Lib Dem cabinet minister Chris Huhne has ratcheted up the war of words against the Tories ahead of next week’s AV referendum, suggesting legal action might be necessary to stop Coalition colleagues spreading untruths. Today’s Guardian reports:
Huhne said the claims made by David Cameron, George Osborne and other Tories undermined their credibility. He is concerned about two claims made by the Conservatives – that a move to AV will need new counting machines, and so cost as much as £250m, and that it will favour extremist parties. He said: “If they don’t come clean on this, I am sure the law courts will. Australia’s used [AV] for 80 years without ever using voting machines. If they can’t substantiate that, there’s simple legal redress. They had better come clean pretty fast.” …
Huhne told the BBC: “It is frankly worrying if you have colleagues, who you have respected and who you have worked well with, who are making claims which have no foundation in truth whatsoever. If they don’t come clean on this, I am sure the law courts will. It is going to undermine the credibility of colleague ministers – the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer and the foreign secretary [William Hague] – if they use repeatedly allegations that have no foundation in truth whatsoever.
“That is not good for the coalition. We have a job to do in the coalition government to clean up the mess we have inherited at the time of the last election. It is going to be a lot more difficult if you don’t have the same respect for colleagues because, frankly, they have departed so far from the foundations of truth in an election campaign.”
There are two possible interpretations of this latest spat:
1) That what we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the Coalition, that the Lib Dems and Tories, never natural bed-fellows, are living out the inevitable demise of their experiment. In this version of events, the fury of Chris Huhne, more moderately echoed in recent days by Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes and Vince Cable, is evidence of a very real schism.
2) That this is simply the latest expression of pre-election posturing, with Lib Dems and Tories licensed for a limited period to emerge from Coalition purdah and revert to ‘politics as normal’. This is the view I put forward yesterday on Lib Dem Voice here. I have been genuinely surprised by the gullible credulity of the news media in treating these stories as evidence of Coalition-ending rifts: for such a cynical professions, political journalists can sometimes be stunningly naive.
In taking the view that Scenario 2, above, is the accurate version, I’m not suggesting Chris Huhne’s anger is fake: I have no doubt that his outrage at the untruths spouted by Tories like Baroness Warsi is for real. I also don’t doubt that there has been very real concern in Lib Dem quarters at the Tory-funded anti-AV campaign’s deeply personalised and vitriolic focus on Nick Clegg.
But equally I have n doubt that there has been agreement right at the very top that the pre-election period is a time when Lib Dems and Tories can vent their pent-up frustration at the constraints of Coalition, safe in the knowledge the Coalition is secure, and that the two parties are going to continue working together for years t come.
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49 Comments
I’m sure Stephen’s concluding paragraph is right.
But whilst anger at the lies trotted out by the No campaign is justified, I don’t think making this public fuss about a change to the voting system will impress many people. Why no similar fuss about certain coalition policies – Tuition Fees being the most obvious example in view of that foolish petition-signing stunt.
The impression is that the party cares more about getting a voting system they believe (rightly or wrongly) will help them win seats, than about issues of real concern to large numbers of the population.
Of course a lot of the No campaign is lies – so what? we should rebut them but stop all this whining and whingeing which does us no good at all with the electorate.
As for Huhne taking legal action -I am surprised the No campaign have resisted (so far) the temptation to produce his 2010 election leaflets which didn’t exactly paint an accurate picture of his married life.
Whether Lib Dem anger at the Tories is genuine or not, it doesn’t reflect well on the Lib Dems.
Where was Lib Dem anger when the Tories raised VAT, increased tuition fees to £27,000 for a three-year course, got rid of half a million public sector workers, scrapped the school building programme, etc etc etc? The Lib Dems were more than just subservient to all this, they gladly went out and tried to sell these policies to a bewildered electorate.
It appears that the Lib Dems are more than happy to tolerate any number of Tory attacks on the ordinary people of this country – but the moment the Tories try to scupper the Lib Dems’ plan to gain an extra 25-30 MPs through AV, just FEEL the Lib Dem rage.
I’m afraid this looks distinctly like the Lib Dems putting their own interests first, while caring not a jot about what’s happening in the country at large.
There is a third possibility – that these ‘officially sanctioned’ spats generate a momentum of their own. Both the Guardian and ConservateHome are running stories today speculating on the possibility of an early election. I think that the prospects of that are remote but such speculation registers an underlying truth – the balance of power in the coalition is shifting very much in the Tories favour.
