Strictly hopeless voting system!

Thousands of complaints, pages or national press outrage and commentaries on prime time TV!! Daily Mail Editorial - “How hard can it be to work out a fair voting system…… for Strictly Come Dancing, which doesn’t involve defrauding two million viewers of their phone charges? You would think somebody at the corporation might have realised there was no point in keeping the lines open for almost two hours, when their (the viewers') votes could make no difference to the outcome."

Blaming it all on a tied vote for two of the three couples in the semi-final is not good enough as the whole voting process is a mess anyway (see *** for analysis). But the worrying aspect of this saga and other similar shows like the X-Factor is that millions of people have become outraged by flawed voting systems for TV shows without realising they are defrauded of their real votes at almost every General or Local Election.

The “wrong� results in those elections have far more effect on their lives than do those in the TV shows. Yet in answer to the Daily Mail question, it is not at all hard to find a fair voting system for real elections – it is STV! So why won’t the media make a similar fuss about the unfairness which defrauds us all of good government?

The Government knows full well the flaws in our voting system for elections yet persists in arguing that electors vote for their preferred candidates to be elected, even though such votes are often used to support Parties rather than individuals, often do not count at all, and worse still can sometimes help to elect others instead. Yet they do nothing about it.

You can help to create a “strictly-style� bandwagon by getting your friends to register with stvAction and propagate the news that there is a fairer voting system – it is STV.

***Analysis

It has long been obvious that in a competition with three remaining couples, there is no way that the public votes can save the couple at the bottom of the leader board because of the way the numbers of votes by the judges and the public are converted to points by ranking. The couples are placed in order and given 1, 2 or 3 points from bottom to top and the two sets of points added together. Those with the lowest total points face the “dance-off�. Supposing there had not been a tie for top place by the judges, then either ….

Judges Public Total
A 3 1 4
B 2 2 4
C 1 3 4

and all three would have been in the dance off – or taken through to the final as the BBC decided at an emergency meeting or so it has been reported.

or……
Judges Public Total
A 3 2 5
B 2 1 3
C 1 3 4

In neither case could C be saved from the dance-off! The critical point to note is that by design it is not possible for the public to “save� their candidate from a dance off and the BBC were clearly at fault by inviting viewers to phone to do so. Bearing in mind the BBC said they had planned for every contingency, that was a huge fraud and it is no surprise they now have to refund the costs of the phone calls.