It’ll be interesting to know what arguments are deployed against AV as it’s hard to think of any good arguments against preferential voting. Indeed, the main argument against AV usually come from reformers who argue it doesn’t go far enough.

Unless you believe democracy is about the most popular, not the least unpopular, candidate winning?

“Go on, it’ll annoy Tim Montgomerie”

@1:

I am in favour of the AV change, but the usual arguments against AV that are made are:

(1) Counts are more complicated and will take longer
(2) It could lead to mundane, boring middle-of-the-road candidates winning because of the need to reach out to other parties for their preferences
(3) It can exacerbate swings, especially against unpopular parties
(4) The majority an MP has is an artificial one, because it treats lower preferences as of equal weight to higher ones.
(5) It’s a non-monotonic system. Which means under certain circumstances, expressing a vote for a candidate can harm one of your higher-ranked candidates.

I doubt the No campaign will be making good arguments against vote reform.

“This is just something that the liberal elite of this country, a very small group, are trying to implement,” Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski told BBC today.

That is going to be their main argument.

@4:

That’s going to be a difficult argument to sustain, what with the Coalition government being made up substantially of the liberal elite.

Sunny,

The problem is that the yes campaign have to prove there is a need for voting change. I doubt many of the traditional Conservative or Labour voters who troop out at local elections will be convinced of this at the moment.

And for those like me who understand the issues and oppose change, we are aware of the arguments Martin summarised. But the simple issue is what a system does – do you elect the most popular MP, or do you elect the most popular compromise?

@Sunny Yea, they’re importing US campaigning rhetoric it seems trying to take the anti-establishment terrain. We should counter that AV actually takes power from the elite by allowing more choice to voters and its defenders of the status quo who want to keep their safe fiefdoms who are really against it. The point about safe seats and expenses abusers (h/t Mark Reckons) should be made too.

“(1) Counts are more complicated and will take longer
(2) It could lead to mundane, boring middle-of-the-road candidates winning because of the need to reach out to other parties for their preferences
(3) It can exacerbate swings, especially against unpopular parties
(4) The majority an MP has is an artificial one, because it treats lower preferences as of equal weight to higher ones.
(5) It’s a non-monotonic system. Which means under certain circumstances, expressing a vote for a candidate can harm one of your higher-ranked candidates.”

1. Fair enough, we lose the drama of an all nighter.
2. This is a good thing, it creates more pluralism and less tribalism whilst preventing extremists. Conservatives should find this a plus point.
3. A good thing, prevents unpopular governments staying in because opposition is split.
4. Explain, I’d have said it makes the majority more legit as the MP needs to appeal beyond his parties base, it also ends safe seats.
5. Not sure about this. Explain further

Surely the projection by ERS that AV would have given the Lib Dems +22 seats is reason enough to vote against AV, not because it favours Lib Dems per se but because it favours the comprise candidate that nobody really wants.

The other thing I don’t like about AV is that it is a negative choice. Under the current system you vote for the candidate that you want but under AV you vote for everybody except the person that you don’t want.

@8

I agree with you about points 1,2, and 3.

The question of how “real” a majority an MP has under AV rather depends on whether you’re prepared to accept the redistributed lower preferences being given equal weighting to first preferences.

On point 5, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion

It’s worth noting that the Holy Grail, STV, is non-monotonic too.

@9:

The argument that people vote for the candidate they want under FPTP is provably untrue. It practically encourages you to vote tactically against your preferred choice in order to get a least-worst result.

One of AV’s great strengths will be an end to the need for tactical voting.

“It’ll be interesting to know what arguments are deployed against AV ”

It can be even more disproportional than FPTP for a start.

It sees to me that there’s two main reasons why AV is better than what we have now:
1) No more tactical voting. If you live in a marginal seat you can cast your primary vote for who you like, rather than whichever of the likely winners you dislike least.
2) No more entirely safe seats. A bad MP can be kicked out much more easily even if their party regularly gets a huge majority.

“It’s as easy as 123”
There’s a slogan.

I see absolutely no compulsion to be enthusiastic for this reform because it does not deliver a more proportional chamber and leaves millions unrepresented and millions more under-represented – not to mention continuing to distort people’s voting behaviour away from their first choice towards the least objectionable of the main parties.