Clegg’s disastrous strategy of lashing the party to the Tory mast is going to leave Lib Dems in a very weak position after May 5th. The mood in the Tory party is less ‘how can we help Nick?’ and more ‘why are we shackled to a corpse’? As bad as the last year has been for Lib Dems it will almost certainly get worse as the parties influence in the coalition wanes.
I don’t think our parties are going to be friends for much longer…there does seem to be a hardening of Conservative attitudes to the Liberal Democrats due to these assaults, planned or not, at grassroots level and it seems Cameron is beginning to clock quite how unhappy dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives are with the coalition.
It doesn’t help of course that we have spent years taking chunks out of each other but I think that an election will be coming much sooner than 2015. Roll on the local elections.
@Stuart “Where was Lib Dem anger when the Tories raised VAT, increased tuition fees to £27,000 for a three-year course, got rid of half a million public sector workers, scrapped the school building programme, etc etc etc?”
The Tories didnt do this, the Coalition did. So it would be odd to be angry with our own government.
raising VAT was the best and quickest way of raising a huge some of money to reduce the deficit in a progressive way. Tuition fees – well we all know the arguments there.
“Got rid of half a million public secrtor workers” – really – when ? where?
“scrapped the school building programme” – you mean the one which wasted £2.5bn on frequeently badly designed and built buildings?
But equally I have n doubt that there has been agreement right at the very top that the pre-election period is a time when Lib Dems and Tories can vent their pent-up frustration at the constraints of Coalition, safe in the knowledge the Coalition is secure, and that the two parties are going to continue working together for years t come.
That would be a bad thing. It would suggest that the coalition are so contemptuous of the public that they’ll try to fool them through a fake fight in the hope of convincing them that the two parties are distinct.
We know that Cameron is contemptuous of those who don’t share his views, poor Nick Clegg, but I though better of the Lib Dems, even after the disasters of the last 12 months.
The view that the Coalition may breakup is well put by Jackie Ashley here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/24/election-this-year-not-impossible
She concludes: ‘ . . An election sooner rather than later now looks like a good option for the Conservatives, and as this realisation spreads through the party, there will be an increasingly tough, even brutal, attitude to their junior partners. Lib Dems’ anger about the Tories is not feigned – you can hear it, feel it, taste it and touch it. They seem at breaking point. From now on, however, Cameron is more likely to let them break than to help them out. That’s why an election this year is no longer impossible – speculation, but no longer wild speculation.’
Time will explain all.
It’s pure hypocrisy for the Yes campaign to be complaining about the “lies” of the No campaign. The Yes campaign has been based almost entirely on lies from day one.
The most blatant one, as I’ve mentioned here many times, is the lie that AV requires the winner to have the support of 50% of voters.
I emailed the Yes campaign on 13th March pointing out to them why the 50% claim is wrong, and suggesting that they make their campaign more honest by removing it from their website. I got a reply from a guy called Elliott Chapman-Jones, the gist of which was that he tried to make out that 50% support in the final round of voting is somehow the same as having 50% of all votes. Go figure.
So I emailed them back on 16th March, pointing out that the Electoral Commission’s official referendum leaflet (which had just been published) stated categorically that a candidate can win an AV election with less than 50% of votes. Having no possible answer to THAT one, I never got a reply, and they continued propagating the 50% lie for all it was worth, such as in this appalling leaflet from the ERS (linked to from the Yes campaign website) :-
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/AV%20FAQ%20web.pdf
I do find it quite perturbing that an organisation like the ERS, which has blathered on for over a hundred years about improving representation of the people, should be willing to hoodwink the voters by making claims for AV that are mathematically untrue. This is not a democratic way of going about things.
Of course the No campaign are a bunch of liars as well, but you know what? We *expected* nothing better from the likes of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. I thought the people on the Yes side might be better than that – but they aren’t, and that’s the disapointing thing.
(As a final aside on this 50% business, I just *loved* the irony of that Independent editorial the other day which lambasted the No campaign for suggesting that AV is difficult to understand – and then trotted out the bogus 50% claim, thereby proving unwittingly that the No campaign are dead right on this one.)
Threatening legal action during an election campaign is, unfortunately, not uncommon, but it is just posturing – it is not going to happen.
SMcG: Thanks for illustrating my point so beautifully.
“‘“Got rid of half a million public secrtor workers’ – really – when ? where?”
