Nick Clegg did not describe AV as a ‘miserable little compromise’. Get your facts straight. He used those words about Gordon Brown’s pathetic offer.

Absolutely right.
Anyone saying we should vote No to AV because then maybe we’ll be offered a more proportional system is being unrealistic. It took the first hung parliament in 30 years (and the first Liberals in government for 70 years) to get even this concession from the political class.
Voting No isn’t just rejecting AV it’s embracing FPTP and no-one will care what your motivations for voting No are.

Dave,

There are two fairly big assumptions in this piece and I am not sure I accept either of them. Firstly, that it is better to have a choice between AV and FPTP. In New Zealand they managed to hold an initial referendum which laid out the options and a second referendum to run the preferred system off against FPTP. This is a much more mature approach and would avoid the ridiculous situation we have where people are pretending to passionately support a system they don’t really believe in. In effect, the current debate is “some change, regardless” or “as you were”. It makes the “yes” campaign look weak because as you say, most of the supporters of AV don’t really support it.

Secondly, you assume a no vote kicks this into the long grass. I disagree. I think a victory for AV would effectively kill the debate dead for 25 years. “We have had one change, we must give it at least 3 or 4 elections to see how it works”. If there’s a “no” vote, however, especially if it’s relatively close, there would be plenty of scope to repeat the process in say 7-8 years following the infinitely better NZ model.

Why we can’t be trusted to look openly and honestly at the system we use to elect MPs is beyond me. I find the AV referendum patronising and full of false bravado. I will be looking for the “meh” box on the 5th May.

Those of us who have always supported PR must accept that the cause is lost for at least 20 years, whatever the outcome of the referendum. That’s the fault of the electoral reform lobby who embraced AV as if all their Christmases had come at once.

Referenda are rare in the UK and we won’t be having another one on the same subject unless something radical happens.

If AV wins and things turn out as Jenkins forecast, it will be seen to have failed. People will want to go back to FPTP as nobody says, ‘that reform was a disaster, lets be more radical’.

AV is less proportional when electing a parliament because compromise candidates from the same party come up time and time again.

So stick with the least worst option, say no to AV.

The overriding objection to FPTP is that it can let the *least* popular candidate win -http://bit.ly/fldUMZ.

It also means that most people in most constituencies are represented by MPs they didn’t vote for, and that many voters have to choose between either showing which party they really support and seeing their vote go to waste or voting for a party they don’t much like in order to keep out a party they like even less (and seeing their vote claimed as an indication of support for the former) – http://bit.ly/fgHxR0.

If AV is rejected, this will by claimed by the No brigade as an indication of public satisfaction not just with FPTP but with the political status quo in general. Ugh.

AV means more choice for the voter, a greater say in the election of MPs and a more representative Commons. Whatever its shortcomings (which it shares with FPTP anyway), AV does mean greater democracy now and the possibility of more reform later.

Greg – agree with your first paragraph. I’m just looking for some positives here. The NZ approach would’ve been my preference as well. Disagree with your second para. A No vote is a democratic mandate for FPTP. It’ll be going nowhere if that’s how things pan out.

The best argument for AV was always that, while not being noticeably more proportional than FPTP, it at least didn’t make supporters of less popular parties feel they had to vote tactically. From this point of view it got rid of one of the key complaints from supporters of less popular parties, without actually giving them enough seats to force parliament into perpetual coalitions or allowing the BNP into parliament. I think a lot of PR supporters realised this, and disliked it accordingly. However, they now seem to have realised that if this referendum campaign, including the overtly anti-politics Yes campaign, can’t break the general public out of its apathy towards electoral reform, then the debate around electoral reform will be dead for a generation. As a result AV has moved from being a potential bulwark against PR to being a stalking horse for PR. However, even in the unlikely even of a “yes” vote, they should not convince themselves that full PR is going to be on the table anytime soon. Our current experience of coalition makes PR a less appetising prospect than at any time in decades.

4/Stephen Newton: That’s the fault of the electoral reform lobby who embraced AV as if all their Christmases had come at once.

What should they have done? Amendments were put in the Commons to have PR as an option on the ballot paper (in such a way that it wouldn’t split a potential reform vote, at that), and were voted down by just about everyone. Labour offered the Lib Dems a coalition agreement including an STV referendum – but quite clearly didn’t have the numbers in their own FPTP-loving parliamentary party to actually provide it. I’m just unclear as to how the “electoral reform lobby” could have got PR out of this situation by doing things differently.

And there is a lot of “anything’s better than FPTP” sentiment, sure, but that is broadly true. Given that the referendum is on AV or FPTP, and all attempts to get a referendum on a more interesting question have failed, FPTP is still terrible even if AV isn’t a great improvement in many cases.

Agree with the article. Would like “was” changed to “is” in the headline.

Stephen: AV is less proportional when electing a parliament because compromise candidates from the same party come up time and time again.

But who said AV was proportional? However its nto difficult to change it to make it AV+ and make it more proportional.

Far easier to do that than make FPTP proportional. I’m not sure what logic you’re using there but it doesn’t make any sense to me.

No to AV wouldn’t only mean Yes to FPTP and the status quo in general. It would also mean that those Tory moneybags with their campaign of lies and distortion had won. And make Cameron and his cronies even more insufferably smug. Think of George Osborne – and vote Yes!

Sunny

It’s a big shift to switch from AV to AV+. Arguably bigger than the switch from FPTP to AV since it introduces top ups and proportionalism and thus breaks the “one constituency, one representative” model which is (for some reason) seen as a sacred cow.

“Supporters of FPTP would be able to say, not just that the public have shown no desire for voting reform, but that the current system now has a proven democratic mandate”

We already know that from the campaign to date that “the public” has shown no desire for voting reform. I don’t think there will be any kind of democratic mandate – irrespective of the outcome – bestowed by the randomised process of giving people who have gone to vote in the local and devolved parliament elections a ballot paper about a subject which they aren’t very interested in, and asking them to pick between an option which they have “almost no understanding of”, and one which they have “a very mixed understanding of”.

From Electoral Commission research:

“3.14 Only a handful of people taking part in our research understood what the
‘Alternative Vote’ system was before hearing any explanation of it. The vast
majority had no knowledge of AV and did not know how to vote under the
system or how candidates would win a seat.
3.15 A few people who were more interested and engaged had found out about
AV when they heard about the referendum. Some people, particularly in
Scotland and Northern Ireland, said they ‘had heard of’ the system but did not
know how it worked. They assumed it to be the same as the proportional
representation systems used in elections there.
3.16 In the context of the proposed question, people guessed or made
assumptions about what AV meant. Most people assumed that it was
something different from the current system, because they were being asked to
choose whether to use it instead of FPTP.
3.17 Some people thought that the reason for changing the voting system was
because the last election resulted in a hung Parliament and that perhaps AV
would avoid that.
3.18 Assumptions about what AV meant varied widely, however. Understanding
of the word ‘alternative’ as meaning ‘different’ led to two of the more widespread
misconceptions on what the proposed question is asking.
3.19 The first of these misconceptions was that some people thought that they
were being asked whether the UK should adopt a different method of voting,
such as using the internet, postal voting or voting via digital television.
3.20 The second misconception was that some people thought they were being
asked about a generic, alternative system of voting and did not understand that
AV was a specific voting system. However, they made no assumptions as to
how it would be different.
3.21 Some people thought it meant there would be some form of ranking, but
the majority were unsure about what it would or could involve. There were many
people who could not hazard a guess on what AV meant.
3.22 Once it was explained to people how AV worked, people were able to
understand that it was a ranking system. Some people in Scotland and Northern
Ireland understood ranking better from using the ‘Single Transferable Vote’
system in elections there and some respondents in Wales also understood
ranking better.
3.23 However, there was some confusion about how voters show their
preferences. Some people were confused about what the numbering meant,
with questions about whether candidates with the highest number rank as the
favourite and those with the lowest number rank as least favourite. Another
source of confusion was how the numbering would be used and counted.”

http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/102696/PVSC-Bill-QA-Report.pdf

re.the proportionality of AV. In last year’s election, according to this from the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/may/10/proportional-representation-general-election-2010#zoomed-picture
the LibDem and Tory seat allocation would’ve been a little more proportional to the vote, and the Labour allocation very slightly less. If you want substantially more proportionality (or less disproportionality), AV+ or STV are clearly the better systems, but AV is a v.small improvement.