More than that though the legislation has not gone through yet, so there is still time to fight for a system of PR. I’m not going to drop my desire for PR simply because the Lib Dems tell me I have to be in favour of any old reform that the Tories will accept.

In New Zealand when they moved over from FPTP they had two referendums. The first to choose which alternative system the public prefered and the second to confirm the people prefered this to the current system. Seeing as there has never been a popular movement for AV but the campaigns for PR go back to the 20s at least it seems to me that AV is simply there to prevent real, more fundamental reform.

The current system prevents people from voting for the candidate they want. If I want to vote Green, I know, for instance that in many parts of the country I will be letting in a vile Tory [insert bloody socialist or wet libdem, whichever]. As a realist, I am condemned to consider the tactical implications of my vote and may end up choosing the lesser of evils.

The Labour and Conservative parties explicitly encouraged this for years “A Liberal vote is a wasted vote”. It is ironic now that in may parts of the country, the Libdems are using the same argument against Tories or Labour.

Anyway all this stuff about how AV prevents you from voting for who you want is the purest hypocrisy. That’s you, Matthew!

“It’s as easy as 123?

Ha – that is a good slogan,

“AV – as easy as 1,2,3!”

@Jim
I completely understand where you’re coming from – it is outrageous that our choice is being limited in this way for the convenience of politicians. The NZ process is a much better way of doing things, as is the system British Columbia used where a deliberative citizens convention weighed up the options and made recommendations to be put to referendum.

But make no mistake, if reformers make the best the enemy of the good and reject this as a stitch up it’s only the forces of conservatism who will benefit. They would love to see the reform movement divided and having just seen Tory MP Daniel K, chair of the “first past the post” group in parliament, on sky news I think that’s a strategy they intend to take trying to split reformers off from one another.

The plain fact is that if reformers do not win the referendum on May 5th, you can kiss goodbye to any reform of the voting system for a generation. If you want STV and the FPTP supporters win the referendum you can kiss STV goodbye. It’s tactical voting again, I’m afraid.

A few random points:

By next May the Coalition cuts will have kicked in and the Tories unpopular. If the latter campaign against the referendum along with the more tribal Labourites, the public will vote for AV in reaction if nothing else.

Will there be any possibility of voting for an STV option when the bill goes through Parliament? If so will Labour put forward such a bill knowing it would split the Coalition and embarrass Clegg? And is there a possibility of such an option getting through with a (mostly) non-Tory majority.

How you can announce a definite referendum date before the bill goes through parliament? After all the House of Lords could delay the bill for a year if nothing else.

Will there be an attempt to make the HoC elections in Northern Ireland STV? They had Euro elections using STV for years when the rest of the UK had different systems. Will there be pressure

When is the bill to set the lifetime of the parliament at 5 years coming forward? And does anyone know if the Lords will have the power of an overall veto on it under the 1949 Parliament Act as it affects the lifetime of parliament?

Whatever you say about AV, it is still a gateway drug for STV because the system is the same for the voter.

Will the rather weird “2nd Choice” vote for Mayoral elections be altered to AV?

I see absolutely no compulsion to be enthusiastic for this reform because it does not deliver a more proportional chamber

Jim – it’s ludicrous to pretend that PR is even on the agenda. If AV dies then the chance for further electoral reform dies with it for a while.

This idea that unless you have the best case scenario (incidentally, I’m for STV and AV+, not full PR necessarily) means you oppose any other moves is self-defeating.

It’s like the people who argued that Health Care in the US pushed by Obama shouldn’t have gone through because it didn’t have everything they wanted.

Sorry that was even more random than I meant. Fourth point should finish:

Will there be pressure from Scotland and possibly or Wales for an STV option for them? After all Scotland currently has four different voting systems at different levels – this would maintain that number.

Martin Coxall/3: It’s a non-monotonic system. Which means under certain circumstances, expressing a vote for a candidate can harm one of your higher-ranked candidates.

I don’t think it’s quite that bad. Certainly it’s possible, however, to harm a lower-ranked candidate that way, if your first preference can’t win but can come a convincing second, while your second preference could win but ends up third as a result of you not giving them a first preference.

