The Thailand Alliance Referendum

Day 977, 19:13 • Published in Thailand Austria • by Jeff Hamilton

Hello, people of Thailand.

As most of you know, I promised that, if I won the primary, I would be holding an alliance referendum on which alliance Thailand would be joining. This referendum will either be held during my Presidency, or, if the current President agrees to it, before the Presidential Elections. It is now time to reveal the structure of the referendum.

Because an alliance should be agreed upon by a majority of the citizens, the referendum will be conducted using the Alternative Vote, or, as it is known in the United States, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV).The way this works will be:

Voters will have four choices of alliance to choose in the election; either EDEN, ONE, Phoenix, or No Alliance. A voter will mark his ballot by preference, assigning each alliance a preference between 1 and 4. Once all of the votes are counted, the tricky part begins.

Let's say the initial results looked like this:

EDEN: 12
Phoenix: 2
ONE: 9
No Alliance: 6

The people who chose Phoenix for their first preference would, since Phoenix got the lowest number of votes, have their votes distributed to their second preference. Imagine for this that both of them chose No Alliance. The results would then be:

EDEN: 12
ONE: 9
No Alliance: 8

Since No Alliance is in last place, their votes would be redistributed to their next level of preference. Let's say that 5 voted for ONE, and 3 voted for EDEN in their next preference. The vote tally would then look like:

EDEN: 15
ONE: 14

EDEN would be the chosen alliance, and it would have a majority of people supporting it.

More information about the referendum will be put out later.

President-Elect Hamilton