@Sunny I accept that nobody has argued AV is proportional.

You could bring in AV+, but it would be just as easy to bring in FPTP+. (Either top-up system creates a group of MPs from smaller parties with no constituency work to keep them busy.)

Are you arguing that AV will be so disproportional, pressure will quickly mount for AV+? If so, I think that’s flawed; people will say ‘AV’s failed, we should go back to FPTP’.

@Cim The Yes campaign has made some ridiculous claims, including that AV would have stopped the expenses scandal (PR didn’t stop UKIP MEPs committing fraud). AV will not make MPs work harder, nor will it end jobs for life (it may create jobs for life for Lib Dems).

They have over promised on a system that will under deliver.

Any attempts to get PR on the agenda have been feeble at best. Reformers protested as the coalition was formed and behaved as if they had won something worthwhile when the AV referendum was announced.

AV is better than FPTP when electing one person to one post. But the general election will be 600 simultaneous elections and AV will encourage uniformity of result. That’s why Jenkins estimated a two-thirds Labour majority in 1997 on 43% of first preferences.

Under FPTP “rules” FIRST IS BEST”. Under FPTP “rules” a No win at this referendum has to be and will be taken as a mandate for NO CHANGE. A No win closes the door on further discussion. The irony is that many PR advocates are supporting the NO campaign simply because they don’t want AV. They are oblivious to the obvious outcome of a NO win – namely NO CHANGE.

15/Stephen Newton: The Yes campaign has made some ridiculous claims

You’ll find no argument from me there. The whole lot has been a “who can run the worst campaign” competition.

Any attempts to get PR on the agenda have been feeble at best.

I ask again – given that neither the Conservatives nor a majority of Labour MPs want anything other than FPTP, how should people have gone about getting PR on the agenda in the 2010-15 time period? Saying that what they did was inadequate might be true, but doesn’t alone imply the existence of an adequate alternative.

That’s why Jenkins estimated a two-thirds Labour majority in 1997 on 43% of first preferences.

As opposed to the 63% majority they got under FPTP? That doesn’t seem a particularly big difference. (“Anyone but X” elections like that are the exception rather than the rule anyway – 1997 was, but even 2010, despite the heavy anti-Labour feeling, wasn’t)

I’m surprised the Tories didn’t allow (insist on) many variants of AV and PR on the ballot paper to split the ‘voting reform’ vote and ‘romp’ home with 35% of the vote for FPTP.

Would have been somehow apt

@CIM Yes, both campaigns are embarrassingly bad. There seems to be a consensus on that which includes everyone not directly involved.

The problem was that everything happened so quickly, nobody considered what they were really signing up for. Clegg needed something to protect the Lib Dems from post-coalition unpopularity that could be implemented in time for the next election. That’s why STV was out.

But the the Electoral Reform Society et al should not have been concerned for the Lib Dems. If they had refused support for AV, Clegg would have been forced to fight for more; he already knew AV was essential to Lib Dem survival.

They should have demanded STV, but compromised at AV+ and a constitutional convention (similar to that which led to the Scottish Parliament) that would consider all that is wrong with our current system.

@12 You’re forgetting that you can go from AV to proportional representation by the Single Transferable Vote very easily as well. They’ve both the same voting system, all proportional representation by STV requires as a step from AV is a boundary review to implement multi-member constituencies, and you’re done.

I agree with the trust of the article (vote for AV it’s better than FPTP) although the idea that “it’s best that we weren’t offered PR” is absolute rubbish – you’d just hold the referendum with AV and ask people to rank their choices of system in order.

19. Stephen Newton

Aren’t you rather supposing that politicians are capable of behaving in a rational and disinterested fashion? “What’s best for the country?” is always conflated with “What’s best for the party?” (and even “what’s in it for me?”).

Rationally we might ask the electorate: do you want (a) a majoritarian or (b) a (more or less) proportional system? If (a), then FPTP or AV? If (b), then STV or some kind of additional-member system? (Personally I find Jenkins’s arguments for AV+ persuasive.)

But Clegg was in far too much of a hurry to rush into the Tories’ embrace and get himself a ministerial car to think of all the implications. Even where people are used to coalitions and parties know in advance of an election who they would prefer to work with afterwards (as in Ireland and Germany), the negotiating process takes longer than it did here.

He should have given a minority Cameron government conditional support from the opposition benches and kept shtum about electoral reform until he had shown that a parliament of minorities could work. After the next election would have been the time to go for a “more proportional” system (even FPTP+!).

@20. Jon

“you’d just hold the referendum with AV and ask people to rank their choices of system in order.” – but that would have been to concede the case for a preferential system in advance, which you can be sure no Tory and few Labour MPs would have been prepared to do. An “either/or” choice is the best we could have got – let’s hope it puts an end to “either/or” choices in the future.

Clegg caved in, so desperate was he for power.

He had the chance to really get big concessions out of the tories, but he chose to be a tory poodle. Pathetic little man.

@21 Jonathan Phillips I agree will all you say about Clegg.

But I was responding to the question of what those currently campaigning under the Yes2 AV banner should have done. Those people claim to be above party politics and so not subject to the pressures Clegg was under. They lost their bottle and set back the cause of meaningful electoral reform at least 20 years, whatever the outcome.

Stephen newton, PR may come about sooner than later as the last OGvernemtn were very unpopualar yet won on 35% i don’t know if laobur would have won the 2005 eelction with av ,but the public would’nt tolerate a governemnt winning on such a small vote, if this hung parliament becomes acceptable then the public might want an either more proportionate system on the future,

@ 23. sally

Yep. I supported and worked for the Liberals from the beginning of the ’60s onwards and voted for them and their successors in every election since 1966. Now at last I’ve got a Lib Dem MP (on less than 30% of the vote…) – and all those decades of commitment turn out to have been wasted. I could have been abstaining and looking after my garden for all the good it did.

It does make me laugh when the tory right wing go on about proportional systems letting in extremists.

Before the last election Billy Cash, was asked what result he was hoping for. He replied a tory win, with a small majority. He and his little gang had visions of being the power brokers, and king makers. He and his cabal would decide what Cameron would get through parliament.

I see no difference to what they are now scare mongering about.

@ 24. Stephen Newton

For myself I don’t think there has ever been any prospect of meaningful electoral reform (I think there was a bill to introduce STV in around 1918) – at least not for Westminster. But if there were any prospect, a No vote would set it even further back than a Yes vote.

The case for STV is very strong in local government, however – they got it in Scotland, even though the ruling Labour party knew they’d lose out initially. The distortions in party representation on local councils can be astonishing – there are London boroughs where every single councillor is Labour, and it can happen that almost all sitting councillors get kicked out and replaced by their opponents. Local STV really would be worth fighting for – but you can forget it for ever if we get stuck with FPTP.

@26 Jonathan Phillips: “Yep. I supported and worked for the Liberals from the beginning of the ’60s onwards and voted for them and their successors in every election since 1966. Now at last I’ve got a Lib Dem MP (on less than 30% of the vote…) – and all those decades of commitment turn out to have been wasted. I could have been abstaining and looking after my garden for all the good it did.”

40 years absolutely wasted assuming that you ignore the policy wins from a political party with 20 odd MPs for the majority of that period: abortion reform, legalisation of male homosexuality, equal opportunity laws, racial equality advocacy, devolution to Scotland and Wales. Liberals did not own those campaigns but without contribution from old Liberal Party activists, they would have struggled. Remember the old anecdote: If the Liberal Party did not exist, we would have to invent them.

Don’t forget that old policies such as site value rating/land value taxation or worker co-ownership of companies are being rediscovered.

Liberals should not treat PR/STV as a sacred object. In a coalition, we have to try to attain the most liberal compromise, covering a range of policies. Last summer, perhaps less so today, Cameron was a very weak partner who could not guarantee how MPs would vote on a bill for a referendum.

Whilst all of you in that there cosmopolitan London village, might have a wonderful set of candidates to choose from, I live in a safe Tory seat. Safe, not because of FPTP, but safe because hardly anyone else bothers to stand!

