Dr Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck, takes apart the arguments against AV used by some in the Labour party.
By Dr Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
The Labour opponents of the Alternative Vote propagate several dubious – at best – arguments that deserve to be answered head-on.
“Keep one person, one vote” they claim, but where is the equality in a system – such as the current one – that awards a parliamentary seat to a candidate whose opponents outnumber their supporters.
Their slogan amounts to little more than hypocrisy when it comes from supporters (and even MPs) of a party that gives more than one vote to some of those who elect its leader.
More importantly, what is wrong with having the support of an absolute majority (as opposed to a mere plurality) of voters.
If the Labour opponents of AV genuinely care for equality of representation, they should be supporting a system that brings an end to artificially ‘safe’ seats where huge numbers of voters have little chance of affecting election results.
Some skillfully try to associate AV with the empowerment of ‘fringe candidates’ or even extreme parties like the BNP but fail to tell us why voters would choose these candidates if their concerns had been successfully addressed by mainstream parties.
Ignoring the essence of the forthcoming referendum – i.e. the strict choice between the two options – some amongst them point out that AV is not a proportional system. While this is true, the Labour campaign against AV should use this argument only if they tell us (i) that they support proportional representation and (ii) precisely how they will bring about its introduction.
In addition, they argue that AV would be:
“…taking power away from voters and allowing the Liberal Democrats to choose the government after each election.”
In reality, AV is much fairer than the current system because it enables voters to indicate – only to the extent that they wish to do so – the range of parties they are willing to support thus giving a steer to politicians when they conduct such negotiations, if the election leads to a hung parliament.
Indeed, the leaders of parties that conduct these negotiations would be far more constrained if they knew – along with the voters themselves – the full range of preferences of the voters who supported them; thus preventing unpopular coalitions.
Some also claim that electoral reform is not amongst the issues that are ‘raised on the doorstep’. I wonder, was the regulation of the financial services industry – i.e. the industry that has been allowed to wreak financial and economic havoc in this country and beyond – ever raised at the doorstep until 2008?
True to the pluralitarian logic of the system that they support, they claim that 2.4 billion people use it; however, this does not make it fair. If – as John Healey implies – AV ought to be rejected because it is only used in three countries, what exactly is Labour willing to do in order to introduce PR; which is used (in one form or another) by the vast majority of European countries?
Citing the Sun, Labour opponents of AV claim to have demonstrated that the introduction of AV will cost £250 million – including £13om on counting machines – when these machines are not needed, as the long Australian experience demonstrates. Moreover, as Channel 4’s FactCheck pointed out,
“no one – not the Treasury, not the Cabinet Office and not the Electoral Commission – is seriously thinking about bringing in electronic voting. So the main claim of the No to AV camp, that voting machines will add an extra £130m to the bill for an AV election, still looks decidedly dodgy.”
Nevertheless, even if the overall figure were accurate, it would certainly be justified, even in an era of austerity. After all, the gradual expansion of voting rights has made the electoral process more expensive to run but who would oppose this development on grounds of cost.
Given that symbols matter, they consistently link (the now much less popular) Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats with AV but fail to acknowledge that they themselves have de facto joined forces with David Cameron, George Osborne and the Murdoch-owned Sun in support of the current electoral system.
Despite notable exceptions including Ed Miliband, the small groups that run the two main political parties do not want power to be dispersed. Rather, they want it to remain concentrated in a handful of people. AV can help ordinary citizens shape political outcomes to a much greater extent than the current system would ever allow them to do. This is why it is a step in the right direction.
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15 Responses to “Red and wrong: Labour No to AV’s dubious claims”
Mr. Sensible
I think all this talk about safe seats is a bit misleading; we only need look at situations like what happened in Ashfield in 2010 to see why.
And if we have more situations like after the 2010 election and how the Lib Dems did their about turns, that isn’t exactly giving power to voters is it…
Ash
“10 votes: A B C
9 votes: C B A
3 votes: B C A
3 votes: B A C
Candidate A will win in AV (13-12 over C in round 2), but a majority of voters prefer candidate B to candidate A (15-10)”
Very interesting – especially as this looks so plausible as a real-life split between three main parties (= e.g. Con-Lib-Lab 10,000, Lab-Lib-Con 9,000, Lib-Lab-Con 3,000, Lib-Con-Lab 3,000). I suppose this amounts to giving first preferences extra weight; maybe that’s a good thing.
Andy W
@cim @ash The example you give would present an interesting argument against AV as opposed to, say, a Condorcet method. But FPTP is actually worse than AV in these situations, and since the referendum is about FPTP vs. AV, we should compare the two against each other – not against systems that aren’t on the table. No voting system is without its flaws, but AV is somewhat less flawed than FPTP.
Rupert Tiger
There is something not quite right with AV its followers conveniently always fail to tell us.
Something that can’t readily be described in few words. It requires complex formulations about how votes are worth different things to different people, in different places, and under peculiarly different circumstances. How that complexity is somehow fairer, yet the more one digs into it the more one comes beguiled, then confused, and then disgusted…
It is the end of democracy in Britain, it is the beginning of permanent LibDem dominated coalition government; the floodgates to the slippery slope to a smooth easy patch-in to the EU-superstate.
And what we would actually lose with it? Forever the ability for us to vote out an entire political class or entire political ideology.
It is not a stepping stone to PR. No party will give us that. And certainly not the LibDems.
The LibDems love AV precisely because AV crushes the other small count parties at first count; counter to what the loving public perceive of it.
AV is nothing but the LibDem CUCKOO’s egg in the nest of British democracy.
cim
Andy W: Well, not always. It’s quite straightforward to construct a preference set where the Condorcet winner and the FPTP winner are the same person (so this person is preferred to every other candidate 1-on-1, and has a plurality of first preferences) – but loses an AV election.
10 votes: C B D A E
9 votes: B A C D E
9 votes: D E C B A
3 votes: A B C D E
2 votes: E D C B A
(C wins FPTP, and is preferred about 2:1 to any other candidate, B wins AV)
Also, of course, if AV’s supporters are claiming the “50% support needed” property for it – which implies in the loose ways it’s generally talked about the Condorcet property rather than the rather more complicated property it actually has – I think it’s fair to point out that AV does not in fact pass the Condorcet criterion [1].
And then of course there’s monotonicity, where FPTP has a clear advantage over AV.
8 votes: A C B
8 votes: B C A
7 votes: C B A
(B wins, but if B convinces two of the ACB voters to vote BAC – an action that makes the electorate as a whole only more favourable to B, then C wins)
The problem with AV is that it only works on average, and the situations in which it doesn’t work it can give some very bizarre results.
I think it’s better than FPTP, certainly, on balance – but I would be extremely surprised if the majority of the electorate would intentionally vote for a non-monotonic voting system because it’s one of the worst properties a voting system can have. That FPTP is so terrible that this major disadvantage of AV still leaves AV ahead … well, I’ll be voting ‘Yes’ in May, but without much enthusiasm.
Fortunately, the No campaign are too busy thinking up implausible lies to worry about unpleasant truths.
[1] When electing a Parliament by multiple single-place elections, I would argue that you want an electoral system that doesn’t meet Condorcet, just so you can have some variety in Parliament. So in that context it’s a strength of AV. I suppose you could argue that non-monotonicity, because it increases unpredictability, is also desirable, but that might be going too far.