I’VE gone right off Boris, he’s ruined my 84th birthday by having a General Election on the same day.

Seriously, the voting system we currently have, i.e. ‘First Past the Post’ is a very flawed way of deciding who should represent us in Parliament.

The majority of seats are, on the face of it, a ‘two horse race’ with the lesser parties having no chance at all. This in effect, disenfranchises many voters and leads to the inevitable decision many make, of not voting at all.

So what to replace it with? To me the answer is simple, the Single Transferable Voting System. Here the voter ranks the Candidates in order of Preference. For Example – Joe Dodds “1” Simple Simon “2”

Dodgy Dick “3” and so on down the list of candidates. If you don’t want to choose more than one or two candidates say, you have the right to ignore the others. Using STV ensures that your choices count far more than they can under FPTP.

At the count, at the end of the first round of counting, the candidate with least number of 1’s drops out and his second preferences are added to the remaining candidates.

This carries on with a candidate dropping out at each round until the winner emerges.

Now I come to the most controversial elements. The voting franchise should be granted to ALL 16 & 17-year-olds. To those who complain they are too young to understand politics, this is nonsense. I know many older voters who haven’t a clue and they have been voting for years. For them to say, as many do, 16 and 17-year-olds are too young to understand is sheer hypocrisy.

The second element and one that some will raise their hands in horror at, is compulsory voting.

Each voting paper would have an option None of the Above. This follows the Australian method that has been in use for some time now.

There have been examples where those who chose not to vote, badly skewed the result in that they outnumbered those who did vote. I wonder what the EU referendum result would have been if the 13 million who did not vote had voted.

There is no way of telling, but it would have been a truer reflection of the wishes of the whole of the UK Electorate.

Ewen Simpson, Northwich