Bernard Peek wrote:

On 04/05/11 15:33, John Williamson wrote:

The closest to the system proposed is Australia, and they make it
compulsory to vote, and any vote which does not rank all candidates is
ignored. The there are Papua New Guinea, and Fiji, which use a similar,
but different system.

It's becoming more popular with organisations that have recently taken
time to study variant voting systems and deliberately chosen what they
see as the best.

I can see that if the referendum result is "NO" we won't be asked again
for generations, as the politicians will have the ability so twist the
result from "No, we don't want AV" to "we're perfectly happy with FPTP"

But there's no way of knowing whether AV might act as a stepping stone
to further reform ...

From a cached copy of the ERS website ...

"Electoral Reform Society campaigns for proportional representation and
the Single Transferable Vote system in parliaments, assemblies and councils"

So why exactly are they supporting AV? it provides neither ...