Non-monotonicity is the major flaw of STV, but in the context of AV, where the count is significantly simplified by their only being a single place and no fractional transfers of surpluses, it rarely actually causes problems. (It also only tends to occur seriously in the situations where the preferences lead to a Condorcet cycle, and in those cases you can make a convicing argument that any member of the cycle “deserves” to be elected).

In practical terms for the “Yes” campaign, non-monotonicity is such a complex concept to explain – even the name is jargon – that the “No” campaign probably won’t try. If they do, the easy counter is that in FPTP much the same occurs, but with all but the final round of the count happening in people’s heads. Monotonicity is, I think, only a useful property for voting systems that don’t encourage/require tactical voting (but given that AV is what’s on offer, and FPTP is atrocious, I’m not about to start campaigning for Condorcet on those grounds)

I think the Yes campaign should push Tory/Labour complacency. Something along the lines of “the two big parties take turns in power, and nothing ever really changes”. It might also be a good idea to get hold of some statistics on tactical voting as well. If people see that a high percentage of voters felt forced to vote for the candidate they didn’t want by FPTP, they’re likely to agree that the system is unfair.

In terms of demographics, for obvious reasons I think people who regularly vote Lib Dem or for one of the small parties will be in favour of reform. Dyed-in-the-wool Tories and Labourites will vote for change if they believe in it on principle and against it if they don’t. I’m not sure how many of those are likely to have their minds changed.

I guess your principle target is swing voters: the people who handed power to Blair in 1997. It’s likely that they don’t think either of the main parties represents their views, so the idea of having more options may well appeal.

Finally, I suspect students will generally be in favour. The trick there will be to motivate them, possibly by emphasising how huge and important it will be in terms of Britain’s political history.

I think LibCon’s role in this should be to really jump on the head of any Labour slime (New or Old) following the lead of Andy Burnham and campaigning against this from the comfort of their effectively never contested super-safe seats.

Did I say New Labour slime?
Sorry, I meant war criminal scum.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/02/conservatives-labour-bid-disrupt-voting-reform.
Isn’t it time Jack Straw did the decent thing and died of old age?

“(1) Counts are more complicated and will take longer”

So what? Who said democracy had to be decided before most people woke up? Do we prefer expedience over the correct result? Confront people with that question and see which side they fall on.

“(2) It could lead to mundane, boring middle-of-the-road candidates winning because of the need to reach out to other parties for their preferences”

You mean it’ll lead to the most accessible and broad candidates able to consider a wide range of views winning?

“(3) It can exacerbate swings, especially against unpopular parties”

There’s no evidence for this whatsoever, but yes…arguably it *could* exacerbate swings, which is good, as it means seats are no longer safe…and safe seats can be evidentially linked to corrupt behaviour and poor representation.

“(4) The majority an MP has is an artificial one, because it treats lower preferences as of equal weight to higher ones.”

This assumes that people would prefer a person to get in even if they voted against them, which is essentially unable to happen logically. The “majority” MP will always be the person most able to command the trust of their constituents. There’s no reason to weight lower preferences as such a practice would be to say that those that vote for the “correct” MP as first preference are worth more in their opinions than those that vote for the “wrong” MP as first preference

“(5) It’s a non-monotonic system. Which means under certain circumstances, expressing a vote for a candidate can harm one of your higher-ranked candidates.”

This is actually completely false. I can’t work out the maths under which you assume that if you vote for someone (which by your example would be unpopular) and then vote for someone else as your second preference that they then have somehow been done badly by you…assuming, of course, that you actually wanted your first preference to be your first preference.

But yes, as I’ve said in another thread the arguments are simple…

1) If you vote *against* AV, it doesn’t matter if you like FPTP or not, the establishment will take it as a vote FOR the antiquated FPTP system. This will completely kill electoral reform for decades.

2) If you vote *against* AV you are effectively saying that you’d rather gamble at getting a poor MP, someone you dislike, to represent you if your MP wasn’t instantly the most popular, instead of having a chance at helping someone you could get along with get the job instead

3) If you vote *against* AV you are saying you’d rather that many of the constituencies in the UK retain their “safe seat” status, meaning a continuation of the kind of safety for MPs that led to the abuse of expenses we all are so disgusted by.