Local elections are usually Tory, Lib Dem and Independents (usually disgruntled Tories). At General Elections, we get a random Labour nobody delivered to receive the inevitable hiding.

How the hell does AV do anything in this cirumstance? The only answer is full PR. To get AV in place, would mean no chance of getting PR in the future.

AV is crap. Even the YES camp are just people who don’t want AV, but just see it as a staging post to move on to PR. It ain’t gonna happen people!

Got my flashy No-to AV leaflet through the door today, marked clearly on the front was a little stamp that intoned “None of your taxes have been used to print this leaflet”. I couldn’t help but be reminded of this.

@30 Well, AV doesn’t do much to change that sort of situation, which is probably why the Tories begrudgingly agreed to a referendum on AV but ruled PR out entirely.

@29. Charlieman

You’re right, of course. I was just being bitter and melodramatic.

Site-value rating and codetermination were two traditional policies I always found appealing – and the arguments for them are as strong today as ever. And the Liberals of earlier generations were a progressive force in social and foreign policy who brought onto the agenda topics that would otherwise have been ignored.

So some goals have been achieved. But has the party still any worthwhile role? Its appeal has the “neither of the above” party has been sacrificed, its economic and fiscal policies have moved rightwards (like everyone else’s, I admit), the strong emphasis on local democracy and the devolution of power (as distinct from the kind of fragmentation beloved of the Tories which actually disempowers local communities) seems to have disappeared. Social cohesion, burden-sharing, the quality of life (environment, society, urban amenity), equal citizenship and access to power – these should have been the new emphases.

A propos the Yellow Book of 1929 (Lloyd George’s “We can conquer unemployment”) – despite a lot of googling I can’t find much in the way of detail. The best has been a curious piece attacking it by a Communist candidate of the period pointing out just how left-wing the Liberals had become. Anyone know where I could find something more?

@ 30. Political_Animal

“To get AV in place, would mean no chance of getting PR in the future.”

NO! “No reform now” means “no reform later” and quite possibly “no reform ever”. “Oh, people have no appetite for this sort of thing,” we would be told – “look at the result of the referendum!”

“Some preferential voting now”, in contrast, could well mean “more preferential voting later” – first maybe STV in local elections, and later… Well, we might argue about the relative merits and drawbacks of STV and AV+, but at least the possibility would be there.

You may be interested in a comment that I’ve just posted on today’s leader in the Telegraph, as follows:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/av-referendum/8454938/There-is-an-alternative-to-the-fudge-that-is-AV.html

If the Telegraph really wants to improve our democracy then it could start by refusing to uncritically propagate whatever rubbish is emitted by the Tories and NO2AV.

First we had the lie that it would cost £250 million to switch to AV, a completely fabricated figure which included the cost of the referendum itself, and the cost of voting or vote counting machines which would not be needed and would not be purchased, plus a sum for educating voters when the Electoral Commission is doing that now and the cost is part of the cost of the referendum.

Now we have the lie that each general election would cost nearly £200 million more under AV than under FPTP, based on a meaningless extrapolation from the costs of continent-wide elections held in Australia.

If the Tories really wanted to work out a genuine estimate of the extra cost of running AV elections they wouldn’t be looking as far afield as Australia, but instead only to Ireland where parliamentary by-elections are held under exactly the same variant of AV that we would have here.

Here are the tabulated results of such an Irish by-election, and note that it’s ballot paper and pencil, followed by a transparent manual count:

http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007B&cons=85&ref

It’s easy to get an idea of how much extra work was involved in the eight counting rounds needed under AV, compared to just the single round which would be needed under FPTP, and it’s easy to work out order of magnitude estimates of how much that extra work needed for AV counts might add to the cost of a general election here.

And the answer is not an extra £200 million but maybe an extra £2 million, about a 2% increase in the total cost.

Correctly or incorrectly the Tories fear losing seats under AV, and they’re so desperate to block it that they’ll resort to any misrepresentation, any lie, any smear, anything that they think might help fool people into voting against it.

34. Denis Cooper

Excellent stuff, though your link just turns up “not available yet” (07.15). Other examples are quickly found – I looked at 30 December 2009 – interesting and revealing pattern of transfers.

Note that there were eight candidates (more than we’d get in a general); and that while four had quite a lot of first preferences, the rest had relatively few. The time taken depends on various factors: how many first prefs go to minor candidates (few to transfer), how many votes are quickly exhausted (few to count in later rounds – and there would be lots more “exhausted” papers here, at least at first), how many major candidates there are (probably more to transfer). In the longer term minor candidates here would tend to get more first prefs as voters realised how to work the system. And so on.

Hard to forecast how long counts would take here. At a rough guess, on the basis of last year’s general, two of the nine Norfolk constituencies would have produced a result in the initial count; five would have given victory to the lead candidate after one round of transfers (Ukip to Tory); and the remaining two might have required quite a few transfer rounds. What is pretty certain is that overall far fewer transfer rounds would be required in a GE here than in an Irish BE.

Link now works.

That massive lie, the latest of a succession of massive lies from the Tories and NO2AV, is actually here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/av-referendum/8455066/AV-referendum-election-bill-will-triple-under-AV-say-Conservatives.html

“AV referendum: election bill will triple under AV, say Conservatives”

The article is not open for comments.

If the referendum result was “yes” then the one-off costs of switching to AV would be minimal.

Thereafter, the cost of each general election would be slightly increased by the extra work required for the counts, with either

a) the same number of tellers employed for a few hours more on average, or

b) more tellers employed for the same number of hours.

Either way, it would be an extra cost of a few million at most for each general election, on top of the present £120 odd million total cost.

This letter:

http://www.parliament.uk/deposits/depositedpapers/2011/DEP2011-0248.pdf

was mainly about the Transitional Protocol on MEPs, but also gave estimates for the cost of the referendum, and one item is:

“Count costs – £5.9m (Hire of premises, staffing and equipment costs for the count)”

which provides an idea of the small scale of the additional recurrent costs which would result from changing to AV.

Everything else itemised in that letter, all the rest of the costs associated with a (stand-alone) national referendum or a general election, would be essentially the same under AV as under FPTP.

37. Denis Cooper

Thanks again, Denis.

“Thereafter, the cost of each general election would be slightly increased by the extra work required for the counts, with either

a) the same number of tellers employed for a few hours more on average, or

b) more tellers employed for the same number of hours.”

But remember that in quite a few constituencies (a third?) the first tally would produce a result and that in quite a few more (another third?) a very few transfer rounds would push the lead candidate over the 50% mark. I wouldn’t know how to estimate the number of transfer rounds needed in the remaining third – but as always the pattern of transfers is far more revealing of the actual spread of voter opinion than fptp. Too many politicians don’t want to know what we really think, that’s part of the problem.

On the likelihood of change to PR- Australia “(Oz) has been the most durable and rigid two Party system of any parliamentary democracy in the world “. …say Proffs Graeme Orr and KD Ewing, in, ‘AV or not AV lessons from Australia‘-
Australia has two major ‘Parties, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and Tony Abbot`s ‘Coalition‘, a group of centre-right parties united by coalition agreement. except for a few short periods, for almost a century.Only one minor Party candidate has won a seat at general elections to the Australian House of Representatives since AV arrived in 1919. It was the 2010 Green
Australians introduced AV precisely to cohere a fragmented right against the socialists and it remains a brutally efficient at reinforcing the two party status quo. Last year the two major parties won 72 seats each, out of 150. In 2010 and 1990, the ALP were conspicuously saved by harvesting second choice Green votes, the system, as ever, protecting the cartel .
If anyone thinks once Clegg has his hush puppies under the table he will retain an interest in AV they must be in need of sedation
To give you an idea of how excluded the Greens are on 1% of the vote they got a seat here The Greens have 9 upper house seats out of 76 under a proportional STV system
It is clear then . AV locks out minor Parties like the Greens. It would reduce Ed Milliband`s current notional lead by 26 seats( Ref -You Gov – last week) Cui bono ? Just Clegg, who gets permanent power leaving us to decide who gets into bed with him. Well may you shudder.

