The House of Commons has just been debating the Alternative Vote system in which voters rank candidates in order of preference, in the context of a proposal by Gordon Brown to pass legislation binding the next government to hold a referendum on it. What do UK and other readers think of this electoral system - would you vote for it?
(Here's WIkipedia's summary of what happens in AV after votes are cast: "If no candidate is the first preference of a majority of voters, the candidate with the fewest number of first preference rankings is eliminated and that candidate's ballots are redistributed at full value to the remaining candidates according to the next ranking on each ballot. This process is repeated until one candidate obtains a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term "instant runoff" is used because the method is said to simulate a series of runoff elections tallied in rounds...")
No - it's disproportionate FPTP.
A referendum on a new Alternative Vote system is way down the list of government priorities if you ask me. When it comes to proper referendums that actually mean something, like a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, we are denied such luxuries.
Or a referendum about the UK’s constitutional status, again, we are denied the chance to choose. So why a referendum on a new voting system? Could it be because New Labour faces electoral obliteration at the forthcoming general election? Fearful of being killed off from the UK body politics, a new voting system appears to be New Labour’s future life support system – it hopes…
Voting on AV makes only sense if you have settled that you definitely don’t want proportional representation, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t you have a referendum on that question first?
Absolutely. But suppose the choice we get is AV or the first past the post status quo - which would you vote for?
AV would be only slightly better than what you have got now, but I don’t call it a choice. You would get to hear for ever that a majority of voters wanted AV, not PR, although this wasn’t the choice they had.
This referendum would give some false legitimacy to another method of un-proportional representation. I would reject it, although it is some slight progress: afterwards it will be impossible to achieve real progress.
This is why we need an option to explicitly abstain in referendums and elections...
http://www.power2010.org.uk/votes/entry/a-none-of-the-above-option-on-ballot-papers/
On the surface, AV appears more democratic than first past the post – so, I would vote AV. How about you Mr Ash? And why?
I'm genuinely torn. Yes, AV is more democratic, and the transferable votes it introduces would give smaller parties a chance to garner votes (including protest votes), grow, and put pressure on larger parties to listen to their voters - all of which seems a good thing. On the other hand, the worry is that voting for it would stop us from getting a yet better alternative (although perhaps in breaking the mould it would allow movement to a different system a decade or two down the line). On balance, I'd probably vote for it, but need to think about it more - that's partly why I started this thread!
By the way, on the subject of alternative electoral systems, I've just published this: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-rickard/another-voting-system-to-wrap-your-brains-around-mc-fptp
OK, here's Stuart Weir just published on OurKingdom tearing apart the suggestion that "perhaps in breaking the mould it would allow movement to a different system a decade or two down the line", as I put it:
Perhaps I was being over-optimistic.
I'll vote 'no' to AV.
It's needlessly complex, without the merits of more proportional systems. Likely in fact to be more offputting than the simple FPTP we have.
Here's what a proper referendum would look like: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/3335382/Proposed-MMP-referendum-wording-released
(hat tip James Graham)
It seems to have a flaw, though. Why is MMP on the second ballot, if a majority has just said they don’t want it?
Or has my limited but disastrous experience with referendums just made me too suspicious?
That's an interesting question. I'd guess they're envisaging a situation where (for example) MMP is everyone's second choice, so they all vote to switch to another system, but a majority then find that their first choice didn't make it through to the second ballot, so they still vote for MMP.
PS: what's your limited but disastrous experience?
We had to fight for decades to have referendums introduced, and on the federal level we still haven’t got them. For German politicians the notion is as awful as “coalition” for British ones, I think. Or “garlic” for Dracula.
We have only had 2 referendums in Hamburg, both times I voted with the majority. In 2004 76% of us voted that the Senate (our government) must not privatise our hospitals. We had to find out that the law about referendums had some interesting small print. The Senate “considered” our vote as they had to and then they quickly sold all hospitals.
The next referendum was about fairer elections: no longer closed lists, we wanted open ones with cumulation and panachage. By this time the small print had been removed and our vote became binding law, but only for a few weeks. Then our parliament decided on a new law: no panachage.
This is fixed now, and next time I vote it will be according to the law we wanted in the referendum, but it took us more than 15 years to make sure that referendums are respected. The experience has taught me to look very closely at a proposal.
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