4) if you vote *against* AV you’re not voting against proportional representation as AV *isn’t* PR, and in effect you’re also not saving the country from coalition governments as the last election has proved.

4 simple arguments that should resonate. I intend to work out any other arguments on the ground here that are standing against AV, but I am honestly going to be amazed if we manage to get a good ground campaign going to secure this reform and we don’t win it.

““(5) It’s a non-monotonic system. Which means under certain circumstances, expressing a vote for a candidate can harm one of your higher-ranked candidates.”

This is actually completely false. I can’t work out the maths under which you assume that if you vote for someone (which by your example would be unpopular) and then vote for someone else as your second preference that they then have somehow been done badly by you…assuming, of course, that you actually wanted your first preference to be your first preference.”

I should clarify… There are *always* going to be losers in elections. There will be people that prefer Lib Dems, but would support Labour and would live with Tories…while the consensus opinion in their constituency is to vote in the Tories, either by first or second preferences. Unfortunately it is no argument to say that under an AV system everyone will have a happy result, just that their whole view will be more considered.

Which takes me to point 1 of my arguments above…if people want to always have a happy result (one where their vote is very likely to result in a proportional shift in who governs) then killing AV isn’t the step towards that happiness. FPTP is a system where if you vote for someone that isn’t the most popular you’ll have less influence over that decision, and STV is the only way to kick that.

Voting against AV won’t help anything in this regard.

@Martin Coxall – sure, we saw how the London mayoral elections resulted in the most boring, middle of the road candidate. 😉

I am going to go off at a tangent – but I think an important one. That is the implication for the London Mayoral election. I would hope that some London MP (presumably but not necessarily a Lib Dem) will put down an amendment calling for the London Mayorality to be elected by AV rather than the spatchcock system currently in use.

It is worth noticing that there are no local elections in London next May: if we going to the poll nonetheless, it seems an excellent opportunity to ask Londoners to review how the Mayor/Assembly system is working & more particularly to hold a referendum for the Mayoralty to be given greater powers (or even scrapped altogether!)

The main point however is that the GE showed that London votes to the left of England as a whole, and as things stand the turnout in London is likely to be dire. This will not help the cause of reform.

***
A quite separate point. Is it intended that we should have to order all the candidates or only those we choose to, under AV? If the former, the opponents can make the point that people will be “bullied” into voting for candidates they actively dislike. If the latter, there is no reason to believe elected MPs will have a majority of votes cast since many people, following their party of choice’s advice will only vote “1” (or more likely “X” which I’m sure will still be counted as a valid vote).

More generally, is there a Parliamentary majority for the insertion of a turnout threshhold as there was for the 1979 Scottish devolution referendum? Kawcynski & co will certainly table such an amendment and it would only take 30-40 Labour MPs to support it for it to pass. That would certainly scupper the whole thing.

29. The London Election system is a joke, only being able to mark against two people doesn’t give the freedom to support broad church candidates.

“A quite separate point. Is it intended that we should have to order all the candidates or only those we choose to, under AV?”

AV never works like that. You can, if you wish, put down only a single preference and treat it like a FPTP election if you wish. Your vote doesn’t get carried on.

Should no-one breach the 50% mark because not enough people have given other preferences then the win goes to the person with the highest share after all possible reallocations.

“More generally, is there a Parliamentary majority for the insertion of a turnout threshhold as there was for the 1979 Scottish devolution referendum? Kawcynski & co will certainly table such an amendment and it would only take 30-40 Labour MPs to support it for it to pass. That would certainly scupper the whole thing.”

This is, of course, the worry and a very real threat to putting an unrealistic demand on a democracy already straining for legitimacy. Those that pass it should know that in doing so they’re not helping to encourage engagement but further show that they, the MPs, would rather we didn’t have any say of our own.

[32] I thought that in Australia (which of course uses AV) you had to number all the candidates. But maybe that’s just the (STV) Senate elections Down Under.

Doesn’t Australia also make it compulsory to vote? I don’t think Australia is necessarily a good comparison of how our system would work.