It was quite widely reported.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&biw=1260&bih=843&q=budget+2010+490000&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
I don’t know where there is any cause of action with a decent prospect of success. Best bet IFAICS would be malicious falsehood but to describe that as a “simple legal redress” is very optimistic.
ECHR rulings on political speech are to allow a wide range of expression which would make any action doubly difficult.
In any case do we really want agents facing court action whenever they say an election is “neck and neck”
The No2AV campaign’s strategy of blatant lies, hypocritical accusations and personal attacks was always going to be a risky one, and may now backfire in a spectacular fashion. The Liberal Democrat counter-attack will, far from portraying the party in a bad light, actually resonate with many people. Sadly, I fear it has come too late.
Yes, a lot of Conservative members members feel they didnt get a good deal from the Coalition agreement. In a poll last week 52% thought the Libdems came off best & only 19% thought the Tories did, thats nearly 3 to 1.
Probably a lot of Tory MPs wish they hadnt signed up to the Coalition but how could they get out of it now without any political damage ? Why pull out now when the Economy may be going either way & the cuts are beginning to bite ?
This story is a typical product of The Labour/London/Westminster Bubble, pure froth.
Paul: “The No2AV campaign’s strategy of blatant lies, hypocritical accusations and personal attacks”
Yes, I saw Nick Clegg complaining about the personal attacks and “mudslinging” the other day. The day after, he was called No supporters “dinosaurs”. Then the day after that he characterised No supporters as nasty right-wing reactionaries.
” was always going to be a risky one, and may now backfire in a spectacular fashion.”
Perhaps. The question in this referendum is: which side’s lies and mudslinging will impress the voters more? Ooh, I can’t wait to find out, it’s the thrill of this wonderful thing we call democracy.
Good articles Steven and some sections of the media claiming the coalition is in crisis are sheer hyberbole, thoufgh it’s obvious there are tensions on AV and believe it or not differences between the parties! However, I think it may be wise to cool the rhetoric slighyly anf focus on rebuttingthe No campaigners distortions. Obviously though it’s an uphill battle and tv reporting hasn’t always been exactly balanced. Pity few Conservatives even if they very much in the minority have gone public for changing the voting system.
When all is said is done though the parties can have healthy debate and whilst tghere may be some strains I’m sure Government can function effectively, but nuch of the media haven’t got used to Coalition yet!
Huhne’s threat of legal action is the stupidest bit of his diatribe. Unless there’s a real chance of succeeding by bluff (and there’s no chance of that in this instance) nobody should threaten to sue unless (a) they’re prepared to put a great deal of money where their mouth is, and (b) they’ve thought through the possible consequencies.
Regarding the coalition generally, I guess it’s usual in these circumstances for each side to think they’ve been shafted by the other. I’m sure Cameron and Clegg are both relieved to be able to drop – or a least shelve – certain of their party’s own policies. An early election would surely be good for the Tories (especially as Labour are not looking too credible just now) and disasterous for the Lib Dems – under any electoral system, even PR!
@staurt – the artcile you link to says what might happen (I doubt it myself) not what has happened.
OK, so AV may not need a computer system to count votes, but how many extra man-hours will be needed? If anyone in the YES camp say that AV will cost nothing extra, then this is an absolute lie. Work it out, if there 6 candidates in a ward with 10,000 votes and on average every voter uses a 2nd & 3rd preference, thats 20,000 extra votes to count/process. Also taking account of the verification process, my gut feel is that the counting teams will need to double in size.
AFAIK, no-one in the Yes campaign has claimed that an AV count would not go on longer and cost more that a typical FPTP count. But the crucial point is that expensive counting machines are not needed, and the No2AV campaign knows that.
The threat of legal action is a bad error by Huhne.
SMcG – it’s not what “might” happen, it’s what is already happening and is planned to be completed by 2014-15.
Stephen – why do you say the media is being gullible? The media are all too happy to pounce on this evidence of a supposedly deep rift and milk it for all it’s worth. Coalitions don’t work, the Lib Dems are only interested in AV, the Lib Dems are going to pull the plug in the middle of deficit reduction – Huhne’s outbursts provide material to put off every type of voter! Except for hardcore Lib Dems, maybe… or Lib Dem members…
Paul Griffiths :-
“AFAIK, no-one in the Yes campaign has claimed that an AV count would not go on longer and cost more that a typical FPTP count. But the crucial point is that expensive counting machines are not needed, and the No2AV campaign knows that.”
