Voting for the Canal and River Trust Council starts tomorrow, 8th February. Liveaboard boater Frank Kelly, who helped to prevent BW from introducing its draconian and unlawful mooring strategy for the River Lea, is standing for election to one of the four private boater places on the Council. Frank says if he is elected he will undertake to be “an effective voice for the civil liberties, human rights and security of residential boat dwellers nationally and will seek to address problems of prejudice, discrimination and harassment faced by our community”.
Don’t vote for any candidates as 2nd, 3rd etc choices that you don’t fully support – if you do, candidates that you don’t like will get more votes. You can vote for as few or as many candidates as you like.
Make sure you check your post as the voting forms will be sent out to the address that you use for your boat licence. Every boat licence holder gets one vote. The election ends on 9th March. See our previous article http://kanda.boatingcommunity.org.uk/wordpress/liveaboard-boater-to-stand-for-election/
Alan’s advice is right.
The advice given above…..
“Don’t vote for any candidates as 2nd, 3rd etc choices that you don’t fully support – if you do, candidates that you don’t like will get more votes.”
is, I’m afraid, quite simply wrong, and further proof that many people advising on how to vote do not actually understand how the Single Transferable Vote system works.
Quite simply, it does not matter how many candidates you rank in order on the voting form, you can NEVER disadvantage a higher placed candidate, by adding lower preferences for others.
The only circumstance in which your vote gets transferred to a lower preference on your list, is when it is not useful to someone you have placed higher. If your first preference candidate has enough votes to be guaranteed elected, without needing yours, your vote can be transferred to be useful to a different candidate based on your stated preference order, (meaning you may help to elect a second candidate that also reflects your views).
Or, if a candidate you have given a high preference to is simply eliminated as unelectable, because even with all transferred votes, they will never have enough, again your vote may be used by one of your separate preferences.
By, (for example) listing only two preferences, you are actually saying “these are the only two I actually care about how they get on, and I simply don’t care who actually gets elected otherwise, whether either of these two get elected or not”. Fair enough if that is what you really believe, but you have given up the chance of maybe helping elect what you might have considered a “poor third”, and might actually instead end up seeing what you considered the worst of the 33 candidates being elected.
By telling people to only vote for one or two preferences, you are doing nothing additional at all to help the one or two you do rank, but may well simply be throwing away your vote, when you might have had some influence with selecting another candidate.
If people understood the system, we would actually end up with a council that better reflected the overall wishes of the electorate, and it is a shame to see advice being given when it is obvious those giving it do not understand the system.
If you haven’t received your voting forms yet, contact Electoral Reform Services on 0208 365 8909 email enquiries@electoralreform.co.uk or customerservices@electoralreform.co.uk
It seems we can vote online too. I just recieved an email from BW, with links to voting forms. Seems sensible to me. The proof as ever will be in the eating!
I’ll give it a go when I get a signal on my dongle.