For all its imperfections, the British constitution in Britain at least makes the administration accountable. Once a prime minister thinks he can escape by doing a post-election deal something dear and precious will be lost and then we come on to why the left do not want direct democracy.
My suspicion is that they wish to exclude all but the politically privileged from the process so as to skew the system towards Europe Internationalism , socially progressive nostrums mass immigration and the rest of an agenda already vastly over represented on popular grounds . This would be through the constant representation of the Liberal centre
The fact that this is a plot of the political elite is clearly shown by the dispatch of the referendum and its timing so as to exaggerate ant Conservative support in the Celtic Nations. The feebleness of Cameron`s efforts where he has deliberately made the weakest arguments
Had open primaries/ FPTP been on the list it would have won but neither the elite nor the Fabian left dare let the people decide anything really

39. Paul Newman

“Had open primaries/ FPTP been on the list it would have won” – do you mean two rounds of elections, with the first one offering voters a choice between different candidates of each party on separate ballot papers, and the second one the sort of choice we have now? How would you force each party to put up more than one prospective candidate in the primary round? If you did, how would you prevent a party running one PC as a paper candidate, with no campaigning at all? And given the general lack of interest in elections, how would you persuade people to vote for a two-round system in the first place? And you could still find the least popular candidate winning out in the end http://bit.ly/fldUMZ.

Or do you mean what Americans call instant run-off, which – guess what? – functions in exactly the same way as AV. It has the same effects, too. See http://bit.ly/hRwaAB and http://bit.ly/h04NTO (US-produced animations) for a neat explanation. Google turns up loads more example.

… and another thing:

AV couldn’t reduce the effective number of parties to two in this country if only because of the existence of the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the various unionist and nationalist parties in NI. Nothing equivalent exists in Australia.

What it might do, at least in England, would be to reinforce the existing trend towards the development of two-party systems in the various regions – Lab/Con in some regions, Con/LD in others, and LD/Lab in yet others.

As far as I’m concerned, AV means far more of us get a say in who represents us, the problem of the wasted vote disappears, and all MPs need the backing (or at least the consent) of far more voters than is the case at present. It would therefore be a marked improvement on what we’ve got now.

@3: “Secondly, you assume a no vote kicks this into the long grass. I disagree. I think a victory for AV would effectively kill the debate dead for 25 years.”

Why are we getting this referendum now? Neither Labservative party particularly likes AV or PR, but one of them was forced to offer an AV referendum as the price of a coalition with the Lib Dems. Or to give another example, the 2003-2007 Scottish government was a Labour / Lib Dem coalition and Labour agreed to STV in Scottish local government.

So it’s reasonable to suggest that future reforms towards PR will happen when there is a hung parliament and either Labour or the Conservatives want to do a deal with the Lib Dems. This is more likely to happen under AV than FPTP, because AV favours the Lib Dems.

Incidentally, future reform needn’t concentrate on on Westminster. Reforms I’d like to see are STV in England & Wales local government, and European elections to use either preference voting or one nationwide party list with no threshold.

The referendum question: “Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the ‘alternative vote’ system instead of the current ‘first past the post’ system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?”

To answer no is not an endorsment of FPTP, but a vote for AV is an endorsement of the AV system. Therefore; we’ll be lumbered with it for years to come…

No, and it’s showing discontent both for the measly choices offered and the AV sytem,

@15: “Any attempts to get PR on the agenda have been feeble at best. Reformers protested as the coalition was formed and behaved as if they had won something worthwhile when the AV referendum was announced.”

The coalition agreement did include a commitment to PR — for an elected house of lords.

Everything seems to have gone quiet on that, however.

@39: “Just Clegg, who gets permanent power leaving us to decide who gets into bed with him. Well may you shudder.”

Labour and Conservative supporters often trot out that lie. It’s a lie because there’s nothing stopping the Labour and Conservative parties forming a coalition. If they don’t want to, that’s hardly the Lib Dems’ fault.

IRONY alert!

So the drippy Liberal Party sends out a leaflet (with Clegg smirking on it) about how AV will let those that did not get the most votes to gain power!
HELLO!!!!

Worse…they show this to us dumb pleb by a photo of a race finish line with the guy NOT crossing the line first winning power.
HELLO!!!!

But I notice it’s not the guy in the yellow vest, but the black one (OOO! Shock for Liberals there, dissing the Blacks!) because I think that even smug Clegg would blanch at the hypocritical irony of having a yellow draped candidate gain power without actually winning the race!

The Liberals came a tragic third place, with less votes than last time, and yet these terrorist appeasing, criminal’s rights above all, THIEVES have got into the Government!
Into power!
Despite coming a bad third!

AV does what again Clegg?

I don`t see any with obliging Parties to hold open Primaries in safe seats ? I wouldn’t `t want to be Stalinist about it the fact of doing so would apply pressure to competing Parties to produce popular and not Party familiar candidates
What do you think , for example it might do to New Labour`s state of denial about the anger their own voters feel at being consistently ignored on the subject of immigration ? Wither the universally loathed £17 billion International aid budget ?
Instant run off has a place in small and coherent clubs were establishing accord is the objective not settling disputes which is what a GE is for.

The point on the effect of AV is not that it would consolidate a two Party system as it has in Oz.Here it would quite clearly benefit the second choice centrist Party and , I would guess, lead to endless coalitions. What it does do however is reinforce whatever cartel it elects . That one , so forget further change !
In Australia the figures are analysable , you can see the extent to which the second preferences come into play to the detriment of the Green Party who cannot get off the ground despite very wide support indeed
Furthermore AV would hurt the Labour Party , you might want to ask yourself why the elite are nonetheless supporting it .

It is to further empower the already over mighty centre , the Party and Westminster so as to leave the Unions and voters kicking a can down the road wondering what happened

Phil – How do you work out that that is a lie ?

My question is: Assuming we end up with a Yes vote, as we probably will, and given the extent to which the last push of the Yes campaign has been “vote against Nick Griffin”, how will the Yes campaign regain credibility when campaigning thereafter for a system which a) Nick Griffin supports and b) would give the BNP seats?

Phil: It may be that someone has realised that in a coalition era, a proportional House of Lords is a terrible idea, because it means a massive Government majority, something which was agreed to be undesireable by all parties to reform negotiations (admittedly in the era of majority government, when PR would have prevented it).

It would therefore be foolish to talk in detail about the next stage of Lords reform before we know what the voting system for the Commons is going to be.

A NO vote means no change under FPTP rules.

FPTP rules, much quoted in this campaign, state that FIRST IS BEST. A NO result will be deemed to be a mandate for no change.

I have a problem with this debate and campaign. I happen to believe that the general direction Conservative policy is about right. To a large extent because of the current financial climate individuals must be given the option of greater self determination and they have to be encouraged to engage in the local and national decision making processes. Certainly national governments cannot deliver everything that people want but they can deliver what people will accept or consent to given the lack of resources. This is “choice”. “The Big Society” is merely a brand name for “choice”.

AV (or IRV – instant runoff voting) must chime with the BS project.

My problem is that AV may not be in the Tories’ best interests. FPTP may deliver the occasional strong government that can turn back “The Big State” from time to time. AV may result in more Big State governments but if that’s the bed that most electors make they will have to lie in it.

The critical issue is that no political party has a god given right to presume that it has the right to rule. FPTP has a tendency to return governments supported by little more than one third of votes cast. Although FPTP rules state “FIRST IS BEST”, in reality the FPTP winners do not have a clear mandate to do as they will.

AV, and the potential to analyse voter preferences and leanings that it offers, must be a more democratic system than FPTP. Although AV may not deliver what I want by way of political leadership it should engage electors more effectively in their choice of representative than FPTP.

38. Jonathan Phillips

One can only take the Irish by-election held under AV as a real-life example of how an AV count would be conducted in each UK parliamentary constituency, and form some view of the order of magnitude of the extra cost compared to FPTP.

There were nine candidates and it needed eight counting rounds to finally identify the winner, with these numbers of ballot papers being sorted and counted in each round:

1. 28,412
2. 203
3. 528
4. 676
5. 893
6. 3,621
7. 4,420
8. 6,537

Total = 45,290

In the first round, the count of the first preference votes, the tellers had to sort and count all 28,412 valid ballot papers, just as in the single count under FPTP.

Because of AV they had to carry out 16,878 additional sorting and counting operations in the subsequent seven rounds, an increase of 59% over those needed for FPTP.