“The London Election system is a joke, only being able to mark against two people doesn’t give the freedom to support broad church candidates.”

Really? I love the London system. I think it’s perfect and that it’s a shame that there’s no clear way of converting it to a national system without inserting so serious problems.

What’s your issue with it?

Chaise: It endorses only major candidates, fails to give people a real choice, and actually makes tactical voting worse since the only vote that matters in most cases is who gets second preference.

In 1976, a Commission set up by the Hansard Society recommended that we adopt the German electoral system because it combines single-member constituencies with additional electoral procedures for ensuring that the eventual composition of the Bundestag (the lower house of the German parliament) reflects the party preferences of voters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Germany

For interesting reasons, the coalitions resulting from Germany’s electoral system have yielded stable governments in West Germany and unified Germany, not the chaos or stalemates of hung Parliaments predicted for Britain.

West Germany had a far better historic record on controlling inflation post-WW2 than Britain – and prior to May 1979, when Mrs Thatcher became PM, the Conservative and Labour Parties in Britain had spent almost equal periods of time in government. The outcome was that we famously became “the sick economy of Europe”, which is arguably why Mrs Thatcher, as Conservative Party leader won successive elections in 1979, 1983 and 1987.

The AV+ prosposals of the Jenkins Commission, which reported in 1998, also amount to a similar electoral system to Germany’s:
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=56

I’ll never fully understand why the Tories oppose electoral reform. Surely they would have a lot to gain from it. I mean under AV they might actually have a mandate to govern in Scotland. Had the Tories of won a majority with only 1 seat in Scotland there would have been serious questions raised. And we all know that Labour in recent years benefit the most from FPTP.

Wasn’t there a story earlier this year or late last where Brown offered a sweetener to the Lib Dems – a referendum on AV and the Lib Dems said that it didn’t go far enough……

No-one really acknowledged this after the election but Labour actually hung on well in terms of seats, I mean the Tories had 165 after 1997 but Labour are still holding a somewhat respectable 258, granted it’s a fall from grace but it’s not the drubbing that was expected.

“Chaise: It endorses only major candidates, fails to give people a real choice, and actually makes tactical voting worse since the only vote that matters in most cases is who gets second preference.”

But the biggest problem (to my mind, at least) with tactical voting is that it creates a semi-permanent hegemony* for two or three major parties while leaving all other options out in the cold. The theory that a minor party can get power if it appeals to enough people generally fails to play out in practice. You know this, of course.

London’s system fixes this. OK, it’s unlikely that a minor party will gain prominence in the first few elections. But because people can always vote for them without worrying that doing so will let the bad guys into power, the minor party’s vote share can rise and rise until it becomes a serious contender. The reason that this doesn’t happen in London is probably a side effect of FPTP in the general elections: people don’t see smaller parties as a realistic option.

As far as I’m concerned, the biggest problem with the mayoral system is that people won’t realise that you should always put your preferred candidate first and your safety candidate second. Of course, it’s not truly representative, but PR puts far too much real power into the hands of parties (while remaining better than FPTP). I really don’t like the idea that parties will be able to just sack rebel MPs, which would presumably be frequent under PR.

*Note: I may be using the wrong word here. Tired, and a little pissed.

“For interesting reasons, the coalitions resulting from Germany’s electoral system have yielded stable governments in West Germany and unified Germany, not the chaos or stalemates of hung Parliaments predicted for Britain.”

My assumption is that parties who know that they’re being elected under a fairly representative system will become a lot better at co-operation than those who operate under FPTP. For a start, it’d stop the trend of condemning something you actually agree with simply because the opposition suggested it.

“I’ll never fully understand why the Tories oppose electoral reform. Surely they would have a lot to gain from it.”

Nah. It’s worth putting up with the pro-Labour bias to benefit from the ridiculous pro-both-big-parties bias. I think there’s a real (and probably unrealistic) fear among both Labour and the Tories that reform would leave them as just one unexceptional party among six or so contenders, and that they might even vanish within a generation. The fact that most MPs would probably feel better defecting to one of these other parties seems to elude them.

Alternatively: the current system means that the Tories are in power most of the time. The alternative is an unknown quantity. Why fuck with that?