No to AV - 20th March 2011

Only three of my correspondents appear to have noticed that there is a referendum campaign underway on changing the voting system. They have written to me demanding to know my position on the issue and that I declare in on a particular website. I am not sure why they are so insistent because everyone has the vote on this in a secret ballot and they do not have to lobby me as their representative to vote on their behalf.  In any event, I am more than happy to make my position clear and I will willingly do anything that will raise interest in the subject in the hope that more than these three constituents that have written, are going to take notice.

The Choice we will be given in May is either to stick with our existing system where you put an ‘x’ next to the candidate of your choice, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Or, whether we want to move to the ‘alternative vote’ where you rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate has more than 50% of the first preference votes cast, then the bottom candidate is eliminated and the second preferences  of the voters who gave their first preference to that candidate are distributed among the remaining candidates; and so proceeding until a candidate gets more than 50% -quite complicated really. A bit like feeding your votes into the sausage machine at one end, and out of the other end comes a result that nobody really quite understands. It will certainly add significant confusion to the voting process and significant extra time and cost to the counting process. Little wonder then that only 3 countries in the world use this system –and two of them are fed up with it.  In total 2.4 billion voters use our system and only 29.5 million use the alternative voting system.

As well as practical concerns I have objections in principle. I reject the criticism that our current system is unfair.  Some people complain that under our existing system their vote doesn’t count. This is absurd: of course their vote counted; they just didn’t win. It’s a bit like someone coming to my surgery demanding that I vote in Parliament in a particular way, and when I vote in a different way they complain that I didn’t listen to them, that I ignored them. Actually I listened carefully, I just disagreed with them.

Second, under the alternative voting system some votes –the ones cast for the least popular candidates- will end up being counted multiple times whilst others are only counted once. This is manifestly quite unfair. Also, the second, third and fourth choices are given equal weight as if they were first choices.

Of greater concern to me is the corrosive effect that the system will have on our politics. Under our current voting system coalition government is very rare. Under the alternative vote in will become the norm.  Political parties will respond by positioning themselves to maximum advantage for the coalition formation negotiations that will follow each inconclusive election.  Increasingly they will put into their manifestos all sorts of commitments primarily as bargaining points for the negotiations which they never really intended to pursue in government had they won outright.  The programme for government will be stitched up by politicians after the election rather than decided by voters at the election.

I am informed by opinion researchers that voters instinctively favour the alternative vote until they find out anything about it, at which point they turn decisively against it. Let’s hope they wake up and find out about it before the referendum in May.