Humans and Voting

By King Taddle

The humans are thinking about changing the way they elect their MPs. At the moment, they use a simple system called first past the post. Everyone has one vote, and they get to vote for who they want their MP to be. The person with the most votes wins.

That might sound simple (and sometimes I think that humans need to keep things very simple) but it does cause problems. Suppose in one area there are three people who want to be MP. One is in favour of maintaining human sillinesses (we will call him Peter) while the other two are in favour of being more cat-like and sensible (we will call them Naomi and Michael). He is one way that the humans might vote.

• Peter 40%
• Michael 35%
• Naomi 25%

The way humans currently vote, that would mean that Peter would get elected and silliness would continue, even though the majority of humans voted for a candidate who was in favour of being sensible.

So that is why the humans are thinking of using a system called AV. In AV, you can rank all the candidates according to your preference, so if your first preference candidate doesn’t get elected, your vote can be counted towards your second preference candidate. In the above example, lets assume that of Naomi’s 25%, 5% voted for Peter as their second preference and 20% voted for Michael. That would mean that the final result was as follows.

• Peter 40% + 5% = 45%
• Michael 35% + 20% = 55%

That way Michael gets elected, not Peter. This is a good thing, because it means that the humans get an MP who is in favour of being cat-like and sensible, and this is what the majority of them wanted.

I hope the humans do choose the AV system.