General Irish politics discussion thread

Of course you'd disagree. Despite being in government, despite FG controlling Dublin city Council, despite a FG Minister very vocal pleas to stop the Dublin City transpor plan tpostponed, it is still somehow SFs fault. 😂😂😂

Can we have examples please, of how SF are "the biggest obstacle to public transport"?

Harris is looking to promote a fresh new brand image for FG. It works both ways, if he gets back into government, he can claim new ideas and new blood, if he ends up in opposition, he won't be stuck with old TDs who have no chance in 5/6 years time of getting elected.

To be fair STV isn't perfect either, we get many candidates getting seats without reaching the quota. Take for example in 2016 where 49.8% of the vote gave FF and FG 94 seats (or 59% of the 158 available)

I don't think there is a "perfect" system though to be fair, just degrees of perfection. Of which STV has a much higher degree of it than FPTP. With that being said FPTP makes for stronger governments so you have to weigh positives with negatives the whole time

It would suggest that people gave a first preference to one party (or indo) and a second preference to another suggesting party loyalty is not very high so that would be the main bug.

The system itself is a good one aside from the numbers that can get in without a quota, min 1 per constituency you could essentially have a political party on the fringe in theory gain 43 seats without a quota

Get rid of 3 seat constituencies and most of this "problem" goes away. But as Podge says, first prefs are certainly not the be all and end all in PR-STV. Your tenth pref might be the one that pushes someone over the line.

It's also very possible to protest vote (or even pity vote) with your no.1 and then move on to candidates who are actually electable.

Yes, the larger the average constituency is, the more proportional the result.

But we're wedded to the old county lines, which makes it difficult.

The Quota figure that is announced before Count 1 is 'the figure at which it is mathematically certain to win a seat'. It remains a constant throughout all the counts.

But should it remain constant, as in reality it is always trending downwards? If Candidate X is eliminated after count 1 with 1000 votes, generally some of their votes are not transferable. Clearly the 'Effective Quota' has changed - it is now Original Quota minus (NonTransferable Votes / No Of Seats). Anyone who surpasses this new figure is uncatchable, is effectively elected and in theory has a distributable surplus.

However, they won't be deemed elected until they've reached the original quota, and will ultimately have a smaller surplus to be distributed. Doing it this way would give marginally more weight to surpluses than is currently the case where the count is weighted towards transfers from eliminations. May or may not change the end result, but would definitely largely reduce the amount of 'elected without reaching the quota' candidates.

The overall time would likely be constant, i.e. the time for a 7-seater would be similar to the accumulated time for the 4-seater and 3-seater it has theoretically replaced.

But you are then giving weight to votes not cast. If a voter wants to, they can continue their preference to the end of the list. The fact they don't is the main cause of votes not being transferable.

Secondly the 'adjustment' would need to take into account various non-transferable totals and the scale of those totals would not be known until after the count

If you take that approach, what about the people elected on the first count. Their surplus increases everytime you reduce the quota. In fairness, you would then have to distribute another element of their surplus every single count.

It wouldn't work.