On the other hand, a much longer manual count could actually cost more than using “expensive counting machines”, if the London experience is anything to go by :-
http://www.drs.co.uk/news/2010/09/10/London%20Elects%20gears%20up%20for%202012%20Mayor%20and%20London%20Assembly%20Elections.html
(As you probably know, one of the two partners in IntElect is Electoral Reform Services Ltd, who have bank-rolled the Yes campaign.)
If AV wins, and it becomes clear that e-counting would be the cheaper option, the government would have litle choice but to buy those pesky machines, and this could cause future embarrassment for Huhne and the rest of the Lib Dems.
@Stuart Mitchell
Isn’t this comparing apples and oranges? The London Mayoral and Assembly elections involve counting (according to the article you link to) 8 million ballot papers in three sub-regional centres. GE counts are much smaller than that.
Although I will vote No to AV I believe, as another No blogger stated on a different LibDemVoice thread, that the extra cost would be worth paying if it were the price of a better system. Those of us who believe in PR should be careful here, as any PR system would certainly cost more.
But I really don’t think that AV would be significantly more expensive.
Firstly and most obviously, there would be no difference at all in seats where the leading candidate gets 50 percent. Secondly, the cost of employing extra counting staff, and / or requiring staff to work a few hours longer, would be pretty minimal.
Why would machines be needed? Having said that, the day will surely come when IT will be used whatever the voting system. The extra cost then will be caused by the fact that governments are hopelessly incompetent at commissioning IT systems which (a) cost anything less than ten times the original estimate, and (b) actually work.
@ Old Codger Chris Posted 25th April 2011 at 6:06 pm
Think I’d have to agree with most of the sentiment expressed, but also with the proposed change in seat reduction there will be less staff counting overall (probably – maybe), so there may be a small overall drop in cost.
“The extra cost then will be caused by the fact that governments are hopelessly incompetent at commissioning IT systems which (a) cost anything less than ten times the original estimate, and (b) actually work”
Don’t be daft – they always work well and don’t cost that much – gosh, a squadron of little pink things just flew by the bedroom window 😉
Sorry but what goes around comes around. Both campaigns have spent he time not talking about the benefits of AV but making insinuations about other issues. The best is Clegg cannot help bu mention the expenses scandal and FPTP in the same breath. There is no proven link between the two anymore than there is a need for counting machines. Both are utter rubbish.
My local MP is a Tory, and I would never vote for his party. He has a rock solid majority with well over 50% of the vote. He is also an honest decent man who never fiddled his expenses. He will remain one whether he is voted in by FPTP or AV. People are dishonest not systems, the expenses system was known to be rubbish for years and no party bothered to think about highlighting it..
@Paul Griffiths
In what sense is a GE with 30 million voters “much smaller” than a GLA election with 8 million voters? Constituency size is irrelevant, there’s no particular reason why you couldn’t reduce the number of counting locations in a GE.
The 2010 GE count cost approximately £6 million, which works out at about 20 pence per vote. A manual GLA count apparently costs £3.6 million, or 45 pence per vote. I don’t know whether AV would be more complicated to count than the system used for the GLA, or whether e-counting machines would be economic, but what I do think would be helpful would be if the Yes campaign stopped squawking about “false claims” and instead told us how much THEY reckon AV would cost. Afterall, given the Yes campaign’s extremely close connections with the leading commercial operator in the UK electoral services market, they ought to have a good idea.
Some people have been deliberately misled into imagining that a manual AV count must be a difficult and protracted affair, possibly with all the ballot papers having to be sorted and counted again and again with the risk that it will descend into chaos.
That isn’t the case in practice, as is clear from the real-life example of this Irish parliamentary by-election held under AV:
http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007B&cons=85&ref
There were nine candidates and it needed eight counting rounds to finally identify the winner, with these numbers of ballot papers being sorted and counted in each round:
1. 28,412
2. 203
3. 528
4. 676
5. 893
6. 3,621
7. 4,420
8. 6,537
Total = 45,290
In the first round, the count of the first preference votes, the tellers had to sort and count all 28,412 valid ballot papers, just as in the single count under FPTP.
But the second round after the elimination of the bottom candidate, O’Loughlin, involved sorting and counting only the 203 ballot papers in his pile, which would have taken very little time; and similarly with the next three counting rounds, each of which involved less than 1,000 ballot papers.
Only after that did the number of ballot papers to be dealt with in each successive counting round start to become significant, and so start to create a significant increase in the work and time required.
