The Labour No campaign has recently published an 8-page leaflet containing 10 reasons to say No to AV. Left Foot Forward examines each point in turn.
The Labour No campaign has recently published an 8-page leaflet which is being distributed around the country. The centre-piece of the leaflet, which does not contain a single positive reason for retaining first-past-the-post, claims to provide “Ten reasons to say … No to AV“. Left Foot Forward examines each point in turn.
Claim 1: AV would lead to more coalitions and back room deals, allowing politicians to renege on their election promises. Voters would be denied the right to choose their Government on a consistent basis.
The truth: Hung parliaments are no more likely with AV. Australia, which uses AV, has had only two hung parliaments in 90 years compared to four over the same period in the UK. Equally Canada which uses FPTP has had three successive hung parliaments since 2004.
As the recent election showed, First Past the Post has not given Britain any special immunity to hung parliaments. Going into the election, the Tories needed to win just 24 seats to cause a hung parliament but 115 seats to win an overall majority. Going into the next election if FPTP is retained (and ignoring the impact of boundary changes), Labour would have to win the equivalent of 67 seats to win an overall majority. Any swing lower than that (or even a modest swing to the Tories that resulted in fewer than the equivalent of 19 seats being won) would result in another hung parliament.
Claim 2: We should safeguard democracy and the principal of one person, one vote. AV isn’t fair. It gives supporters of minority parties more votes than people who back mainstream candidates.
The truth: With AV everyone gets one vote. The difference is that with AV gives you a vote that really counts and more of a say on who your local MP is. If your first choice gets knocked out your vote is transferred to your second preference. But regardless of whether you just vote ‘1’ for your favourite candidate or list a preference for every candidate on the ballot, only one vote will be counted. If you go to the pub and order a pint of Carling but they are out of Carling and you choose a pint of John Smith’s instead, you’ve still only had one pint.
Claim 3: The current system is simple both for voting and counting. AV is more complex, likely to result in many spoilt ballots and would involve expensive voting machines.
The truth: AV couldn’t be simpler. In fact it’s as easy as ‘1,2,3…’. People will be able to pick the person they really want but will also have the chance to pick second and third choices if their first choice doesn’t win. And if you only want to vote for one candidate, you can still do so. There are no plans to introduce new voting machines.
Claim 4: AV wouldn’t end negative campaigning. Just look at Australia!
The truth: AV rewards candidates who reach out to the widest possible number of voters. Candidates can, of course, still choose to go negative but as they can no longer rely on mobilising only their core vote it is less likely to be a winning strategy.
A good example of the impact of AV on campaigning is Mary Robinson’s election as President of Ireland. Brian Lenihan, the Fianna Fáil candidate, was expected to win but Robinson won on second preferences after conducting a 3-month tour of Ireland meeting people, listening to their concerns, and setting out how she wanted to revitalise the Presidency. Robinson was also helped by an attempt to smear her by Padraig Flynn, a senior Fianna Fail politician, who accused her of “having a new-found interest in her family“. This drew the ire of women and unaligned voters, and cemented Robinson’s support base.
Claim 5: We have a tried and tested voting system that works. Why fix what isn’t broken?
The truth: FPTP is a broken electoral system. First, general elections are increasingly decided by small numbers of people in marginal seats. Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research shows that just 460,000 voters decided the last election. Second, the number of safe seats is increasing. Mark Pack has shown that half of all seats in England have been held by the same party since 1970. Third, the number of MPs getting elected without majority support is increasing. In 2005 and again in 2010, two-thirds of MPs returned to Westminster did not have majority support from local voters and some were elected with as little as 30 per cent of the vote.
Claim 6: Extremist parties find it hard to win now. They cannot benefit from the transfer of votes. We should keep it that way.
The truth: AV is the most “extremist-proof electoral system“. Respected pollster, Peter Kellner, has written:
“it is worth noting that AV is the best system for keeping the BNP at bay. The party would seldom, if ever, win any contest under AV, whereas we now know that, if local conditions are right, it can win under both FPTP and proportional representation.”
Because FPTP enables candidates to win with a relatively small percentage of the vote, extremist parties such as the British National Party have more chance of being elected under FPTP despite most people in an area opposing them. It is little surprise, therefore, that the BNP are campaigning against AV.
Claim 7: AV wouldn’t end tactical voting. It reinvents it. The key to winning a seat is the order other candidates are eliminated.
The truth: With AV there is no more need to vote tactically. Instead, you can pick the candidate you really want to win. Under FPTP voters often have to face the choice of having to abandon the party they actually support, to prevent the party they least support getting in. AV eliminates the need to vote tactically in this way because people can rank their candidates in order of preference.
Claim 8: AV hasn’t worked abroad. It led to a big fall in turnout in Australia and the introduction of compulsory voting. In Fiji they’re planning to ditch AV. Papua Guinea is the only other country electing its Parliament using AV.
