I shouldn’t have to state the case for the Alternative Vote Plus voting system here, but I’ll do so anyway because this is an issue that the media has refused to explain clearly. Anyone who’s ever looked at our current voting system will be aware that First Past the Post is one of the worst possible systems we could have in place. Under FPTP, the majority of votes don’t count at all. If you vote for someone who doesn’t end up winning, you may as well have stayed home. The only votes that really count are in swing seats.Allow me to demonstrate with simple mathematics: let’s imagine a constituency consisting of 1000 people. Let’s say 450 of them vote Conservative, 300 vote Labour and 250 vote Liberal Democrat. The Conservatives win and all other votes are discounted. The 550 people who voted Labour or Liberal Democrat may as well have stayed at home. And the Conservatives only needed 301 votes to win, so 149 of their voters needn’t have bothered either. In total, 70% of the votes cast in this constituency were irrelevant.
AV Plus is not the best alternative available to First Past the Post, but it’s the only other choice we’re likely to be offered anytime soon. A real proportional representation system would be preferable, but the main parties don’t really like PR because it hands more power to smaller parties. But AV Plus is still far more fair than FPTP.
Let’s go back to the above scenario. When the Liberal Democrats come last in our fictional constituency, their votes will be looked at again and allocated according to second preferences. So if 225 Liberal Democrats put Labour as their second choice, then Labour would be left with 525 votes, which would ultimately put them in first place (yay!). Are you beginning to see now why many Tories don’t like the idea of voting reform? The fact is, Labour voters and Liberal Democrat voters have a lot more in common than anyone has with the Tories, so like it or not, AV will always cost the Tories votes.
David Cameron argues that there is “no other walk of life” where a system like AV Plus would be considered, comparing it to athletics and all sorts of other irrelevant human endeavours. But voting is not like running a race. When you win a race, it doesn’t matter whether you win it by a five minute margin or a 0.0001 second margin. It only matters who is fastest. When you’re running a country, you can’t claim a tiny margin of victory gives you a mandate to run the show. Politics is too important to be decided in the same way we decide horse races.
Back to the advert above. The No 2 AV campaign have gone for a truly tasteless and despicable way to bring voters round to their side. They’re trying to scare the public into siding with them, hoping to take advantage of the fact that many people don’t really understand our current voting system or the alternative that’s being put forward. They’ve avoided an honest debate, because they can’t win an honest debate. There’s no good moral reason to support FPTP. It’s an affront to democracy. So the No 2 AV camp has to carp on about perceived practical issues instead.
What practical issues? Well, they say, it’s too complex. People don’t understand it. The odd thing is, AV Plus is already used for some local and European elections. A system similar to AV Plus is used on plenty of forms used in the public services. So if the public can’t understand it, wouldn’t we have already heard about it by now? Voting under AV is not a complex task – you simply write 1 next to your preferred candidate, 2 next to your second preference, 3 next to your third preference, etc. Any idiot could do it, and it’s both deceptive and insulting to the general public to claim otherwise.
Then there’s the money issue, which the advert above aims to highlight. The No 2 AV campaign is telling us that implementing AV will cost £250m. Ministers have since admitted that this is bullshit, but even if it wasn't, how can anyone put a price on real democracy? In the long run, if it helps us to elect rulers who have our best interests at heart, it will save money for us all.
Consider the baby in the above picture. Her parents may have voted Labour, but because they live in a Conservative safe seat, their vote didn’t count, even though the Conservatives only obtained 1% more of the vote than Labour did. Thanks to the current voting system, the Conservatives walked away with the constituency seat, and that helped the party to win the election. Now the NHS is facing widespread cuts, health workers and social workers are losing their jobs, Dad is about to lose his job with the council and Mum is suffering post-natal depression and unable to get the treatment she needs from her GP consortia (which doesn’t have the same resources or depth of knowledge as the recently disbanded local primary care trust).
The baby needs AV. We all need AV. The only people who don’t need it are Conservatives.