Overall because of AV the tellers had to carry out 16,878 additional sorting and counting operations, an increase of 59% over those needed for FPTP.
It may be argued that the tellers would be slower picking out the correct number 1, 2 etc than a single X, but on the other hand it may be argued that on average we would not have nine candidates in each constituency and some of the results would be decided on the first count.
It should also be borne in mind that the tellers are not active for the whole of the period between the polls closing and the result being declared, and that the transport of ballot boxes, the verification count, the first count proper when ballot papers were actually sorted between candidates, and the delay after completion of the count before the result was finally declared, would all be essentially the same under AV as under FPTP.
So it would probably be a generous estimate to say that on average the declaration would delayed by maybe 2 hours under AV compared to FPTP, unless more tellers were employed.
@Denis: You can’t make conclusions like that based on one by-election. The time and cost of each count under AV would depend on many factors including turnout and vote shares. The government have said it isn’t actually possible to predict accurately how much the count would cost.
Interesting to note in your example that the winning candidate ended up with the “support” of just 48% of voters. How can this be possible?? In fact with 16% of votes eliminated before the final round, the winner needed only 42% to win. This is a very stark demonstration of just how dishonest the Yes campaign and ERS are being when they say things like, quote, “With AV when a winner crosses the finish line they’ve had to bring 50% of voters with them.”
@ Stuart Mitchell
Maybe it would be more economical to count GE votes by machine in several regional centres rather than each constituency, but if so that would be equally true whether the system was FPTP or AV.
You call upon the Yes campaign to predict the cost of an AV count, yet in your very next comment seem to concur that no accurate prediction is possible.
AFAIK the Yes campaign have been using the following phrase, with only minor variations, in all their literature: “Your next MP would have to aim to get more than 50% of the vote to be sure of winning.” The key words here are “aim” and “sure”.
Stuart Mitchell –
There are other by-elections, but this is a typical example and it illustrates the point that having eight counting rounds does not lead to eight times the work taking at least eight times as long, as some may assume, but only to a much smaller increase in the work and the time.
In this particular case, only a 59% increase in the number of sorting and counting operations to be performed by the tellers during the actual AV count, compared to FPTP.
And setting that additional work and time in the context of the entire process from the time the polls close to the time the result is declared it would possibly extend that period by an average of a couple of hours, unless more tellers were employed.
About 50,000 tellers were employed for the 2010 general election count:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/06/general-election-tellers-electoral-administrators
and one advertised pay rate is £16 an hour:
http://www.merton.gov.uk/council/voting/extinfo_form2011.pdf
on which basis the cost of the necessary 100,000 extra teller-hours would be £1.6 million, say £2 million to be on the safe side.
That’s actually consistent with your own statement that:
“The 2010 GE count cost approximately £6 million”
which matches quite well with the £5.9 million estimated cost of the count for the referendum given in this letter:
http://www.parliament.uk/deposits/depositedpapers/2011/DEP2011-0248.pdf
The cost of the count is in fact the second smallest item in the overall cost of the referendum – the smallest being the £1.2 million in grants to designated organisations – and it comprises less than 5% of the total costs.
What is absolutely clear is that the Tory claim that AV would add £200 million to the cost of every general election is out by a factor of about a hundred.
@Paul Griffiths
Take a look at Nick Cleggs speech at the start of the campaign it was on this site. If I recollect correctly, he stated that , no vote would be wasted (false) and that MP’s would need 50% of the vote(false).
@ Paul Griffiths Posted 25th April 2011 at 8:26 pm
“With AV when a winner crosses the finish line they’ve had to bring 50% of voters with them”
From the AV FAQ published by the ERS and downloaded from the Yes website
The Supplementary Vote used for direct mayoral elections is better than AV. Admittedly, it’s arbitrary in cases where the second and third placed candidates (on first preferences) are very close, as the third placed person is always eliminated after the first count.
But the Supplementary Vote does not have the nonsense of 3rd or 4th prefs etc, and the second prefs of voters who favoured ALL candidates other than the “top two” are ALWAYS counted insofar as those prefs are for a leading candidate (assuming, of course, that the front runner didn’t get 50 percent of first prefs).
Of course it would still be rubbish for electing a Parliament, but PR was never on the agenda.
