The Alternative Vote Referendum

Hiding beneath the Royal Wedding there will be local elections across most of Britain on May 5th. More importantly, on the same date, there will also be a binding, national referendum on changing the voting system from the First Past The Post (FPTP) to the Alternative Vote (AV) system. So try and stay awake as I try to explain the difference between the two systems.

First Past The Post (FPTP) is the voting system that people are familiar with across the democratic world. Here you are given a ballot paper listing all the candidates and you put across next to the name of the candidate you want to win. Then all the ballot papers are counted and the candidate with the most number of crosses next to their name wins.

Under the Alternative Vote (AV) system you are also given a ballot paper listing all the candidates. The difference is that rather then choosing one candidate you rank all the candidates in order of preference. So you put a "1" next to your first choice, a "2" next to your second choice and so on until you've put a number next to the name of every candidate on the ballot paper. Then all the ballot papers are collected and all the ballots counted. In the unlikely event that this gives one candidate more then 50% of the total number of votes cast then voting stops and that candidate is declared the winner. If, as is more likely, no candidate reaches the 50% threshold then the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc votes on those ballot papers are added to the totals of the other candidates and if this gives one candidate more then 50% of the vote then they are declared the winner. However if still now candidate reaches the 50% threshold then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and all the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc votes on those ballot papers are added to the other candidates. This process continues until one of the candidates reaches 50% of the vote and can last for up to a week. The closest thing to the AV system that British voters will be familiar with is the voting system for the European Parliament which allowed voters a first and second choice and saw the Fascist British National Party (BNP) win their first two parliamentary seats.

The main argument for the AV system is that it gives a fairer result by allowing supporters of minority parties (eg LibDems/BNP) to still have their votes counted in areas where one of the main parties (eg Conservative/Labour) dominate. This is simply not true because in most areas in Britain the winning candidate already wins with more then 50% of the vote under the FPTP system. Therefore AV only has a chance of affecting the election in around 2% of the 625 Parliamentary seats or just 12 MP's.

What AV will be much more successful in doing is massively increasing the scope for electoral fraud by creating a counting system so complicated that you need a maths A-Level to even begin to understand. Under FPTP you are left with a pile of ballot papers that can be checked by hand for fraud. Under AV you are left with multiple piles with some ballot papers being counted in three or four different piles at different times during the counting process. This makes it much harder to check for fraud and there has been a lot of talk about bringing in computerised voting machines to cope with the extra work load. You only need to look at America's 2000 Presidential election to see how easily computerised voting machines can be abused.

This corrosion of democracy can be seen in the only three countries in the world where the AV system is used. Papa New Guinea and Fiji are out and out military dictatorships where the newspaper's routinely publish blank pages to protest the amount of news that government censorship won't allow them to publish. In Australia people quickly realised that a vote under AV had so little impact of the government they would end up with they stopped voting and it had to be made compulsory. Australia's current government is a four party coalition with a majority of one. We are all waiting for a strong gust of wind that will cause a Canada style collapse that will leave Australia governed directly by the Queen of England rather then by an elected Parliament.

In Britain even the debate about AV is killing politics. At a time when the British economy is bumping along the bottom, we're still at war in Afghanistan and we've just started another war against Libya political debate has been reduced to LibDem MP's siding with Conservative MP's to argue with Labour MP's who have also sided with Conservative MP's about whether AV will cost us £220 million or £225 million. Or to put it more simply a change to AV will silence the voice of the British people and lead to us getting more governments like the government we've got now.


So on May 5th I will be voting NO to AV and the most annoying bit is that I will actually have to go out and vote. Otherwise the people who do get excited about changes to the voting system will go out and vote in their droves and the the voting system will be changed without most of the people in Britain even noticing.