ALL VERY …

There are elections in the UK on May 5th. As usual, some (but not all) local councils in England will be contested but this year there are other far-reaching ballots: for the whole of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies, plus a referendum across the UK on the voting system for the Westminster parliament, to which members are elected from Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland as well as England.

The referendum issue concerns whether to change from the present First Past the Post system (FPTP) to an Alternative Vote system (AV). FPTP is beguilingly simple. The candidate with the largest total of votes in the constituency is declared the winner. It makes no never mind if that candidate’s majority over the runner-up is just one vote, or if the percentage of the total votes cast that is gained by the winner is lower than – even, considerably lower than – 50 percent.



There are several possible alternative ways of awarding and counting the votes on the ballot paper but the one the electorate is being offered as an alternative to FPTP works like this. If the voter wishes to do so – and it wouldn’t be compulsory as it is, for instance, in Australia – she may write a number 1 (instead of the traditional X) against the candidate she most favours to be the MP, a 2 against the candidate among the rest whom she least abominates and so on for as far down the ballot paper as she can stomach.

When the ballot papers are checked, all the number 1 scores (plus the Xs) are added up. If one candidate has scored more than 50 percent, that is the result. In the – more usual – event of no candidate reaching half of the vote, the candidate with the lowest first preference votes is eliminated but the second preference votes on the ballots that put him first are added to the other candidates’ totals as if they were also first preference votes. In other words, from the second count onwards, second, third and so on votes on the eliminated papers have the same weight as first preference. When the result of this topping-up of votes pushes one of the candidates over 50 percent, that candidate is declared the winner. As will be apparent, this might not be the candidate who led the field at the first count.

Movie director Agnès Varda

This referendum is the Liberal Democrats’ main – some would say only – fig leaf with which to cover their shame at propping up a coalition government implementing policies almost all of which the Lib Dems opposed at the general election last year. The party has been complaining for decades that FPTP is “unfair”, that it denies them representation in the Commons commensurate with the level of votes that they receive in the ballot boxes. What they have long proposed is a more elaborate version of AV – known as AV-plus – which weights the transferred votes rather than simply counting them as equal with first preference votes.

In the dying days of his government, Gordon Brown suddenly became a convert to electoral reform, seeing it as a carrot for the Lib Dems in the event of a hung parliament, whereby the two supposedly left-of-centre parties might find an accommodation. What he proposed was AV.

Television actor Anthony Valentine

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who personally had a famously good election campaign (how long ago the mantra “I agree with Nick” now seems), was scathing. Just a fortnight before the general election, he told The Independent: “AV is a baby step in the right direction – only because nothing can be worse than the status quo. If we want to change British politics once and for all, we have got to have a quite simple system in which everyone's votes count. We think AV-plus is a feasible way to proceed. At least it is proportional – and it retains a constituency link. The Labour Party assumes that changes to the electoral system are like crumbs for the Liberal Democrats from the Labour table. I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour Party”.

Instead, of course, he has settled for the same miserable little compromise but thrashed out by the Conservative Party. He has had to go with a referendum on AV, not AV-plus, and if he loses it his party will be on what might prove to be a terminal warpath.

Cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov

Both the coalition and the opposition have agreed to allow the campaign to be a matter of conscience for individual MPs. David Cameron is opposed to AV as are William Hague, Ken Clarke, John Redwood, Margaret Beckett, Malcolm Rifkind, Keith Vaz, Caroline Flint, Michael Fallon, Dennis Skinner and the BNP among others. Ed Miliband is in favour, as are Douglas Alexander, Sadiq Khan, Hilary Benn, John Denham, Jon Cruddas, Alex Salmond and UKIP. It is pretty hard to find a high profile Tory in favour. That very fact might boost the vote for AV.

Ed Miliband’s support for AV is understandable. Last summer’s Labour leadership election was conducted under an AV-plus system. Second preference votes were successively transferred until one candidate topped 50 percent. That candidate was Miliband. His brother David led every round of voting until the last one that clinched it for Ed. What’s more, the votes were divided into three “colleges” – MPs, party members organised by constituency and unions. It was the vote of the unions that made the difference for Ed in his narrow victory. Many Labour members believe that a truer measure of party sentiment would have elected David rather than Ed. Happily for Ed – and indeed for Labour – those members have largely suppressed that belief though it will undoubtedly resurface if Ed’s leadership hits trouble. Still, it may not be entirely surprising that the largest concentration of pro-AV sentiment in the Commons resides in the shadow cabinet.