One area the Electoral Commission have economised on in running the Referendum is the delivery of the explanantory booklet; “Local Elections and the Referendum on changing the Voting System.” Out of about a dozen people I have asked in Peterborough, the only one who has received it is me. The rest are all politically aware people who would not have discarded it without realising it. It was delivered to me as unaddressed “walk-sorted” (i.e. junk) mail in with the double-glazing and pizza flyers about 3 weeks ago. Presumably there are many 1000s of booklets dumped in a corner of the sorting office until after May 5. (I’m not certain whether the UCW supports the Yes or No camps.)
Of course, it local authorities had been asked to send it as addressed mail along with the poll cards, it might have been different. No wonder the public say “noone has explained AV”. The booklet does this very well but noone has seen it.
@Peter Chivall Posted 26th April 2011 at 11:04 am
Ditto, never got one through the post, I downloaded a copy instead (after finally remembering that they must have done some sort of pamphlet.- Doh)
Yes in my area the Electoral Commission’s excellent leaflet was tucked inside a free newspaper along with the double glazing and supermarket offers. I suspect that most people either discard the whole newspaper without a second glance, or – like me – they usually throw the inserts straight into the recycling sack.
I’m told that the free paper isn’t even delivered to the estate where the local “poor” people allegedly live, nor to some of the rural areas outside town. I trust that alternative arrangements were made to deliver the Commission’s leaflet to these areas, but I don’t know whether this was the case.
Yet another instance of government shafting Royal Mail and the Post Office in general (no I don’t work for them!).
Old Codger Chris Posted 26th April 2011 at 12:37 pm
“… they usually throw the inserts straight into the recycling sack. ”
Ah, perhaps that’s what happened to mine – oops.
“Yet another instance of government shafting Royal Mail and the Post Office in general ”
Thought the Elect Comm were independant of Gov and would surely have decided themselves on how the info was delivered?
@ Paul Griffiths
“You call upon the Yes campaign to predict the cost of an AV count, yet in your very next comment seem to concur that no accurate prediction is possible.”
Oops, so I did. I’m sure it must be possible to give an estimated range though.
“AFAIK the Yes campaign have been using the following phrase, with only minor variations, in all their literature: ‘Your next MP would have to aim to get more than 50% of the vote to be sure of winning.’ The key words here are ‘aim’ and ‘sure’.”
Just a few random quotes from the Yes campaign’s website or literature :-
* “The winner in an election should need the support of a majority of the people. AV makes this happen”
* “With AV when a winner crosses the finish line they’ve had to bring 50% of voters with them.”
* “Make them get 50%” (caption from end of latest Yes campaign video)
* “We need our MPs to work harder and to have to get at least 50 per cent of support from the communities they seek to represent. That means voting ‘yes’ to the Alternative Vote”
” “[AV] will ensure that all MPs have at least 50% of the vote”
* “MPs like you will have to aim for at least 50% of the vote” (quote from TV broadcast, 12th April)
I could go on but you get the drift.
The Yes campaign know that these claims are bogus but are happy to keep on making them. As we all know, the No campaign is no better. This is without a shadow of a doubt the most fundamentally dishonest political campaign I have ever witnessed. I am genuinely gutted that one of these two sides is guaranteed to win.
By the way, going back to the formulation you quoted :-
“‘Your next MP would have to aim to get more than 50% of the vote to be sure of winning.'”
Have you noticed how the above statement is just as true of FPTP as it is of AV? In fact I would assume it’s true of every voting system ever devised. It’s a meaningless statement which is sneakily designed to make it sound like it’s claiming far, far more than it is actually able to.
This is the difference between over-claiming or exaggeration, and telling lies.
1. Because electors do not have to rank all the candidates and some don’t, an MP gets elected under AV with only 48% of the total ballot papers in her pile, like Maureen O’Sullivan here:
http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007B&cons=85&ref
The Yes campaign states or implies that a candidate would need to get at least 50% of the total ballot papers, so that claim is not 100% true.
So how much truth was there in that claim?
It should be 50%, but it was only 48% in that case, so is the claim 96% true?
Or should one say that if that by-election had been held under FPTP she might have won with only 27% of the ballot papers in her pile, and 48% is 91% of the way from 27% to 50%, so in that case the Yes campaign claim was 91% true?
In any case, there is obviously a lot of truth in it.
2. NO2AV claim that it would cost £250 million to switch to AV, while the correct figure is more like a few million.
So how much truth was there in that claim?
About 1%, it was and is a deliberate lie.