The truth: Approximately 14 million people in the UK already have experience of using AV in civic society elections. It is used by teachers, journalists, nurses and lawyers in their internal elections as well as by organisations such as the Royal British Legion, the Telegraph media group, and News International. The Labour party already uses AV for its leadership elections while a similar ‘preferential voting’ system is used for Conservative party leadership elections.
AV was first used in Australia in the 1919 election when turnout was 72 per cent, the highest it had been so far that century. It did, indeed, fall in the subsequent election but two data points rarely prove anything. This brilliant blog from Lee Griffin (aka @niaccurishi) explains the background in much, much more detail.
Claim 9: AV isn’t proportional representation. The Lib Dem Roy Jenkins concluded in his report that ‘in some circumstances AV is even less proportional than First-Past-The-Post’.
The truth: This is probably the only accurate claim in the entire leaflet. Much to the chagrin of PR purists like David Owen, AV isn’t and doesn’t claim to be PR. Instead, AV is a natural, sensible and small change to strengthen our current electoral system, not abandon it. It preserves its best features – the constituency link and decisive election results – but updates it to give voters more of a say, and ensure MPs have to reach out to over 50 per cent of their local voters.
Claim 10: We need the best people serving in Parliament, not the least worst. Sir Winston Churchill said AV would mean ‘the most worthless votes for the most worthless candidates’.
The truth: The beauty of Winston Churchill is that over an illustrious career, his wit and words were applied to almost all subjects. For example, in relation to FPTP, he said:
“The present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any party, nor to any section of the community. In many cases they do not secure majority representation, nor do they secure an intelligent representation of minorities. All they secure is fluke representation, freak representation, capricious representation.”
In a pure two-party system like the US, or the UK from the 1950s to 1970s, FPTP might well be a superior system. But when a third of people vote for a third party and 1-in-10 vote for one a party outside the ‘Big 3’, a different system is needed. AV is the right voting system for Britain today.
155 Responses to “Ten reasons why the ‘Labour No’ campaign are wrong on AV”
Kevin McNamara
simon: under av, you do have the option to ‘go thirsty’ so to speak, you can still number or cross only one candidate. if you’re a pluralist, or you agree with two parties to varying degrees, but absolutely do not like another, then av stops your vote being split or squeezed. av is by no means a perfect system, and does raise additional concerns, but i still think it is an infinitely better system than fptp.
on a separate note, i do not think av violates omov. labour’s version for sure does, as if you are a member of the party and affiliated organisations, then you do have more than one vote that is counted more than once. it is an important distinction in av that if your first vote does not count, then it is discounted, and really you are only voting again on candidates that are left. this needs to be emphasised more.
Helene Thygesen
Just clarifying: Those who vote for minority parties will under AV of course get more influence than they have now (as now they have zero influence). Under AV they get the same influence as those who has a majority party as first choice.
Simmon: yes if your first choice is a minority party and your second choice is to go thirsty, then indeed AV won’t help you. PR would but that is not on the menu for now.
But maybe you have an opinion about which of the two major parties is the lesser evil. In that case, you can let that opinion count while still showing your support for your favorite party. With FPTP, you are torn between supporting your favorite party (thereby getting no influence) or making a tactical vote for the lesser evil (thereby contributing to the picture that everyone almost everyone is happy with business as usual since they keep voting for mainstream parties!).
Lewis Baston
Simon – I could write the script now for a leaflet complete with bar chart by the Lib Dems in a seat where voting last time was something like Lab 41 Con 30 LD 29 under AV. “DID YOU KNOW that voting Tory can give you a Labour MP? Polling shows that the Lib Dems are the strongest challenger to Labour but we need your first preference to make sure that Labour are defeated in the final round…’. It’s a slightly more complicated argument, but AV certainly won’t be the end of the bar chart (dodgy or otherwise) or the tactical appeal in British electioneering. STV makes tactical voting computationally next to impossible, AV doesn’t. Keep it real.
Helena Todd
RT @labouryes: 10 reasons NO2AV are wrong https://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/03/ten-reasons-why-the-labour-no-campaign-are-wrong-on-av/
Mark Scott
Guido Fawkes (@3, @4) either misunderstands or is wilfully misrepresenting AV. No voter in AV gets more than one vote, nor is any voter’s vote more infuential than any other. See http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/13996
A BNP supporter whose second preference is UKIP becomes to all intents and purposes a UKIP voter, indistinguishable from someone who voted UKIP as their first preference. Is his vote somehow less valid because his desire for BNP representation has been thwarted?
All voters’ votes are counted in each round of the AV runoff (unless all candidates they indicated a preference for have been eliminated). If your single first-preference vote turns out to have been for the winning candidate, your vote has been counted the same number of times as that of a voter whose preferred candidates have been successively eliminated. Who knows, his final preference may have been the same as your first, and been the one vote that pushed that candidate over the winning line!