[mozboz]

Can someone enlighten me as to how this achieves anything, other than a count of people who abstained?

If you want to reform something, it seems like the required action is to reform it. Saying on record 'i want reform', or 'i don't like the old system' does not achieve anything, and in fact wastes everyones' time. The hard part: working out reform and enactioning it, still needs to be done.

Am I missing something?

[raesene2]

I think that what this could achieve is stating the importance of the issues to the main political parties. Most "mainstream" political parties that I've seen will change their positions on things if they think it will get them more votes.

So what would this achieve. Well having a "privacy reform" party candidate on all the ballots would draw attention to the problem, in that voters would see the name and potentially hear about the platform. Also getting on the ballots would be likely to draw some mainstream media attention (heck the Monster raving loony party gets attention in the UK when it's on the ballot at by-elections)

Then if the party actually gets a decent number of votes, it may persuade mainstream parties to change their positions. My feeling is that at the moment none of them think it's that important a topic, so aren't formulating policies on the topic.

Personally I think it's a good idea to try and do something about this now, as once the idea that PRISM etc are fine and accepted gets embedded into culture, the next steps are likely to follow (e.g. what the US seems to be seeing with DEA and other law enforcement areas getting access to data). How long would it be before your local police are trawling your smartphone GPS data to see if you were speeding...)

[rmc]

Most "mainstream" political parties that I've seen will change their positions on things if they think it will get them more votes.

Yep, this has happened before. 25 years ago the Conservative party brought in a law banning the "promotion of homosexuality in schools", now they are legalising same sex marriage.

[IanCal]

> Can someone enlighten me as to how this achieves anything, other than a count of people who abstained?

That in itself is quite useful. At the moment, anyone who doesn't vote generally falls into one of two categories:

1) I don't care

2) I don't want any of them

Having some way of explicitly saying "I care, but have no confidence in any of you" can be quite powerful. If it wasn't, votes of no confidence wouldn't mean anything.

> Saying on record 'i want reform', or 'i don't like the old system' does not achieve anything

Only when people agree that the old system has problems. If all the parties think it's fine and they think their constituents are happy with it then a significant voice saying "No, we're not" is important, even when there's no plan. If people agree that there are issues then yes, it's pointless.

You don't need to form a party for this however, you can spoil your ballot paper, that has to be counted.

Unfortunately, due to misinformation (IMO) the plan to reform the voting system failed. I think that would really have helped.

[vidarh]

> Unfortunately, due to misinformation (IMO) the plan to reform the voting system failed. I think that would really have helped.

I'm ambivalent about it. I'm Norwegian, so can't vote here anyway, but my feeling, partly because of seeing the Norwegian system, I think that while the proposed system would've been a big step forward, it was also a quite poor stopgap measure, and if it had succeeded it would likely have killed the voting system debate for the next 50 years as anyone trying to lobby for further reform would have just been met with "but we already did enough".

[vidarh]

I posted a couple of comments to the blog to the effect of focusing on the marginal seats.

Consider this: In 2010 there were 40+ seats with margins of 1000 votes or less. And Labour lost the chance of cobbling together a coalition (whether or not it'd have worked is another matter) by a handful or two of seats.

So a campaign like this, if well run, is a big threat of upset to all three of the big parties.

But as I wrote on the blog, you can get that same effect by focusing the effort on, say, the 100 or so most marginal seats and using any extra resources on advertising an PR to explicitly make a point out of spoiling it for the incumbent in those seats unless they take a principled stand on the campaigns issue.

For many of these seats, the margin would have only required a swing of <1% away from the incumbent for the runner up win, and many of these seats remain close in election after election.

Also, in these seats it's not only criticising their policy and getting votes that would upset the big parties, but any campaign that'd focus on telling voters "the big three are all just the same, so it doesn't matter which one wins" would be an issue for them in marginal seats as winning those seats depends so heavily on getting people to actually go out and vote as well - voters who decide that they don't give a shit about this campaigns issue but find themselves agreeing it doesn't matter if their seat goes to Labour, the Tories or the Lib Dems might very well stay home even if they'd otherwise vote a specific party out of habit or overall sympathies.

First past the post systems are very prone to big upsets from relatively modest campaigns due to effects like this, and that's one of the reasons why you see so extensive lobbying, but this is a quite interesting approach to it and as much as I loathe the current coalition government, I'd love to see it attempted (and I fall in the category who think that while they're not all the same, they're all so far from what I'd like that I don't care all that much).

[MaysonL]

This seems to be an avenue to (possibly) get enough leverage to have more than a snowflake's chance in Hades of actually getting somewhere, given the current power structure.

[notahacker]

Sadly, you'd probably achieve more political change by making an e-petition and persuading Jeremy Clarkson to endorse it