It may be argued that the tellers would be slower picking out the correct number 1, 2 etc than a single X, but on the other hand it may be argued that on average we would not have nine candidates in each constituency and some of the results would be decided on the first count.

It should be borne in mind that the tellers are not active for the whole of period between the polls closing and the result being declared, and that the transport of ballot boxes, the verification count, the first count proper when ballot papers were actually sorted between candidates, and the delay after completion of the count before the result was finally declared, would all be essentially the same under AV as under FPTP.

So it would probably be a generous estimate to say that on average the declaration would delayed by maybe 2 hours under AV compared to FPTP, unless more tellers were employed.

According to this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/06/general-election-tellers-electoral-administrators

50,000 tellers were employed for the 2010 general election, so the additional cost if it had been held under AV might have been the cost of 100,000 teller-hours.

And according to this from Merton:

http://www.merton.gov.uk/council/voting/extinfo_form2011.pdf

they will be paying £16 an hour to the tellers for the referendum count, so that would be about £1.6 million extra cost for a general election held under AV rather than FPTP.

Call it about £2 million to be on the safe side, trying to make sure that every trivial extra cost gets included, and that means that the Tories’ £200 million claim is out by a factor of a hundred – as they must know, but hope that very few voters will realise.

47. Paul Newman

“Furthermore AV would hurt the Labour Party , you might want to ask yourself why the elite are nonetheless supporting it.” Erm…

“With transfers between parties, otherwise called ‘split-ticket voting’, where parties did not stand more than one candidate, there is evidence of second preference transfers across the main centre-left parties i.e. Labour, the SNP and Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives look somewhat isolated here, with the lowest level of second preference transfers of all four main parties. This to some degree explains the disparity between votes and seats for the party (shown in Figure 1) – Conservative candidates did not attract large transfers thereby restricting their electability.” (LSE report on experience of preferential voting in Scotland, see http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2011/03/28/stv-scotland/).

49. Bruce

“My problem is that AV may not be in the Tories’ best interests” – the Tories believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can win only against a divided opposition, and that AV would allow other parties’ supporters to gang up on them. (a) If they’re generally unpopular, what’s wrong with that – from the electorate’s viewpoint? (b) the Tory party won a succession of elections against an entirely united opposition in the 1950s – have they so little self-confidence that they don’t think they could do it again?

A party benefits under AV only if it is popular enough both to win plenty of first and second places in the initial tally and to pick up plenty of second and later preferences from lower-placed candidates thereafter; if it fails on either count it is likely to do badly. A centrist party which is everybody’s second choice but hardly anyone’s first will get nowhere. A party which attracts strong support from its core voters but is otherwise widely disliked may get a lot of first and second places, and even quite a few outright wins – but if it is no-one else’s second choice it won’t do well overall.

If anyone hasn’t done so already, it’s well worth checking @AntonyGreenABC for a series of pieces on the ways in which preferential voting Aussie-style is or is not relevant to AV in Britain.

50. Denis Cooper

Brilliant – again!

“Think about what a victory for the No campaign would mean. Supporters of FPTP would be able to say, not just that the public have shown no desire for voting reform, but that the current system now has a proven democratic mandate. FPTP will not just be retained but strengthened – perhaps permanently – by a no vote.”

They might indeed claim that the public would have shown no desire for voting reform, and are content with FPTP, but it would be a self-evident falsehood. A vote against AV is not the same as a vote of confidence in FPTP, and AV-refusers have a variety of rationales.

One is preferring a fully proportional electoral system and not seeing AV as a step towards that, but as a dead end that would give the political class the chance to claim (equally falsely) that AV needs decades to bed in, thus taking meaningful electoral reform off the agenda for the foreseeable future.

Another reason for voting against AV is hatred of the LibDems and consequently wanting to give Clegg a good kicking. And related to that is the perception that the main beneficiaries of AV are liable to be the hated Lib-Dems.

Anyway, I’d prefer direct democracy. Let’s press for a citizen right to demand a binding national referendum on any political proposal that attracts substantial support. Initiative and referendum, as it’s known elsewhere. Could stop UK participation in a few wars, scupper unpopular NHS reorganisations, and give bankers a very hard time.

52/domestic extremist: “They might indeed claim that the public would have shown no desire for voting reform, and are content with FPTP, but it would be a self-evident falsehood. A vote against AV is not the same as a vote of confidence in FPTP, and AV-refusers have a variety of rationales.”

True, but those rationales won’t show up on the ballot paper. When the referendum was held on the NE Regional Assembly, the ballot paper in County Durham also had a question on how local government should be reorganised if the Regional Assembly went ahead – either one unitary authority for the county, or three smaller ones grouping together particular district councils.

The Regional Assembly vote of course failed by a massive margin as the Yes side utterly failed to make its case. The secondary vote on unitary structures in County Durham was 52-48 in favour of a single unitary authority.

This was then taken as a clear mandate by the government to push ahead with a single unitary authority. This was equally a self-evident falsehood – the electorate had voted for “no local government reorganisation”.

And County Durham is now – against the wishes of the majority of those living there – a single unitary authority.

The political classes are going to claim a whole bunch of complete garbage about what “the people” have said whichever way the referendum goes. Might as well vote for whichever of the two systems you think best and at least get something out of it.

2. domestic extremist

“Another reason for voting against AV is hatred of the LibDems and consequently wanting to give Clegg a good kicking.”

Seems to me not a very good basis for rational choice. Clegg is here today, gone tomorrow. Whatever voting system we’re stuck with after 5 May will be around for a very long time. I can’t stand the man either – http://bit.ly/gagDeK – and AV is the perfect system for showing who you hate most.

“And related to that is the perception that the main beneficiaries of AV are liable to be the hated Lib-Dems.”

The first question should be: would we the people benefit, in terms of increased say over who represents us and greater choice when we vote (no more need to choose between tactical and truthful voting)? And only then: would one or other party benefit or suffer?

Besides, the perception that the LDs would benefit is almost certainly false, particularly post-coalition (I’ve gone off them after 40 years, so I suspect a lot more folk have). But even without Clegg’s Clanger they might not do especially well. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

“A party benefits under AV only if it is popular enough both to win plenty of first and second places in the initial tally and to pick up plenty of second and later preferences from lower-placed candidates thereafter; if it fails on either count it is likely to do badly. A centrist party which is everybody’s second choice but hardly anyone’s first will get nowhere. A party which attracts strong support from its core voters but is otherwise widely disliked may get a lot of first and second places, and even quite a few outright wins – but if it is no-one else’s second choice it won’t do well overall.”

“massive margin as the Yes side utterly failed to make its case”

More like UKIP filled everyone’s head with tin foil hat nonsense of EU conspiracies, and killed the prospects for devolution in england dead. Then claimed to be in favour of de-centralisation.

Jonathan Phillips – New Statesman -…….. it’s worth watching to see how Labour activists respond to a new YouGov poll for Channel 4 News showing that their party would suffer the most from a switch to AV. Under FPTP, based on current voting intentions, Labour would win 355 seats, the Tories would win 255 and the Lib Dems would win just 16 – a Labour majority of 60. But under AV, Labour would win 342 (-13), the Tories would win 255 (unchanged) and the Lib Dems would win 29 (+13), resulting in a significantly reduced Labour majority of 34.

Last week End of

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/04/labour-voters-win-lib-poll

In fact at the last election the Liberals would have gained 20 seats and the Conservatives lost about the same number . They would however have gained about the same amount by the boundary changes that are part of the deal

So who loses …the Labour Party and not exactly rocket Science , they were not there to do the deal , what do you expect. So I ask again why are so many Labour Party members happy to see their own Party betrayed ?
Of course we know why the PLP detests and despises its own voters and its true the lower classes are the keenest to retain FPPT. Andrew Rawnsley summed the attitude up when he called them the “thicko vote ”

I shall assume Jonathan you are a Liberal and could not give a rats arse about the Labour Party anyway . Fair enough but why is Ed Milliband stabbing his own in the back ?

57. Paul Newman

?he LSE study (post 51) showed what people actually did with their second and third choices – and the fact remains that it is the Tories that tend to be shunned by supporters of other parties. How does the NS survey take account of the effect of second preferences? And indeed of possible shifts in the pattern of first preferences as compared with Xs? Or is it just guesswork? (I’m only asking.)

