Olly Zanetti: Yes to AV
Reasons why you should vote to change the British electoral system on May 5.
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On May 5, 2011, we in the UK will face probably the most important election of our generation. I'm not talking about the local council elections – although for many this will be their chance to tell the Tories and Liberal Democrats exactly what they think of their punishing cuts agenda – but something far more important. For on May 5, we will be asked to vote on our voting system itself.
The choice in the referendum is simple: do we want to stick with the current first past the post (FPTP) system or do we want to change the way our elections work and use a system called the alternative vote (AV)?
First past the post gets its name because it works a bit like a running race. Everyone in an area votes for the person or party they like best, and the person with the most votes takes the seat in the House of Commons. With one obvious winner, the candidate with the most votes, it seems on the face of it to be a fair and logical system.
But there's a lot to be said for the alternative vote too. It's true that it’s a bit more complicated but it's hardly incomprehensible. Rather than simply marking one candidate on your ballot paper, AV asks you to rank candidates in order of preference. If you only like one candidate, you can just mark that one as your first choice; if you like two or three of them, you can list your preferences in order; you can even rank all the candidates if you want. When the votes are counted, all these preferences are included in the count.
If more than 50% of the electorate mark one candidate as their first choice, that candidate wins. But if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the second (or even third, fourth, etc) choices of all voters are taken into account. The most important thing is that, with AV, it is impossible for a candidate to win a seat without at least 50% of the people living in their area having expressed at least some preference for them.
That is more important now than it has ever been in history. Years ago, the country was pretty much split down the middle with some voting Labour and others voting Tory. Today, the vote is far more widely spread with the Liberal Democrats having become a major third party and other parties such as the Greens, UKIP and the BNP getting a small but significant share of the vote too.
This matters because your local MP is the only person allowed to represent your opinions in parliament. In the present system, it is possible that many more people voted against your MP than for them. Take Norwich South for example, where the 'winning' candidate Liberal Democrat Simon Wright got only 29.4% of the popular vote and just 310 more votes than the second candidate got. This means he now represents a constituency where 70.6% of people didn't vote for him. It's an extreme example, but it's not a new phenomenon. In fact across the country today, 66.6% of seats are represented by candidates who got less than half the popular vote. Can these people really say they represent their constituents? I doubt it, and that doesn't sound like democracy to me.
The alternative vote also lets people who prefer one of the smaller parties express their opinion without it being wasted. For me, that would mean I'd give the Greens my first choice, with Labour or the Liberal Democrats second. This means that, while the Greens might not win my seat, the candidate that does win will know they owe their support to someone who'd rather have voted Green. If the winner wants my support in future, they'll have to keep me sweet. There's a flipside to this, of course, which is that parties like the BNP might get more of a voice too. But we live in a democracy – and groups like the BNP must be silenced by reasoned argument not a bad voting system.
Finally, AV suits a politics where coalitions are more frequent. Because voters will know that a coalition could be on the cards, parties can campaign and the public can vote accordingly. This means that when coalitions form, they'll be based on what the public want – not the back room wheeling and dealing we got back in May 2010.
Recent polls suggest that the No to AV camp may be winning the day. The young are the most likely to be in favour of AV, but the least likely to turn out and vote for it. This is a once in a generation chance to make our electoral system fairer. No, AV isn't perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than what we've got now. On May 5, take five minutes out of your day, and vote Yes to AV.
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Yes to AV (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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