Britain's Parliament has approved a plan to hold a referendum May 5 on adopting the "Alternative Vote" system for future House of Commons elections, it says here. And here is a decent, apparently unslanted summary of what AV and some of its alternatives mean. (Essentially, in each constituency, you pick 1,2,3,... among the candidates on the ballot, and as the least-supported candidates are eliminated, voters' second and third choices are applied until one candidate has 50% in that riding. It is not, most observers agree, proportional representation -- it could even reduce party proportionality -- but provides that each member of the Commons would be a majority winner in his or her own constituency.
Britain's Conservatives apparently dislike AV (as likely losers by it) but agreed to the referendum as part of the coalition agreement with the Liberal-Democrats.
