Letter to the Editor: Roger Louvet (Letters, Cambrian News, 1 March) defended the Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system by comparing it with the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) as currently used for Westminster elections. This is a totally false comparison. Since its inception in 1999, Senedd elections have used a Regional List system to ensure proportionality.

What Dave Bradney pointed out two weeks ago (Letters, Cambrian News, 22 February) was that the Labour administration in the Senedd are going to replace that Regional List system with STV; and that STV is worse than the Regional List system Welsh voters are familiar with.

There is no such thing as a perfect electoral system. They all have advantages and disadvantages which is why there are more than a dozen systems used in democracies around the world. An ideal system would enable a wide variety of political viewpoints to be expressed in the Senedd, it would produce Senedd Members in proportion to the vote cast for their party; while at the same time it would prevent the formation of a large number of splinter parties, as we see in countries like Israel.

The effective threshold to enable a political party to gain just one MS will be far higher with the proposed new STV system than the existing Regional List system. We should be aiming to have more plurality within our legislature, not less.

Then you have the problem that STV works better in big cities; and worse in sparsely populated rural areas. Given that about two-thirds of Wales is rural, you have to wonder why the Labour administration is pushing STV. Could it possibly be for their own party advantage?

Chris Simpson,

Waunfawr, Aberystwyth