The Nays Have It

In about a month's time, British voters will be taking a short (or long, if you live next door to Charles Kennedy) trek to their local church, school hall or other public infrastructure to once again take part in that sacred engagement we call democracy. In many borough councils, my own included, the 2011 UK Local Elections will be taking place. There are also Scottish, Northern Ireland and Welsh Assembly elections due to be held.

Finally, there will be one other ballot paper put before us to be marked. It will ask us a very controversial, decisive, arbitrary question:

"Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt an unfair, costly and confusing voting system instead of a tried, better and fairer system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?"

Or, if you reside in Wales, something along these lines:

"Ydych chi am y Deyrnas Unedig i fabwysiadu system bleidleisio annheg, yn gostus ac yn ddryslyd yn hytrach na rhoi cynnig, gwell a llawer system decach ar gyfer ethol Aelodau Seneddol i Dŷ'r Cyffredin?” 

Unfortunately, I am linguistically challenged with every other language bar my native English and some aspects of French, therefore I cannot determine the clarity of the above machine translated sentence. But it doesn’t really matter, because the message is the same, whether it’s in English, Gaelic, Welsh, Fijian – the Alternative Vote (AV) is a pointless, unfair, unneeded and, based on numerous polls and public opinion, largely unwanted voting system this country would be mistaken to implement. 

I am going to set out and explain why everyone – you – should vote ‘No’ in the May 5^th AV Referendum via the most argumentatively balanced, properly evidenced and politically unbiased way I can – with lots of nice pictures, colourful descriptions and easy to understand language that your puny, inferior non-political minds can absorb and be swayed by.

To start with, where did this AV Referendum come from? 

As we are all aware, last year’s general election produced a hung parliament, whereby no party was able to achieve a majority in the House of Big Important and Rich People That Tell us What to Do. 

David realizes he forgot to tell Nick about what he did to his car's windscreen during the election. 

 

As part of the formal coalition agreement between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, a deal was struck whereby a nationwide referendum would be held on the adoption of AV to replace Britain’s current First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) electoral system. As quoted from the formal coalition agreement, “The parties will bring forward a Referendum Bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the Alternative Vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum ...” 


The Liberal Democrats have long used electoral reform as one of their primary policies, going as far back with their existence as The SDP-Liberal Alliance in the 1980s and purely The Liberal Party before then, when they argued for using a different voting system with Proportional Representation (PR). 

 A sketch from Monty Python's Flying Caucus.

It’s important to remember that AV is NOT the same thing as PR. If Deputy Clegg would have really had his way, we’d be having a PR referendum, not one over AV, hence why he called the agreement a “miserable little compromise.” I’m happy he likes his own demand so much.

What actually is AV? What is FPTP?

AV, like FPTP, is an electoral system used in voting – in nationwide elections, party leadership elections etc.

FPTP is the system the UK currently uses in general elections. It’s pretty easy to understand – the candidate who receives the most votes wins. We can take my constituency (Southend West) as an example:

David Amess (Conservative) – 20,086 – Elected

Peter Welch (Liberal Democrats) – 12,816

Thomas Flynn (Labour) – 5,850

Gary Cockrill (UKIP) – 1,714

Tony Gladwin (BNP) – 1,333 (I’m glad he didn’t win. That is so clever. Someone write it down and send it to Andrew Brons.)

Barry Bolton (Green) – 644

Dr Vel (Marimutu Velmurgan) (Independent) – 617

Terry Philips (English Democrats) – 546

AV, on the other hand, is a lot more complicated, although it doesn’t seem so at first. In AV, you rank candidates in order of preference – ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’ and so on. Speaking of a trio, there are currently only three countries which use AV – Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Australia has been notorious in the case of AV since most of its voters want to get rid of it.

Here is a how a book describes the method of AV voting:

“As the process continues the preferences allocated to the remaining candidates may not be the second choices of those electors whose first-choice candidates have been eliminated. It may be that after three candidates have been eliminated, say, when a fourth candidate is removed from the contest one of the electors who gave her first preference to him gave her second, third and fourth preferences to the three other candidates who have already been eliminated, so her fifth preference is then allocated to one of the remaining candidates."

No matter how many times I read this, I still don’t fully understand it, and I have way more smarts than, like, Leo Strauss. 

One blogger provides a decently concise description:

“When a candidate is eliminated, each of their votes is allocated to that voter’s highest preference among the remaining candidates. Preferences for candidates that have already been eliminated are skipped over."