My attitude to Labour? A good deal more sympathetic (at least since the mid-’80s) than my attitude to the Tories, whom I have long regarded as the embodiment of pure evil. Even so I thought Blair a self-serving, celebrity-obsessed, wealth-worshipping warmonger, while Brown managed to pursue policies which were both right-wing and wasteful – privatise, deregulate and hide government borrowing under the carpet of PFI.

I’m a social liberal, and as such have little in common with the Cleggies. There are sound democratic reasons for preferring AV to FPTP (more power to the voter, more representative MPs and all that), whichever party one might support. The fact that it really would tend to hit the Tories (who are some people’s first choice but hardly anyone’s second) is just a bonus. And of course Cameron would find his authority seriously undermined by a Yes vote. Frankly I’d much rather kick the Tories, and the LDs are dead ducks now anyway.

Australia went preferential to ensure that the anti-Labor vote wasn’t split with the rise of a new party of the right, and in 1918 the Netherlands replaced a single-member two-round system, French-style, with out-and-out PR partly to contain the growth of the Labour party. How wonderful it would be if we could switch to a voting system which would actually damage the long-term interests of the major party of the right and their ghastly backers!

If it really were the case that AV would damage Labour more than the Tories, do you honestly think all that all those Tory m/billionaires (who may be evil but are not stupid) would be pumping so much cash into the No campaign?

There is only one thing that really bothers me about AV.

Most will remember that in the recent elections for a new Labour leader, AV was used. David Milliband was always the members’ first choice until the Trades Unions votes were included. Then they got Ed.

As an old fashioned Liberal, no big deal for me personally because I want to see full Proportional Representation but I do see a ‘balls-up’ factor attached to AV.

I’ve had people tell me that AV will help keep fascism out of parliament; I’ve had people tell me that AV will enable fascism to get into parliament. I really don’t know, and with cuts, cuts, cuts and another war getting under way in the Middle East, AV hasn’t rated highly amongst my priorities.

Yesterday, however, a couple of pals both said that they were going to vote ‘No’ in the referendum as a rejection would strip the Lib-Dems of their last excuse to be in the coalition with the Tories. Now that might just encourage me to cast my vote.

60. Dr Paul

But even if a “no” vote did strip the LibDems of their last excuse to be in the coalition that wouldn’t mean that they would actually leave the coalition.

The LibDem MPs must realise that collapse of the coalition would almost certainly be followed in very short order by a collapse of the gilts market, and if they don’t realise that then they must surely be aware that between half and three quarters of them would lose their seats if a general election had to be called in the near future.

Personally I don’t think the coalition would be sunk by either a “yes” or a “no” result, in either case it would sail along regardless although taking in rather more water.

I shall vote “yes” because I believe that AV is a small but worthwhile improvement on the basic FPTP we have now.

Dr Paul:

“… were going to vote ‘No’ in the referendum as a rejection would strip the Lib-Dems of their last excuse to be in the coalition with the Tories. Now that might just encourage me to cast my vote”

A very short-term view, if I may say so. Governments come and go, but whatever voting system we’re stuck with after 5 May will be there for ever. Make up your mind on the basis of the relative advantages of the two systems (try http://bit.ly/fldUMZ for the basic case against fptp, for the No case see http://bit.ly/ifQQIr).

But if you must take the short-term view… The Cleggies can only hang on for dear life in the hope that one day something will turn up, whether or not we get AV. A No vote wouldn’t encourage them to back out, it would just make it easier for Cameron to bully them. A Yes vote wouldn’t help them much either – not least because it would make the Tories hate them even more. Remember: A Yes vote would piss off far more politicians than a No vote.

@ 62 (JP)

You make a strong point about pissing off politicians, I copied this off the Internet:

“AV is not about ordinary people. It’s about politicians and the political parties, constituency boundaries and power. Without the Lib Dems part of the Coalition partnership, this referendum would not be considered. AV also has nothing to do with democracy and accountability”

That makes me (the voter) just a ‘tool’ for the purpose and process – nothing more.

@63

“AV is not about ordinary people. It’s about politicians and the political parties, constituency boundaries and power. Without the Lib Dems part of the Coalition partnership, this referendum would not be considered. AV also has nothing to do with democracy and accountability”

It’s hard to see what this means. Or perhaps impossible.

Why aren’t voting systems “about ordinary people”? What’s more important in a representative democracy than the way we the people choose our representatives?

Everything politicians do is “about politicians and the political parties”, one way or another. But if anything is more “about” us than about them, then surely it’s how we choose them

Of course the Cons wouldn’t have held this referendum if the LDs weren’t in the coalition (bloody Clegg). But it was in the Lab manifesto too, so just possibly if Lab had won – even outright – we would also be having it.

AV is no more “about” constituency boundaries than any other voting system is. The boundary changes are irrelevant to the choice of voting system. (The Dutch have an electoral system without constituency boundaries – not that I’d want to see it here – but it’s the only system in which boundaries have no effect on the outcome.)

All electoral systems are “about” power in some degree. And AV puts slightly more power in the hands of the voter than fptp: http://bit.ly/fldUMZ, http://bit.ly/fgHxR0, http://bit.ly/eddJWZ. Of course it’s “about” democracy, and to the extent that it gives more of us a say in who gets elected it’s also “about” accountability.

For maximum disruption, vote Yes. Also to piss off the Tory moneybags who are funding pretty well the entire NO campaign. How wonderful to feel they had wasted all that cash!

Well said, Jonathan.

@ 64

Because nobody has a clue what a future government will look like until after the election has taken place. Therefore no politician need bother with manifestos and commitment prior to an election. It’s post election day when the fun starts.

Picking a Cabinet will probably be easy but picking Junior Ministers positions will be all about a bit of horse trading, greasy palms and promises as these positions will involve partners – not parties.

It then becomes personal, who dissed who in the campaign and who’s a member of which club, old school, knows something dodgy about somebody else etc. etc.. Need I go on ?

This has nothing to do with ordinary people so call me cynical if you wish but like most ordinary people, I do not trust politicians.

@66.

Sorry, Ted, but you will need to go on a bit if I’m to see what you’re driving it.

I don’t trust politicians either. Short-sighted, self-serving, narrow-minded, uncultured, ignorant of history, scientifically illiterate – and these are some of the nicer things I might say.

But you can’t get rid of them. Like ground elder, they are. Keep on coming up. The best you can hope to do is find the least dishonest, self-serving etc. among them and put them into parliament and government. Better a small pile of shit on your doorstep than a large one. What’s the alternative? Wash your hands of the matter altogether and leave the business of choosing representatives to other people?

Dishonest deals are done behind the scenes within all parties. AV wouldn’t alter that, but it would give far more of us a say in who makes those deals – and keep out the candidates that most of us really dislike http://bit.ly/fldUMZ

And I suspect if you were to pin even the most vocal advocates of AV up against a wall and ask them what they really thought of it, they’d say that while it’s an improvement on FPTP, it’s still not the voting system they’d want to end up with.

Just to throw a spanner into that statement I’m pro-AV and anti-PR. I’ll go further than that and say I despise PR. Even with open list AV systems it breaks the link between representative and represented and it does that because it’s NOT proportional.

Take our PR elected MEPs. For my area every single one hails from the highly-populated urban strip along the eastern-most border yet they’re also supposed to be representing the majority rural area. Under FPTP, AV and PR the most likely winners will be those who come from the most densely populated regions. Yet only under PR do you have to expand these areas (or at least double the number of representatives for the current boundaries) which in turn increases the distance between the urban and rural areas. Even if you redraw the boundaries to exclude major centres it will still contain pockets of relative urban density which will skew the results.

PR – even worse than FPTP; at least I know who my minority-winning MP is.

@68

“Just to throw a spanner into that statement I’m pro-AV and anti-PR. I’ll go further than that and say I despise PR. Even with open list AV systems it breaks the link between representative and represented and it does that because it’s NOT proportional.”

