The Alternative Vote isn’t a great voting system but neither is First Past the Post. I suspect inertia and boredom and a lack of outrage will help swing the day for the status quo in the end. Neither side has impressed during the campaign thus far. Claims that AV is some kind of elixir that will “clean-up” British politics are absurd. But at least the Yes campaign is, on the whole, only peddling pie-in-the-sky. They’re not, again on the whole, trying to frighten voters. Their exagerrations seem a little less desperate than those made by the No campaign.
Take Baroness Warsi’s nonsensical claim that AV will somehow help* the BNP. As it happens, FPTP doesn’t help them much either and you’d need to switch to an Israeli-style system to give the BNP a real boost. Nevertheless, were AV adopted for council elections the BNP would find it much harder to win any seats at all since, if nothing else, AV raises the bar of minimal acceptability to a level the BNP cannot realistically hope to clear.
Nor is it true, despite what the No campaign alleges, that some people’s votes are counted more often than others when AV is used to decide elections. This, one must admit, is an ingenious argument since it has a superficial and slippery appeal: why should the third and fourth preferences of some voters count when only my first preference has a chance of counting?
But, as Norm points out with admirable clarity, this is a specious argument. AV is just a balloon debate. Each candidate makes the case for his retention. Everyone votes. The candidate with the lowest number of votes is ejected. Then everyone votes again and another candidate is removed from consideration. People who supported these candidates continue to vote in the subsequent rounds but so do the people who backed candidates who easily avoided ejection. The only difference is that AV uses a single ballot paper to mark these preferences so all the rounds of voting are completed in one go. Which is why it’s called Instant Run-Off in the United States. Because that’s what it is. If there are, say, four rounds of counting needed to push someone about 50% then everyone’s vote** is counted four times. The only votes for which that would not be true are those cast in favour of eliminated candidates that do not express subsequent preferencs.
Like I say, AV is scarcely perfect and can’t deliver some of the gains its advocates promise. But that doesn’t excuse the No campaign’s preference for hysterical and dishonest arguments against it. Then again, the main merits of FPTP are that it is so simple even voters can understand it and it’s the system that’s been used in most British seats for some time now. Custom is not a bad thing and often reason enough to reject change but let’s not pretend that FPTP has much more than that going for it.
*Warsi also claims that fascists are helped if their third or fourth preferences can help a candidate to victory. But this happens already! There must be some people who’d quite fancy voting BNP but don’t because they know that the goons can’t win. So they vote Labour or Tory instead as the “Most acceptable candidate with a chance of winning”.
**The better argument against AV, though it doesn’t demolish this, is that a third preference should not count for as much as a first preference even if, of course, it’s a third preference contingent upon first and second choice candidates not being available for election. Still, it’s a better argument than the one the No campaign are actually using.
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