In other words there's a demonstrable difference between
peoples voting preferences and beliefs, and social groups, and how they do their various jobs.
Not exact matches
Consumer
preferences are more stable than electoral ones —
people are volatile in the
voting booth and predictable at the checkout.
«I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to
vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political
preference — and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the
people who might elect him.
Is this open for intentional gaming (via tactical
voting) or unintentional skewing of the results towards a film or location, where the winning result does not match most
people's
preferences?
The suggestion here is that
people believe a
vote for the Conservatives indicates a
preference for personal gain over public good and are therefore less likely to admit
voting Conservative.
I believe that Alternative
Vote (AV) system, where
people rank candidates in order of
preference rather than selecting only one, has much to commend it.
The
people I met gave explanations about their
voting preferences that would be difficult to fully convey in responses to standardised questions.
In practice in Australia in the Senate most
people vote by group and their
vote is distributed by the
preferences of the one party they
vote for.
He is encouraging
people to give him second
preference votes, and will encourage independents to give their second
preference to the Labour candidate.
The candidate with the lowest number of first
preference votes is eliminated after each round of
voting and their
votes are then reassigned until one
person passes the 50 % mark.
The second
preference votes of
people who
voted for one of the eliminated candidates are then looked at.
Tell
people to
vote tactically rather than according to their
preference («
vote X, get Y»).
However, many of these are second
preference votes for
people already
voting for Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone.
However, I'm always slightly wary of constituency polls in Liberal Democrat held seats — the effect of incumbency and tactical
voting is far higher for Lib Dem MPs, and when you ask a generic
voting intention I think many
people give their national
preference, rather than how they would actually
vote in their own constituency.
Once all but the top two candidates were elminated and second
preferences re-allocated the result becomes Livingstone 51 %, Johnson 41 % (the figures don't sum to 100 % because some
people were not reallocated, presumably because they gave second
preference votes to candidates that had already been eliminated).
In the forty constituencies that they contested, the
People Before Profit Alliance won 5.2 % of the first
preference votes cast in these.
Running 43 candidates (four more candidates than the Anti Austerity Alliance did), the
People Before Profit Alliance won 29,081
votes across the state, amounting to 1.7 % of the first
preference votes cast nationally.
At the Dublin European Elections contest, sitting MEP Paul Murphy (Socialist Party / Anti Austerity Alliance) won 29,953 first
preference votes (8.5 % of the
votes), leaving him in sixth place on the first count, and Brid Smith (
People Before Profit Alliance) won 23,875
votes (6.8 %).
These are usually more accurate than normal opinion polls because they are conducted at the count - so all those
people with a
preference who didn't bother
voting are kept off the results.
«I think Zac is a candidate who is well placed to appeal to
people's second
preference votes... And the other key thing that he needs to do is to pick away at the credibility of what Sadiq is offering,» says Barwell.
They generally involve having
people either
vote multiple times, or use some
preference based system.
But, he added: «I think, if you offer
people something that isn't quite as bad as Labour and isn't quite as bad as the Tories, you're giving
people quite a good reason to give you their second
preference in an alternative
vote election, which you might recall is a system we do not have in this country.»
Miliband, for example, it was reported, bequeathed South Shields a voter contact rate (the percentage of
people in the constituency for whom the party has a record of
voting preference) as low as 0.2 % — or roughly 100
people.
Apart from seniors, this group of
people, cutting across all lines of geographic location, class, race, religion, age, sexual
preference, gender, etc. is potentially the largest
voting block.
Perhaps before the voters go to the polls Mr Livingstone might consider announcing that he does not want the first or second
preference votes of
people who support terrorism.
In California, registering «No Party
Preference» allows
people to
vote for Bernie in the Democratic Party primary.
Jack Straw has said he is not opposed to the idea of the alternative
vote system where
people can rank their
preferences for MPs, but it is a hardly a radical change to the way we elect our politicians and the Tory leader David Cameron has said that at least with first past the post you can kick out a government.
The assumption that even if
people vote for David first they will back Ed second means that if David doesn't win on the first count, the inclusion of second
preference votes could mean Ed prevails in the end.
If we had known that, say, the majority of second
preference votes had been for Labour where first
preference votes had been for the Green Party, the Lib Dems or the Nationalists, this would have made a coalition involving Labour far more likely, making the coalition a much better reflection of what
people actually wanted.
As regards wastage, more
people's
votes will be counted because those who
vote for candidates eliminated early on will have their second
preferences counted later on.
In Mark Ferguson's excellent expose of «community campaigning» in South Shields under David Miliband's watch, he reveals that the voter contact rate (the percentage of
people in the constituency for whom the party has a record of
voting preference) in the constituency was as low as 0.2 %.
As for the suggestion that
people will
vote for change, regardless of substance, in
preference to the status quo, I refer you to the recent referendum on the alternative
vote.
However a lot has been made of the fact that while both polls had an effort to take account of
people's personal and tactical
voting behaviour in their own constituency, they did so in different ways — Ashcroft asks a two stage question, asking
people their national
preference and then how they will
vote thinking about the candidates and parties in their own constituency; ICM asked
people the
voting intention question including the names of the candidates standing in Sheffield Hallam.
This makes sense in that the purpose of fake news is often not to convince
people of «alternative facts,» but rather to sow doubt and to disengage
people politically, which can undermine the democratic process, especially when society's future hinges on small differences in
voting preferences.
We asked 300
people to
vote for the most important trait in a short term personal loan and nearly 93 percent of respondents
voted for «safety» as being at the very top of their «personal
preference» list.
Every April, the greater Concord area population
votes for their favorite service providers for the CAPPIES awards (Capital Area
Peoples Preference).
The firm is alleged to have harvested data of tens of millions of Facebook users without permission in order to design a software to predict and influence
people's
voting preferences.