Voting reform?

My "political" career began in 2008 in bottom line student union politics. We had just undertaken a governance change at UDSU at the time and with it came an alteration in the way in which we voted in student union elections.

Under the new system we were using single transferable voting, a form of alternative voting, as opposed to the traditional first past the post system.

Although, 2 years on, the majority of Student Politics uses STV, certain corners of the NUS are only just getting used to the idea. The problem is that even for single seat elections, only a hand full of people understand how to count it, but with multiple seat elections, it really is a nightmare.

I will try to explain the way in which STV works.

The idea is of course that each voter, rather than crossing the box of the person you want to elect, numbers the candidates in order of preference. So if I was voting today, I might put a 1 in the box next to the Conservative Party Candidate, a 2 in the box next to the Liberal Democrat Candidate a 3 in the box next to the Green Party etc.

The votes are then counted by taking all of the first preference votes first until a candidate has met the quota of votes needed to win. The quota is usually devised, in the case of STV, by taking the number of voters and dividing that by the number of seats. If nobody meets the quota in the first round, then the person with the lowest amount of votes is eliminated and their second preference votes are then distributed out amongst the remaining candidates. The process is then repeated until somebody has met the quota and been elected.

AV is almost the same except the quota is 50% of the votes.

But given the average turnout that we currently experience on polling days in Britain at the present time, is it a good idea to alter the way that we cast our vote?

Are we going to disengage thousand of voters by altering the voting system? The young first time voters often find first past the post confusing and disengaging enough, without complicating it even more. I mean the idea of having a commons seat quota is alien to the majority of young voters who are probably used to the idea of simple majority.

So how will the country's older generation react to a new system, Its difficult enough to manage change in life as it is, but this would be a seemingly needless change.

Without wishing to be controversial, it was the Liberal Democrats who wanted to propose this system in the first place, and statistics have shown that under the alternate proportional voting system, the Lib Dem's would have gained a further 22 seats during the 2010 General Election.

Would it not make more sense to try to increase the amount of voters, turning out at the polling station, rather than altering the voting system, which could potentially disengage voters rather than recruiting them?

I am skeptical about altering the voting system. But then I am an IT technician and an instinctive Conservative, so skepticism is in my nature.

I don't think that NUS and student politics has made a very good job of STV. So therefore, if change didn't happen all that well at student level, where change management is relatively simple, I don't see the change being a good one at a national parliamentary level.