourless devotees work themselves into apoplexy because other people mysteriously treat it as a popularity contest, not as a "serious dancing competition". Bizarre.
UPDATE : Having thought about this some more, I've realised that either the American show must have a slightly different voting system, or else Silver must have misunderstood it. In Strictly, only the judges' rankings of the couples matter, not the raw scores. If anything, that makes it even easier for Widdecombe to survive.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Want to choose the Queen? You may be missing the point here...
So the tedious issue of whether Camilla could one day be Queen has been reignited by Prince Charles' slip in an American TV interview. I tend to think the people questioning whether a woman they don't happen to like very much "should" become Queen are a bit like the outraged TV talent show viewers who think that Wagner "shouldn't" win The X Factor just because he can't sing very well, or that Ann Widdecombe "shouldn't" win Strictly Come Dancing just because she can't dance very well. What, you mean that in a public phone vote, the person with the most votes wins? What, you mean that in a hereditary monarchy, the wife of the heir to the throne gets to become Queen? Who'd have thunk it?
If Camilla does become Queen (or indeed if Wagner wins The X Factor) it's the sign of a system working exactly as it's supposed to. If you don't like that system, let me suggest the remedy has been staring you in the face all along...
If Camilla does become Queen (or indeed if Wagner wins The X Factor) it's the sign of a system working exactly as it's supposed to. If you don't like that system, let me suggest the remedy has been staring you in the face all along...
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The Sun? Hypocritical? Perish the thought...
Not that I particularly want to give Simon Cowell praise for anything (even when it's due) but I'm very pleasantly surprised to see that X Factor contestant Chloe Mafia will not be axed from the show simply because of allegations that she worked as a "£160-an-hour escort" (is our knowledge of the exact price supposed to make it worse somehow?). I read the original article on The Sun website a couple of days ago, and it was utterly breathtaking to see that publication - of all publications - taking an implied judgemental stance on matters of sexual morality. I shouldn't have been surprised of course, because it's hardly the first time - tabloid journalists have a remarkable knack of seamlessly switching back and forth between 'laddish' mode and 'outraged evangelical preacher' mode. The most nauseating part of the article was the account of an undercover reporter who was "repeatedly invited" onto a double bed by Ms. Mafia, but instead "made his excuses and left". Well, how terribly noble of him. But does anyone doubt for a moment that The Sun would have been perfectly content for their reporter to go ahead and do the deed (on expenses, naturally) if they had calculated it would sell more papers? Of course, the main reason that couldn't happen was that it would have been incongruent with the pious subtext of the piece - namely that if the story could be substantiated, it was a complete no-brainer that Mafia's involvement in X Factor was untenable.
Now I may be missing something here, but as far as I'm aware what Mafia allegedly does for a living is perfectly legal in the UK (there may be some grey areas over the advertising of escort services on the internet, but as things stand the work itself is legal). So why should her participation in the show ever have been thought to be in jeopardy? Yes, she's done something that a certain portion of the population finds morally objectionable, but the same would apply to anyone who has ever had an abortion, eaten meat or had an affair - all also legal activities. Why is it taken as read that certain types of intolerance will always be pandered to, but not others? Regardless of personal moral values, it's always a good start to view every individual as first and foremost a human being, rather than as some kind of walking embodiment of one particular choice they've made in their life.
Now I may be missing something here, but as far as I'm aware what Mafia allegedly does for a living is perfectly legal in the UK (there may be some grey areas over the advertising of escort services on the internet, but as things stand the work itself is legal). So why should her participation in the show ever have been thought to be in jeopardy? Yes, she's done something that a certain portion of the population finds morally objectionable, but the same would apply to anyone who has ever had an abortion, eaten meat or had an affair - all also legal activities. Why is it taken as read that certain types of intolerance will always be pandered to, but not others? Regardless of personal moral values, it's always a good start to view every individual as first and foremost a human being, rather than as some kind of walking embodiment of one particular choice they've made in their life.
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