I’ve got some sympathy with this view, but… STV (which isn’t party-proportional) would work perfectly well at local level. Three-member wards are common anyway, and switching from XXX to 123 would ensure that we were not almost always represented by three councillors all of the same party. Our local councillors would still be readily identifiable – and we would be more likely to have one to suit our own political taste. And we already have local STV in NI and Scotland – why not England and Wales?

STV works well enough in parliamentary elections in the Irish Republic because electorates are small enough for the choice offered to be meaningful and for local MPs still to be easily identifiable (a four-member constituency in Ireland has about the same size electorate as one of our single-member jobs).

Lord Jenkins proposed a system (AV+) which left 75-80% MPs elected from local constituencies, with the remainder elected across blocks of constituencies with a view to ensuring that no significant minority was left unrepresented. So instead of having 9 MPs for local constituencies, Norfolk would have 7 local MPs and 2 county MPs – all of them easily identifiable, all of them with local responsibilities.

Additional Member systems are quite common – Germany, New Zealand, Scottish Parliament, Welsh and London Assemblies). The special feature of Jenkins’s proposal is that it makes for a much better balance between local and political representation – we all have identifiable MPs (none of them from some long regional list), but we are more likely than at present to have access to one we find politically sympathetic. http://bit.ly/emjgB2

@ 68 FlipC

I am not yet sold on PR. Even with open lists where I can vote for individual party members how am I going to evaluate each candidate in each party. Feels that it could be a mammoth task. I suspect that I would use a pen.

In my PR transfers power to party apparatchiks. If that is true then that’s not good

@70 Bruce

I know I’d be a much less boring person if I weren’t interested in electoral systems, but here goes anyway.

Closed-list systems put a lot of power in the hands of whoever determines the order of candidates in the list. But that’s not so different from what we have now: who decides which candidates get to “contest” the shoo-in safe seats, which the marginals and which the no-hopers?

Open-list systems put a lot more power in the hands of the voter, but the choice is not meaningful if you have too many candidates to choose from. I might be able to pick my favourite from three or four Labour (say) candidates, but no more; and even that would be too much for all those sensible folk who don’t take much interest in politics.

In principle STV gives maximum possible power to the voter – you’re not bound by anyone’s candidate lists. But again the choice is not going to be meaningful for most people (see my post 69), at least in general elections.

And in general there’s the problem with multi-member constituencies that you don’t have an easily identifiable MP. Which brings me back to AV+ http://bit.ly/emjgB2
I really do find the reasoning persuasive.

@71. Jonathan

Thanks for the link.

When New Zealand changed its electoral system to MMP (a form of proportional representation) in the early 1990s it was through a two-step referendum.

The first stage let people decide between a wide range of alternative electoral systems, and this was followed up with a second stage where people chose between the winner of the first round (which was MMP) and the incumbent system (FPP). MMP won, and we’ve had proportional representation ever since.

There was no sham process and no need for any miserable little compromise. We were treated like adults and trusted to make an informed choice about our electoral system. If I were British I’d be outraged at the way you’ve been railroaded into this position and denied a genuine choice.

@73

Yep. Outraged – to put it mildly. Spitting blood, chewing the carpet and weeping quietly in a corner. And that’s on my better days.

Not only are we offered a choice which isn’t much of one, we are treated to a campaign between the feeble and ill-focused Yes lot (who have quite failed to bring out the fatal flaw of fptp, that it can allow the least popular candidate to win http://bit.ly/fldUMZ) and the raucous No lot, almost entirely funded by big Tory donors (who might, just might, have a vested interest in the result), who spew forth nothing but lies http://bit.ly/ifQQIr.

What can you do? Get on with the gardening, maybe.

73. NJ -

No, in fact we’re extremely grateful that chance has given us this unprecedented opportunity to have a direct say on how we elect our rulers.

At least, some of us are grateful, but others are too dim or too stroppy or too Tory to see what a tremendous stroke of luck it is.

And NO2AV disparage Australia as not being a proper democracy because it uses AV which undermines the sacred principle of “one person one vote” …

While ignoring the use of exactly the same AV system within both Houses of Parliament, without any objections that it’s not “one MP one vote” or “one peer one vote”:

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/executive/briefing-note-ballot-select-committee-chairs.pdf

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/SpeakershipElectionResult.pdf

Some those MPs and peers who apparently have no problem at all with AV being used for elections WITHIN Parliament are those now lying to us, telling us that we shouldn’t vote for such a dreadfully unfair and undemocratic system for elections TO Parliament, including of course our Prime Minister David Cameron MP.

You can see that we have a problem here.

@68 Jonathan -

Three-member wards are common anyway,

But with STV the charge levelled by the No2AV campaigners regarding having multiple votes has some validity. If you take the Wikipedia example for STV some of the votes cast for the winning chocolate are redistributed; these voters are getting 1.5 votes compared to the minority. Under AV it’s – I’ll have this one or that one; under STV it’s – I’ll have this one and that one.

a four-member constituency in Ireland has about the same size electorate as one of our single-member jobs

You want to quadruple the number of sitting MPs? We can barely keep an eye on 650 you want to go for 2,600?

Lord Jenkins proposed a system (AV+) which left 75-80% MPs elected from local constituencies, with the remainder elected across blocks of constituencies with a view to ensuring that no significant minority was left unrepresented.

Which is even worse. To keep the same numbers the areas will need to be enlarged though only slightly while at the same time we get a set of MPs only really answerable to the larger urban blocks meaning they get two MPs working on their behalf.

@ 76. FlipC

“Which is even worse. To keep the same numbers the areas will need to be enlarged though only slightly while at the same time we get a set of MPs only really answerable to the larger urban blocks meaning they get two MPs working on their behalf.”

There is much more to think about under PR than at first meets the eye.

I am not yet buying into PR. AV must make best sense for the Commons but arguably does marginalise Greens, UKIP and, dare I say it, BNP. I can see a place for PR for the second chamber whose role primarily is to keep the Commons honest as it were.

@76

More MPs? Not likely! Just making the point that choices and representation are meaningful only where there are relatively few voters per MP/councillor, so multi-member constituencies for Westminster would be a bad idea. Not so in local elections.

STV counts are complex (though clearly not too complex for the Irish, north or south), but nevertheless no-one’s vote is worth more than one.

Wait for it. The quota is the total number of valid votes cast divided by one more than the number of seats to be filled. Why? In a 3-seat ward, if three candidates each accumulate just over a quarter of the total then there is no room for any other candidate to overtake them.

If the quota required for election is 1000 votes, and the candidate concerned receives 1500, then there is a surplus to be redistributed (otherwise the votes constituting the excess majority are going to waste). The person elected needed only two thirds of the votes he actually received to be elected. So how do we decide which third are to be transferred?

In fact every ballot paper in the pile is transferred to whichever candidate is marked as the next preference on the papers concerned,, but each transferred vote is considered to be worth only one third. So I’ve used two thirds of a vote to help elect one candidate, and the other one third can be used to help elect someone else.

So it isn’t a case of “Under AV it’s – I’ll have this one or that one, and under STV it’s – I’ll have this one and that one”. In fact under STV it’s “I’ll have two thirds of this one and one third of that one.”

It sounds much more difficult than it is – but once the penny drops it is intuitively appealing. It helps to see a count being conducted. I’ve yet to come across any animation which shows the transfer of vote fractions, though.

No system is perfect. AV, like FPTP, can leave substantial local minorities unrepresented. Norfolk, 1983-7, all eight MPs were Cons – even if you accepted that each individual constituency was adequately represented it’s clear that the county as a whole was not. Cornwall, 2005-2010, all five MPs were Lib Dems – same problem. And there are plenty of urban areas where Con supporters will never have any representation to their political taste and plenty of suburban areas where Lab supporters will remain similarly unrepresented. AV+ solves this problem neatly without creating any further problems of any great significance http://bit.ly/emjgB2.

But it’s not on offer. Let’s get AV first, and maybe later on we can discuss whether the system needs a further tweak. Either way we’ll both be satisfied that AV gives us more say in who represents us and lets us show who we really support without our vote going to waste.

@75

Denis – I’ve just clicked on your links – thanks. It’s ASTONISHING the hypocrisy of the man!

He KNOWS how it works, he KNOWS it’s not difficult, and still he goes on about how complex it is.

It’s sometimes says that a country gets the government it deserves – what the hell did we do to deserve this?

