Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Moment former PM Liz Truss loses seat in UK general election | BBC News" video.

  1. AUSTRALIAN HERE with an observation. Britain has 1st past the post and Australia has a preferential voting system. In our system all those votes from down the list would have been switched to their secondary preferences. This is how this might have gone with our system. I suspect all the Reform UK who are all 100% Brexiteers would have put Liz Truss as their second preference. So on that her vote would go to 21,175. I have no doubt the Greens would vote Labor (as they do here) taking their vote to 13,685 The real question is what the Independents & Lib Dems would do. In Australia the sorts of people who vote for minor parties at #1 tend to be swing voters with their preferences. They typically give preferences to the existing government if its doing well and against if its not. With this clearly being a protest vote AWAY from the previous election where Liz Truss got 26,195 votes I'd expect those people would have also voted Labor on their preferences making Labor's vote 22,585. So under a preferential system I'd expect the same result but with a bigger margin. Another question that could be asked is what happens if you have something like Australia's compulsory voting system. You only had 59% turnout in this seat meaning about 30,000 didn't vote at all. In Australia those people tend to do some interesting things. If they are unmotivated they do what's called donkey voting and either they just put 1,2,3,4,.... down the list or do something so that no vote is counted at all. My brother used to add his football team to the list and vote for them and of course such votes don't count. But one of the massive benefits of compulsory voting is that when our governments screw up (and they do) these people tend to do massive protest votes. So in this case I'd expect MOST of those people to vote Labor as a way of flipping the finger at Liz Truss and this would have been a massacre not a narrow loss. FYI - There was an American political analyst in Australia during one of our elections and she said that if America switched from first past the post to preferential AND made voting compulsory then it would re-shape America for the best. Preferential but NOT compulsory has been tried in a couple of states with significant changes. Her main reason for wanting both is that it prevents parties from having a "culture war" mentality because they have to engage with the general population not just those motivated to vote. And if you put that into the context of where America has gone in the last couple of years I think she had a valid point.
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