Of course this differs wildly from a general election where less than 24% of the electorate vote Tory and the Conservatives obtain a majority in government.
Yes indeed; in a union, you do theoretically get to influence local policy which tells your delegate how to vote on issues, even before you elect a delegate. Whereas, you usually have to ask your MP how they are going to vote
after they have taken power.
Incidentally, if you keep playing around with the numbers on the bloc vote thing, you'll find that
differing branch sizes are less likely to cause a paradoxical outcome than
uneven distribution of sentiment -- even in my above example, the branch sizes are exactly equal, but the bulk of the opposition is concentrated into one branch. If you didn't think hard enough about it, you might naïvely expect that a boundary change which evened-up the numbers in constituencies was making things fairer; when in fact it could be having the precise opposite effect by consolidating pockets of sentiment.
And once you try to use the archaic first-past-the-post system for electing a candidate from a pool of more than two, you end up with even more opportunities for paradoxical results. Especially because people are perverse and tend to get more passionate about small issues than they do about big ones. For instance:
- Candidate A favours beheading kittens.
- Candidate B opposes beheading kittens, but favours serving beer in litres.
- Candidate C also opposes beheading kittens, but favours retaining the pint for beer.
The rivalry between B and C splits the vote of the ailurophiles, candidate A is elected and kittens are beheaded
even although the total vote against beheading kittens is greater than the total vote for. With the Alternative Vote, even C's staunchest supporters, the most vocal opponents of metrication, might well be more prepared to put up with beer in litres if that meant saving cute fluffy kittens from the chop, and so award their second-place vote to B, and vice-versa. So if either B or C loses out in the first round of counting, their votes are more likely to be transferred to C or B respectively.
We could have had the initial vote with just a single X to be marked, and then held a whole 'nother vote after eliminating B or C; but for fairness' sake we really should only be asking those who voted for the losing candidate (otherwise, we can't be sure that someone who voted for a candidate still in the race will not change their mind; you can push a weakly-supported candidate through the first round knowing that your real favourite already has adequate support from other voters, in order to eliminate a stronger-supported candidate. That's how it works on
Strictly Come Dancing), and that would mean compromising the secrecy of the ballot.
