Over at the Liberal Conspiracy website, LDV Co-Editor Mark Pack takes a look at the proposed new electoral system, the alternative vote, and points out some of the welcome behavioural changes it might exert on British political culture. Here’s an excerpt:
What really interests me about AV is the change in political culture it can bring about. … Under preferential voting most candidates hoping to win most of the time have to have an eye on appealing to the second preferences of those who cast a first preference for another party. That imposes a significant burden on the style of politics where you seek out any difference between yourself and another party and inflate it to baby-eating monstrosity levels.
Instead of politics where everything is black and white, AV with its shades of grey when you vote encourages shades of grey in campaigning. That does not stop passionate disagreement where it’s justified, but it would be a healthy brake on some of the more juvenile styles of politics that we see all too often.
You can read Mark’s post in full here.
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4 Comments
I can’t really see this. You don’t win under AV if you’re everyone’s second choice, you get eliminated early on. So the game under AV is to build enough of a core support so you survive the eiiminations. The smaller parties will be able to use it as a showcase – they can say “if you really support what we are suggesting, vote for us first preference and one of the big boys second”. They wouldn’t be aiming to win, just to show there is significant support for their ideas. But we’re not in that game now, are we?
AV doesn’t entirely shut out tactical considerations. A strong third party could make a heavy tactical appeal to second party voters on the grounds “if we win through to second, we’ll get the transfers and win the seat, if your lot are second and we’re eliminated, you won’t get all our transfers, so the one you like least will win the seat”.
There are a couple of ways where Lib Dems can win votes with AV. The first is getting first preference votes from people who like us but usually vote for one of the Labour or Conservative parties to keep the other out. Persuading them to vote for the party they like (us) first then voting for their tactical choice second should be an easy task. Much of the Lib Dem vote is very soft. An awful lot of people who said they were going to vote for us at the last election changed their mind just before the big day. The option of a second preference for someone else might help them keep their nerve in the polling booth.
The second is to seek second place votes from the minor parties. Voters for parties like the Greens will give their first choice vote to their favourite cause but may give their second places to us if we persuade them. As these smaller parties are the first to be knocked out, their second place votes are the ones that will tip the balance. These are the ones we need to turn our strong second position constituencies into wins.
Both the above posts, for and against, show the main problems with AV. It is too complicated, turns the election into a kind of game, and does not produce a result which is more fair. Under AV, a candidate with 10,000 more first choice votes than anybody else could nevertheless be defeated by the combined weight of 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th choice votes. This will seem intuitively unfair to many people, especially those who only really support one party.
The Tories have played this one very smart. By persuading the Lib Dems to accept an unwinnable referendum on a duff voting system, they have safely eliminated the possibility of fair votes for many years.
I’m a big fan of AV.
There are two huge problems with the present electoral system.
(1) It forces people to support a candidate they may hate, out of fear of another who they hate even more.
(2) It produces results which severely under-represent smaller parties.
AV fixes the first, it doesn’t fix the second. But fixing the first is an enormous step forward.
The “wasted votes” argument is used across the country. In order to get any decent representation under the present appalling system, we have to as well. But I’ll be celebrating if the referendum next May spells the demise of the slogan “It’s a two horse race.”