Arthur Vickers VC

The Electoral Reform Society has put out several leaflets and set out the case for AV on its website. Having read the material, I find that it has propelled me pretty firmly into the No camp, which is not at all what the ERS wanted. But so many of its arguments are bankrupt or plain stupid. “All too often” it says “the ‘winners’ in our FPTP elections are opposed by a majority of voters. AV addresses that fundamental problem ensuring that an election winner has genuine support”.

It’s absurd to suggest that FPTP winners don’t enjoy “genuine” support. How else would they manage to amass more votes than any other single candidate in the first place? And it’s no less ridiculous to propose that AV “addresses” the “problem” that such winners “are opposed by a majority of voters”. AV is only a different method of reading the result of the vote. It still produces a winner. If I want Labour to win the seat where I vote and Labour comes last (as it traditionally does in our constituency), how have I gained anything under AV? I still don’t get the MP I want. So the ERS is fantasising when it declares that “AV would remove the frustration many voters feel that they currently have no vote at all”.

Movie star Alida Valli

AV might provide more data from which its apologists could argue that the winner in some mysterious way enjoys “majority” support but as FPTP doesn’t furnish such data about voters it cannot be assumed that every vote not cast would have been a vote registering more or less support. (The ERS claims that FPTP is “taken as a statement of equal contempt for all the other [candidates]” to which I would reply “only by you is it taken that way”.)

What’s more, the proportion of the ballot papers still eligible to be counted might well be considerably below 50 percent by the time of the final run-off between the two surviving candidates so to characterise the eventual winner as recording more than 50 percent of the vote would be utterly misleading because the size of the vote still being counted will have shrunk. At the same time, the winner under AV will win on a figure consisting of many votes that have been counted several times. The voter who happens to have voted in an order of preference precisely the reverse of the majority will find each one of her votes being added to a candidate’s total.

The ERS claims that AV removes the need for “tactical voting” which traditionally means, for example (as I have done in the past) voting Lib Dem because, though I would most like Labour to win, I would least like the Tories to win. But bestowing second and third (and maybe more) preference votes is also tactical voting – indeed, it is more complex, ticklish and unpredictable tactical voting.

This Derbyshire constituency can sell the AV campaign: it's Amber Valley

The No campaign has used some water-muddying arguments of its own, claiming for instance that voting under AV requires “higher maths”. Mind you, this is less far-fetched than this ERS proposal, that “the logic’s familiar enough to anyone who’s ever asked a friend to pop down to the shops for a coke and said ‘if they’re out of that I’ll have a lemonade’.” In fact an AV ballot paper would, by that sort of analogy, require the instruction to continue “ … or a Tizer or an Irn-bru – though don’t get a lemonade if they’ve got an Irn-bru, but I’d rather have a lemonade than a Tizer, although thinking about I’d rather have an Irn-bru than a coke unless they’ve got Pepsi. But what I really want is a pork pie. Perhaps I’d better come with you”.

The one thing the ERS can hope that no one will dispute is its asseveration that “voters are tired of Punch and Judy politics”. Fair enough. But who imagines for a single second that AV will consign such ding-dongs to history? Get real.

I have studied the ERS FAQs leaflet but can find no answer to this question. Let’s say that there are five candidates in my constituency at the next general election. I’ll call them Bevan, Grimond, Pankhurst, Stalin and Thatcher. And let’s say that I number my votes in the same order in which they appear alphabetically on the ballot, so Bevan gets my ‘1’ and Thatcher gets my ‘5’. Now, suppose Bevan comes bottom of the poll and is eliminated. In the next count, my vote will be transferred to Grimond. But suppose Grimond goes out in the second count. Will my third vote he given to Pankhurst or is my ballot paper now exhausted? And say instead Grimond goes out in the first round and then Bevan in the second. Does my third place Pankhurst vote still count then too and is it the equal of someone else’s first vote for Pankhurst? If I award only two votes, first for Bevan and second for Thatcher and Bevan goes out on the first count and Thatcher survives to the run off with Stalin, will my Thatcher vote count in the second, the third and the final counts, so counting three times whereas my Bevan vote only counted once, even though he was my favourite? How is this a more just system?

In narrow party political terms, it looks as though the referendum result will be bad for the coalition whichever it is. A No win will cut off at the knees Lib Dem support for continuing the coalition. This was the prize for which they agreed to share power and they haven’t won it. A Yes win will hugely irritate the Tory backbenches, many of whom fear that they are in danger of losing their seats under AV – the Lib Dems still come second in far more Tory-held seats than in Labour-held ones. They will grumble that Cameron didn’t do enough to ensure a No victory and that the Yes win implies that Ed Miliband is making big inroads into Cameron’s wavering personal popularity. So either way, the referendum can be an own-goal for the government. Maybe on my referendum ballot paper I shall put a 1 by No and a 2 by Yes.