The alternative vote re-visited
Electoral reform re-emerged in the 1980s as a significant issue in British politics. After a long spell in which the established system was very widely accepted, warts and all, political developments in the last ten years have undermined satisfaction with the system. The 1983 and 1987 general elections produced a particularly disproportional relationship between the parties' votes and seats, and thereby highlighted the inherent unfairness of first-past-the-post. The Liberals and Social Democrats presented electoral reform as a central feature of their Alliance programme, and the Nationalists and Greens advocated systems other than first-past-the-post. Since 1987 growing concern over the Conservatives' electoral dominance has prompted renewed interest in electoral pacts between out-of-office parties, and thus in electoral systems which might facilitate such pacts. As well as doubts about the adequacy of the electoral system for the House of Commons, the proposals to create Assemblies for Scotland, Wales and the English regions, and Labour's recent proposals to establish an elected Upper House, involve the question of the electoral system that should be used. The 1990 Labour Conference recommended that the party consider the creation of a Speakers' Conference to examine the whole issue of electoral reform.
The Plurality Vote: A Reappraisal
A R G u M E N TS in favour of the adoption of proportional representation in Britain have been advanced far more extensively in recent years than the case favouring the retention of the present system of the plurality vote.’ In this paper I wish to help redress the balance by indicating some misconceptions within the critique of the plurality vote and to point out some neglected advantages of the present electoral system in Britain. The principal objection to the plurality vote is that it distorts the number of seats won in proportion to votes cast to such an extent that government frequently falls into the hands of a single party receiving the support of a minority of the electorate. Thus Lakeman contends that an ideal electoral system should promote ‘government according to the wishes of the electorate’,2 whilst S. E. Finer maintains that ‘for a government to claim a mandate to carry out its policies it ought to be elected by at least half the voter^'.^ These principles and the subsequent critique of the plurality vote are based on a perception of the democratic function of an electoral system as the establishment of governments that represent the views of the electorate at the time that an election takes place. In the second half of this paper I shall point out that this is an inadequate view of the role of elections within a democracy and that the effectiveness of a voting system must be made with reference to further criteria. The contention of Finer and Lakeman that an electoral system must produce results that represent as closely as possible the demands of the electorate cannot however be doubted. The first section of this paper will therefore consider the rival merits of the plurality vote and proportional representation (PR) in the promotion of representative governments.
Fault Diagnosis and CAN Bus/Ethernet Redundancy Design of a Monitoring and Control System
The ship monitoring system is used to monitor and control the working status of various equipment on the ship. The navigational safety of the ship is affected directly by the stable working of the monitoring system. In this paper, a ship monitoring system with fault-type judgment function and bus redundancy is designed to improve system reliability and reduce fault checking cost. A redundant Ethernet/CAN bus communication network is constructed in the system, which connects multiple simulation nodes. The simulation node can simulate the faults that may occur during the communication process and feeds back the fault information to the host computer. The host computer will analyze and display the corresponding fault type on the user interface with the feedback information is received. The system reconfigures the network route autonomously when the simulation node has a communication fault. Routing of fault nodes can be switched to redundant routing, and the load balancing of the communication network can be maintained. Through experimental tests, the system can accurately locate faults and achieve fast switching of redundant routes between buses. Hence, the reliability of data transmission is improved.