“…So how much truth was there in that claim? …is the claim 96% true? …and 48% is 91% of the way from 27% to 50%, so in that case the Yes campaign claim was 91% true? In any case, there is obviously a lot of truth in it.”
@Denis, with respect, your reasoning makes no sense whatsoever. Either AV guarantees 50% support, or it does not. There are no other possibilities, no shades of grey, it’s either 100% true or it’s 0% true, period. And you acknowledge yourself that it isn’t true. Since AV (in the form proposed in this referendum) is in principle incapable of guaranteeing a 50% share for the winner, such a claim is untrue.
What the Yes campaign COULD have said (and you allude to this) is that AV will in most cases guarantee a greater share for the winner than an equivalent FPTP election. Such a claim would be true. Sadly, the Yes campaign would rather use untrue claims that sound impressive rather than true claims that sound more modest. How ironic that one of their *other* questionable claims is that AV would help raise standards in politics.
Well, we don’t know how often the winner would get 50% or more of the total ballot papers in practice under AV, but it would certainly happen more frequently than under FPTP. On the other hand we do know for sure that it wouldn’t cost £450 million to find out – that’s £250 million for start-up costs, plus £200 million extra on the cost of the first (and every subsequent) general election held under AV.
@Denis Cooper Posted 26th April 2011 at 9:27 pm
“Well, we don’t know how often the winner would get 50% or more of the total ballot papers in practice under AV, but it would certainly happen more frequently than under FPTP. ”
Is that an acknowledgement then that it was not a true claim?
It’s a shame really, if they had use wording along the lines of that suggested by Stuart Mitchell and also sorted out the other dodgy statements then they could have held the moral high ground. As it is, they have just shown the voters yet again that politicians can not always be trusted to be honest.
Just because the current MP gets over 50% under FPTP doesn’t mean they would get over 50% under AV, because many of their votes will be tactical 2nd, 3rd and yes 4th preferences from people who would like to vote Green, UKIP, Lib Dem, independent etc, but feel they have to vote for one of the two tribal parties ‘to keep the other out’.
I used to live in North Sydney, a really safe Liberal seat where the incumbent won 60% of the vote on first preferences. He hadn’t done anything wrong much, but had taken his electorate for granted. At the federal election, along came a popular independent, and blew him away. It was a real Portillo moment!
The 50% hurdle isn’t a lie, you just need to be careful how you define the denominator. It is 50% of valid votes, after eliminating those who are no longer expressing a preference between the remaining candidates.
@Dennis Cooper
If you print something you know to be untrue it is a lie. Both camps are guilty of it. There is no percentage in telling the truth.
@ Paul Kennedy Posted 26th April 2011 at 10:20 pm
” It is 50% of valid votes, after eliminating those who are no longer expressing a preference between the remaining candidates.”
I agree that saying the above would be legit on the whole, I would say a non-pref entry is valid though as is it is a statement that you don’t prefer some candidates – therefore I’d change the wording on that. There are 2 points I would raise though:
1. This obviously isn’t what is being said, so in the case here the 50% claim is bogus.
2. In something as important as a referendum on changing the way we vote, technical truth is not enough. It should be written in a manner that is so clear that there is absolutely no (or the bare minimum) chance of it being misunderstood (see suggested wording by Stuart Mitchell)
” At the federal election, along came a popular independent, and blew him away”
As can happen with fptp of course, AV isn’t really much of an improvement for us. As I’ve said elsewhere, it may actually work better in Australia. Voting is compulsory so you have a better chance of getting a high percentage ot the voters (instead of a high percentage of those who can be bothered to vote).
Paul Kennedy :-
“The 50% hurdle isn’t a lie, you just need to be careful how you define the denominator. It is 50% of valid votes, after eliminating those who are no longer expressing a preference between the remaining candidates.”
Two things there.
1. The 50% hurdle is utterly bogus when the denominator is given as “all voters” or “the electorate” or “the community” or anything else which includes all voters (see the examples I gave earlier).
2. By referring to the “eliminated” votes, all you are saying is that the 50% claim is true if applied only to the final round of voting. Or in other words, AV guarantees a 50% share for the winner once the candidates are whittled down to two. Paul – what electoral system DOESN’T guarantee a 50% share for the winner of a two-candidate contest?? It’s a meaningless observation which is just as true of FPTP as it is of AV. Think about it.
Paddy Ashdown came out with a stunner on Newsnight last night: “Never again,” he thundered emotionally, “will a politician be elected without majority support!!”