Via Kevin (with a nod to James Nicoll) I discovered this post in which Mike Brotherton explains everything that is wrong with the Hugos.

There’s nothing much new here. Brotherton’s particular combination of hobby horses may be different from other people’s, but his opinions have all been espoused by other people at some time in the past. What is most familiar about his post, though, is his conviction that he knows how the Hugos ought to be run, and that all right-thinking people should agree with him.

Brotherton says he doesn’t have the time to try to fix things himself, which is fair enough, but I’ve seen people like him before turn up at the Business Meeting determined to make everyone else see the error of their ways. Usually such people run away very quickly, complaining that They are conspiring to prevent the required changes, and demanding that They (presumably another They) do something about it.

The reasons this happens are many, but one of them is that while people like Brotherton are convinced that they know what needs to be done, they all have a different recipe for change, and so when you put them together they can’t agree. Getting support for your ideas is hard work, and requires a willingness to compromise.

Why am I talking about this now? Well today in the UK we are having a referendum. The question we are being asked is whether we should replace our existing First Past The Post (FPTP) system for parliamentary elections by something called Alternative Vote (AV, also known as Instant Runoff Voting, Australian Ballot and the way we run the final ballot for the Hugos). I’m going to vote in favor, as are many of my friends, but the referendum is going to fail, probably with a fairly massive majority against.

The reason for this is fairly simple. AV is a system that fosters compromise. In order to win you have to present policies that are acceptable to an actual majority of people. FPTP works well enough in a simple two-party system: Us again Them. But the more of a plurality of political ideas you have, the easier it becomes to win FPTP simply by being the largest minority on the dung heap. As Kevin likes to point out, FPTP in the Hugos could allow a book to win Best Novel with 21% of the electorate loving it and the other 79% hating it.

Politics, of course, isn’t generally a 5-way fight. But neither is it necessarily a 2-way fight. It is, however, fought in much the same way across the country. Why do I mention this? Because while you may not need more than around 35% support to win some hotly contested constituencies, if you can do that in all of the marginal constituencies you end up with a massive majority in parliament. And then you have 5 years in which you can run the country however you like.

So the UK has a choice between a political system in which people will always have to negotiate and compromise, and one in which a given party may be out of power a lot, but is always in with a chance of a massive victory.

Being out of power is, of course, frustrating, but it is also easy because you can say what you want, and stick to your principles, without having to deliver on your promises. Being in a coalition, on the other hand, is no fun at all, because you have to work hard all the time to get support for your policies, and your own supporters are forever calling you “turncoat” when you can’t deliver only what they want.

So the majority of the UK’s politicians want to stick with a system that gives them that chance of a massive majority, and the majority of the UK’s voters want to stick with a system that gives their side a change to remake the country according to their vision, because they know what needs to be done, and surely all right-thinking people should agree with them.

Who wants a compromise, if it means you’ll never get the chance to impose your will on others?