Why you should vote YES TO AV today

Whilst not wishing to get a reputation for being a woolly liberal leftie*, I'm still going to follow up yesterday's quite murky (and perhaps ill-advised) defence of liberal views with a plea today that you vote YES in today's UK Referendum on voting reform.

If you are still undecided, or at least open to my attempts at persuasion - please just read on a bit and tell me you are not convinced by the end of it.

If you want to see a list of the virtues of AV - go here.

What I thought I'd do briefly was my own refutation of some of the No campaign's so-called 'facts' about how terrible AV will be for us.

It will cost us millions to implement AV.
This is bullshit. All it takes is a pencil capable of marking 1,2,3 rather than a 'X' on the ballot paper. At most it'll use up a few more pencils in polling stations.

Apart from the cost of the referendum itself (which is obviously unavoidable if we are going to change our voting system), AV will not require any further additional expense to count the votes. The electronic counting machines the No Campaign have been going on about do not exist either - AV votes are hand-counted in Australia and they will almost certainly be hand-counted here. Voting reform taking money away from hospitals and schools is, quite frankly, a scare-mongering fabrication.

AV is too confusing!
Only if you are a fucking idiot, or haven't actually had it explained to you.

Few people would honestly be confused by AV if they took the time to watch this video. It explains it quite simply with an analogy about going to the pub. Cheers!

Under First Past The Post someone can get elected when over 50% of the voters didn't actually want them elected.

Under AV, an MP will need at least 50% of the voters to vote for them. If they get more than 50%, they are elected, straight-away. If they do not have 50% support, only then do people's preferences come into play.

Knowing people's preferences then eliminates the chances of politicians being elected by a minority of voters.
Common sense, no?

AV Will let the extremist parties in!
No it won't. That's why the likes of the BNP are actually campaigning for a NO vote. Actually, extremist parties have a lot more chance of being elected by FPTP than they do by AV.

Under FPTP, MPs can be elected to Westminster with support from less than 1 in every 3 voters. That's why there was a perceived danger in the 2010 election of the BNP scraping an MP in - they only needed 30% of the vote in a constituency.

Under AV, the BNP and other extremists have no real chance of ever having an MP elected, as they will need the backing of more than 50% of voters. Unless they move their politics towards the centre-ground of opinion, this is never going to happen.

AV is unpopular - only 3 countries use it!

It is true that only Three countries use AV for elections to their national parliament at present. This seems to be brought out quite a lot to justify why it must therefore be an unpopular, bad system.

However, firstly consider how hard it is to get an existing government to commit to a referendum to change an electoral system.  As they got voted in on the existing system, why the hell would they wish to change it?!! Turkey's don't tend to vote for Christmas! We've only got a referendum today because it was a carrot dangled in front of the Lib Dems to convince them to join the coalition, not because the largest party actually wanted change.

Therefore, how many more countries might chose to move over to a fairer system where their vote counts more, if their politicians actually gave them the chance to?

Another point to make is that AV is actually used quite regularly worldwide and even in the UK already - just not necessarily for national parliamentary elections. The Conservative and Labour party even use it to elect their own leaders. And Hawaii is among many US states/cities that has recently adopted AV for it's elections. Fancy that!

AV means some people get more than one vote!
No, For crying out loud, it doesn't. You still have one person, one vote - but with multiple preferences, in case no-one gets 50% in the first round.

If your first choice gets knocked out, your vote becomes whatever your 2nd preference was. It's not a 2nd vote - it's the same single vote, in another round of counting, worth the same as anyone else's.

Compare that to FPTP, where thousands of people effectively have a vote that doesn't count at all, because their seat is safe for the incumbent party, despite many not even having a simple majority.

AV will result in more hung parliaments than FPTP.
Umm, 2010? Wasn't that a hung parliament? Wasn't that FPTP?

The fact is, the more the vote gets split between more than two parties, the more likely we are to have some form of coalition or hung parliament, irrespective of which voting system is used.

For example: Canada used FPTP and always has hung parliaments. Australia on the other hand uses AV and has had 1 hung parliament from the last 38 elections. Hung parliaments can occur regardless of the voting system used. At least under AV the elected representatives will better represent their electors.

And why all the negativity towards hung parliaments and coalition governments anyway? Countries like Germany get along quite fine with them and have done for decades. We only have angst about it last year because we haven't had one for ages. We'll get used to it.

FPTP works fine. Why change something that isn't broken?
Because it is broken. In today's political world we need a system that reflects a modern, multi-party system.

FPTP works fine in a two-party system - as mentioned in the video link above in the 1950s, 90% of votes were for Conservative or Labour, so MPs were always elected by a majority in their constituencies, and as such had a popular mandate.

These days, with so many other parties gaining sizeable voting percentages in each constituency, MPs are often elected under FPTP when the majority of their constituency didn't want them. ⅔ of MPs elected in 2010 did so with the support of less than half of the voters in their constituency.

Under AV, even if it's a 2nd or 3rd preference, at least the MP elected will have done so with a mandate by voters who actually chose them.

So, that's my take on how some of the negative stuff you've heard is basically a load of old cock. So what's stopping you voting yes then?

This is an important day for British politics as if the NO vote wins today, the chances of another reform of our voting system is unlikely to come up again for decades, if at all. AV ain't perfect, but it's better than what we've got.

So I urge you to get off your arse and vote YES TO AV today.

Even if that does make me a woolly liberal.





*I refer you back to my earlier diatribe against the tuition fee protests - entitled "Pay Your Fees, Crusties!". I also quite admire Hitler, but for all the right reasons, obviously. Like the Autobahns and that.