My head still hurts. No matter how you look at it, FPTP is a far easier and more straightforward system. But just because something is more confusing doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad. AV, however, is the worst of both worlds. It is more confusing and it is far worse than our current system.

So, what is wrong with AV?

Finally, we get to the crux of things. Why is AV a system we should refuse to adopt?

Intrinsically, AV is an unfair, expensive and confusing voting system.  It lets those who are second or third in preference come first. It makes some votes count twice or three times while others are only counted once. It causes governments to be made by back-room deals and not by the people. Ironically, it also brings less proportionality, not more like its proponents claim. 

Because there are so many reasons to vote ‘No’ to AV, I’m just going to focus on what I think are some of the most important ones.

Under AV, a candidate who receives fewer votes can end up winning. This is because, in order to achieve a supposed 50% of votes (which AV doesn’t always enforce anyway), those candidates which are removed can have their votes transferred unevenly to other candidates. It’s a bit difficult to explain. Basically, most voters could have in fact placed the Labour candidate as their first choice, but because of the stacking up of other preferences, those transferred preferences could throw more weight to a BNP candidate and he / she could overtake Labour and win. Get it? Didn’t think so, but such is AV. Talk about sloppy seconds.

AV is expensive. The cost of just having this referendum is about £250 million – although, I will admit, differing figures are constantly thrown around. Nonetheless, can we really afford to spend so much money right now? AV will also cause councils to have to spend more money on ballot machines, literature regarding AV and generally informing voters about the system’s workings. If I had a quarter of a billion pounds, I’d spend it on something worthwhile, like Murray Mints, or I’d use it to fund my idea to Parker Brothers. It’s a board game where you play as either Aaron Eckhart or Ellen Page and have to fight your way through hordes of Chilean reptile hedge fund investors to reclaim your golden suitcase full of Eccles cakes before your opponent. It still makes more sense than AV, chums!

AV is less proportional. This is what an Independent Royal Commission chaired by Roy Jenkins, a Liberal Democrat, declared over a decade ago. AV does not increase proportionality over FPTP. In AV, with lower vote share can come a greater number of seats attained by a party. For instance, in 1997 Tony Blair may have ended up with a 245 seat majority with 43% of the vote if it were used. I shudder at the thought. 179 was way more than enough, thank you.

AV allows governments to be made by politicians, not the people. AV can naturally cause more hung parliaments and therefore minority governments or coalitions than FPTP. This is not to say that FPTP elections never cause hung parliaments, as we know well. But when this does happen, you don’t decide the government, those ‘bad’ men in suits huddled together in Westminster do. Do you want an endless sea of indecisive elections and coalition governments where your vote essentially means nothing? 

FPTP: And then he voted Conservative and everyone was happy and ate some Mr Kipling tarts.

AV: And then he put his first choice as Conservative and then he put his second choice as Liberal Democrat and then he put his third choice as Green and then he put his fourth choice as Labour and then his votes had less weight than all the others and the Poetry Party candidate won and everyone went home and cried and read some Walt Whitman.

      The part where I stop talking.

      

      After all that, I’m not going to sit here and claim that FPTP is the perfect system, because it isn’t. It has plenty of flaws, and I will admit here and now that in certain cases, yes, it can strangle smaller fringe or single issue parties. But I, like many, certainly don’t want the BNP, or even UKIP, landing a Commons seat – which, under AV, could very well happen. As I’ve stated, FPTP can lead to hung parliaments and minority governments. We need only look again at Canada, which has had minority governments since 2004 – and, if the country’s polls are anything to go by, it looks like another is on the way. But I think there’s a reason why so many countries, from the grand United States to the humble Switzerland, use FPTP and only three use AV. Because, far from being the perfect system, it is an easy, quick, efficient, cheap(er) and fairer, more democratic system.

      You should make up your own mind on May 5^th, and also make sure you cast your vote in the local elections. I will certainly be voting ‘No’ and doing the latter, and I hope the majority of people do too. If one day what I regard as a genuinely better system than FPTP is proposed, I will duly take it on its merits. This time round, however, we should keep things as they are.

      Perhaps we could have an FPAV coalition. You put a cross in the box of the candidate you don’t want and a 1 in the one you do, and then a 1 and a cross in the box you want as deputy MP and them a cross before the 1 in a candidate you want to replace your MP in case of resignation.

GET IT?

      

      Now let Ken Clarke in his political wisdom tell you why 'No' is the way to go.