@78 – I counted the STV votes incorrectly my bad there are no multiple votes. Instead what you get under AV is – if your candidate is eliminated who would you prefer?; under STV – your candidate already has enough to win, you should vote for someone else.

Yes I can see that working for local elections when all the district seats for a single ward is up for election; but not for a Parliamentary election. Do we want to use two different systems even if they’re the same from the point of view of the voter? Could work I’ll admit.

As for Norfolk etc. presumably you’d want to redraw the borders to create 6 constituencies then add 2 PR MPs who’d probably both come from Norwich?

But yes we’re both agreed that AV is better than FPTP and that’s the way to vote then argue about later… I wish some of our ‘representatives’ could see that.

@80

Right.

I must admit I would like to see first AV then AV+ (to be discussed at a later date). But I’d be much more enthusiastic about getting first AV for Westminster and then STV for all local elections. That seems to me much more urgent than moving to AV+.

In fact I think that STV for local councils in England and Wales (already in place in NI and Scotland) is far more urgently needed than reform at Westminster. The LDs managed to persuade the Labour administration in Edinburgh to bring in STV even though Labour knew they would lose council seats as a result. Clegg has been an idiot in so many respects – if he was going to get into bed with the Cons it would have made far more sense to go for local STV than national AV. The problems are so much more obvious – councils made up of only one party, councils where there is never any significant opposition, councils where a small swing in votes sweeps out almost all the sitting councillors etc.

78/Jonathan Phillips: In fact every ballot paper in the pile is transferred to whichever candidate is marked as the next preference on the papers concerned,, but each transferred vote is considered to be worth only one third.

That’s only strictly true under certain forms of STV (the fractional forms).

The rules the ERS uses only transfer on the last papers to arrive at that candidate (unless they reached quota on the first round, this means transferring fewer papers at a higher value). This makes it much easier to calculate the transfers entirely by hand.

There’s also Meek STV which recursively adjusts the transfer values – effectively, based on what *will* happen in the next round – to get the optimal value. It’s theoretically extremely nice, but literally only being possible to count by computer even for a tiny election is a drawback since it’s not possible to verify the results by hand.

At the other end there’s “minimal” STV, which doesn’t involve fractions at all, where you shuffle the ballot papers and allocate them one at a time, stopping as soon as someone reaches quota. Trivial to count, but of course virtually impossible to recount. Useful if you want to do an STV-style election at a meeting, and you’ve forgotten to bring any ballot papers, though.

There have been quite heated arguments over which method of transferring surpluses gives the best balance between convenience and “accuracy”, since in a close election it can make a difference in the last couple of places. I consider fractional to be best, but most STV-using organisations in the UK use ERS-style transfers because they provide a rulebook for it.

(Those arguments are one reason that I prefer open-list PR over STV)

75. Denis

I wonder how many MPs using AV within parliament question why some of their colleagues get more than one vote but others only one.

83. Bruce -

I think the MPs know very well that they still get one vote each.

@81 – I think the logic is that with all the focus on MPs (expenses and whatnot) this would be the one to try and reform. Also it could be considered the ‘big pill’ and if you can get the electorate to swallow it the smaller pill of reform at a local level may be easier to sell.

@85

You may well be right.

My thought was simply that STV for councils would not have required a referendum and that the defects of fptp are more (glaringly) obvious at local level, so that making the case would have been easier.

As a one-time Liberal I’ve been distressed to see how Clegg has hardly managed to put a foot right since the GE. If he was going to toady to the Tories (spit spit), couldn’t he at least have got something more visible than a few ministerial cars?

So what if the LDs have managed to “restrain” the Tories a bit, and even to put through a few oddments of their own policy the Ts weren’t much bothered about? It was obvious from the start that the Cons would get the credit for anything that happened to go right, while the Cleggies would get the blame for everything that went wrong.

Let’s hope the Welsh Assembly introduces STV for local elections.

I will certainly not be voting for AV. That doesn’t mean that my motivation for not doing so can be assumed as my support for FPtP.

If we keep up the agitation for ‘PR Now!’ whilst returning a resounding NO to AV, the motivation behind the no2av vote becomes clear enough, and with enough agitation, it will be offered as a choice.

Once we make concessions and go with AV, it’s going to be another decade or so at least before people start seriously considering PR – provided the young who come of electoral age are not underdeveloped by the AV experience to not bother about PR for more decades. Let’s not forget that the elite always rely on a less radical present you to further depoliticise those who come after us via the compromised system that we have brought about. What might be ‘psychobabble’ to the masses is ‘strategy’ to the elite. Think along the lines of the devil with a PHd vs. a people who think they know what’s right because they have come of enough age to get a job, afford to reproduce themselves, and drink themselves silly on a friday night.

I don’t see why the mother of all parliaments should be taking baby steps when it comes to electoral reform given that a more radical shift from an absolutist system to an electoral one has already been made.

That doesn’t mean that my motivation for not doing so can be assumed as my support for FPtP

Except that’s exactly what it will be assumed to be. By voting “No” you’ll be the one stifling debate. No-one’s going to listen to you demand any PR system, because the people want FPtP and we’ve got the results to prove it.

Even if I had no other reason for saying Yes to AV I’d do it just to say NO to the raucous No campaign, funded almost entirely by rich Tory donors (who know perfectly well which side their bread is buttered), which has consisted entirely of misrepresentations, half truths and lies. We really mustn’t let the liars and the moneybags win.

And as for saying No to AV because you want something proportional – well, that might be your (short-sighted) reason for doing it – but that’s not how it will be trumpeted by the Tories and their lackeys in the press. It’ll all be Victory for Common Sense, Public Support for FPTP Confirmed, and suchlike. And there’ll be no point in even thinking about changing the voting system ever again.

It’s either something now (and just maybe more later), or nothing now and bugger-all ever again.

If the result is “no” then NO2AV, the Tory party and much of the Labour party will present it as a vindication of FPTP, and that message will be not just transmitted but amplified by the same media which are now clamouring for a “no” vote.

For the national newspapers that’s the Sun, the whole of the Mail group including the London Evening Standard, the Telegraphs, the Times’s, and the Expresses, plus there’s a raft of popular bloggers taking the “no” side.

There may be some surveys and analyses which conclude that a certain proportion of those who voted “no” did so because they saw AV as being an inadequate reform, and maybe the Guardian and the Independents will report on that, but their circulations are too low to make much difference.

Only tellers and returning officers will see protests scrawled on ballot papers, and nobody will pay any attention to those who want to make it clear that they voted “no” because they wanted something better.

FPTP will have triumphed and the prospect of any kind of reform of the system used to elect MPs will recede into the distant future, and with it also the prospect of other reforms to the political system which might benefit the people rather than the politicians.

And, maybe the worst thing of all, the politicians will have had it confirmed that provided they can win over the media they can get away with any lies they like.

@ 90

Spot on, Denis. When I heard that Dr Owen had popped up calling for a No vote on the grounds that AV is not proportional, my first thought was: “Oh, is he still living?” and my second: “He’s turned Tory and he’s trying to minimise the Yes vote with spurious arguments.”

@ 82

Turns out that the fractional-transfer system has been used in NI since the introduction of STV there, at least according to Google:

“Calculating compound fractions is labour-intensive, so in the Republic of Ireland the method is used only for the Senate whose franchise is restricted to c. 1500 councillors and members of Parliament. However, in Northern Ireland the method has been used for all STV public elections since 1973, with up to 7 fractional transfers (in 8-seat district council elections), and up to 700,000 votes counted (in 3-seat European Parliament elections).”

Is 1973 right? Could be, the Heath government did start the process of reform in NI. So it would be STV in local elections in 1973, Euro-elections 1979, Assembly elections some time in the late 1990s. What about the system used in Scotland?

FlipC Denis C

“Except that’s exactly what it will be assumed to be. By voting “No” you’ll be the one stifling debate. No-one’s going to listen to you demand any PR system, because the people want FPTP and we’ve got the results to prove it.”

“If the result is “no” then NO2AV, the Tory party and much of the Labour party will present it as a vindication of FPTP, ”

FPTP rules say what is the label. First is Best. The people have spoken and given a mandate for NO CHANGE. Worryingly, NO2AV YES2PR supporters are not getting the message.