Counting votes and making them countt

This is a rip-roaring article on STV-PR from the experience of many years of using it. I particularly found this paragraph resonant having lived in a number of areas where the kind of invidious choice mentioned has indeed been my experience.My vote will really count this week: but then I'm lucky enough to have PR | Politics | The Observer: "Unlike voters in marginal constituencies in Britain, I won't have been given the unpalatable choice of either supporting my least-worst candidate or in effect wasting my vote. Unlike many people in Britain, who can spend their entire lives without ever casting a vote that actually helps to elect someone, I can vote for someone who represents my own minority views, knowing that if she or he doesn't get elected, my vote will be transferred to my second choice, and so on down the line. If the election is really tight, my choice between the ineffectual eejit who got my ninth preference and the obnoxious git who got my tenth could be decisive. PR gives me a Duracell-bunny vote, one that keeps on working long after the first-past-the-post model has given up the ghost."
And then, joy of joys, a point I have often made but until now not seen in print from any other keyboard:

According to Blunkett, however, PR encourages political parties to "horse-trade" and "engage in dodgy stitch-ups". Which is fair enough: British voters presumably feel that horse-trading and dodgy stitch-ups are alien to the Westminster system and that Britain is currently blessed with a government of incomparable strength and ineffable decisiveness. To an outsider, though, it looks rather as if what happens is that the factional deals and carve-ups simply happen within the governing party.

The difference with PR is not that deals don't get done by politicians after elections, but that they're negotiated relatively openly. Each party comes to the table with its manifesto commitments and a number of parliamentary seats that is close to its actual share of the vote. Is there horse-trading and compromise? Are there outcomes that voters didn't quite expect? Sure - just as there are in a first-past-the-post system. The implication that, in the Westminster system, voters control what happens after the election is laughable. Remind me - how many people voted for Gordon Brown as prime minister?

Read the whole thing for further helpful reflections on allegations of relative stability of governments. And given the current British concern for accountability of MPs, this supposed downside of the Irish system seemed quite refreshing: "Sometimes, though, politicians end up competing against members of their own party, leading to an emphasis on constituency work over parliamentary business"; would that many constituencies here had that problem: politicians 'fighting' to serve the people that elected them. That actually sounds like a strong argument in favour of the Irish system or -come to think of it- perhaps the Scottish.