Sam Iles's Blog

Woe is me. The people have spoken: No to AV. And what a genuine shame.

And, unfortunately I find myself hit with the burning, horrible question of “what would the result have been if the question would have been, ‘do you want to switch to full proportional representation?’ instead?”.

Why did it fail? Firstly, I think there were a large number of people hell-bent on the idea of being mean to Clegg (who they seem to think is running the country) and thus voted against AV. It’s a shame if anyone did, because it really is pointless.

The second reason is that they just didn’t understand. I’ve had several conversations with people who didn’t know about the referendum’s details or what AV was (mostly through no fault of their own, of course). Presented with the option or “switch or change?” most people would pick “stick”.

The third reason is the group of people who we’re taken in by the lies of the No campaign.

Incredibly, before the campaign started back in September, 60% polled said the would vote Yes to AV. At the end of the campaign: 60% polled said they’d vote No.

I’ve written a lot on here over the last week about “AV Myths” and whether or not you agree with AV, you can’t deny the No campaign have lied a lot.

Even on the day of the vote, David Blunket – poster boy for the No campaign – admitted that the £250 million cost figure was completely made up.

The Yes campaign (the honest one) succumbed to the lies and clever rhetoric of the No group.

So sad.

Alas, I just hope this result doesn’t put off electoral reform for a generation. As we continue to switch between Labour and Tory governments for the next fifty years, they’ll always be able to cite this referendum as proof that everyone loves FPTP – when all it really proves is that everyone hates AV…

But, in wonderfully good news, the Green Party had a smashing time. They took control of the council in Brighton and Hove and got many, many councillors elsewhere (although, where I live, there was only the option to vote Tory or Lib Dem – no Green or Labour or anyone else – perhaps I should stand next time…?). Now, I just have to wait for the next general election.

Update: Having just checked my site stats for the last few weeks, I am pretty stunned. Over 6,000 – yes, 6,000 – unique people have read my AV blog posts, making a total of 10,000 blog readings. Usually, around 200-300 people read each of my posts (depending on what they are), so this is a big jump. It’s mostly thanks to links on Facebook (over 1,000 people came from there) and some high Google search rankings. SO, my point is: thank you for reading. I also think these numbers say something for the apparent interest in AV… Anyway: thank you.

Tomorrow, we vote. I’ve done my best on this blog over the last two weeks to dispel the AV myths and lies and I think I’ve done a pretty good job. And now is my very last chance:

Tomorrow’s referendum is a once in a generation chance to change our voting system. This won’t be happening again for a long time.

FPTP works when there are two big parties. But, as UK politics gets more and more diverse, with the Lib Dems more popular than ever (pre-coalition) and many more smaller parties getting large percentages of the total vote, FPTP doesn’t work.

AV is – for now, at least – the answer. It is fairer. It makes MPs work harder to get elected as they need more support. It is not expensive. It doesn’t give people more than one vote. It won’t lead to constant coalitions and it is better. In fact, nearly everything the No2AV campaign has said has been utterly deceptive twaddle-speak.

FPTP is old and broken. Sure – it has widespread use, but nearly all of the counties that use it have very different politics to us. Ones that don’t use FPTP have more parties, just like us.

AV really is your only chance for change. If you reject AV, you reject PR for a lifetime. For the next fifty years, the mantra will be, “but, the people voted against political reform once before, so how can they want it now?”

It’s not too late to change your mind. Read my blog posts, read the Yes to AV websites – and, listen to Stephen Fry, dammit! Even if you’ve voted by post, you can vote at the polls tomorrow and that will be the vote that counts.

Please, vote Yes for change!

“AV Makes it Harder to Remove Unpopular Governments.”

What utterly deceptive twaddle-speak.

Put forward first by Cameron, and one which once again sounds scary but is patently false. Let’s analyse it a little further.

Firstly, let’s take the opposite point: that FPTP makes it easy to remove unpopular governments. To believe this, you have to blindly ignore history. Mrs Thatcher’s government proved deeply unpopular, but was hard to dislodge. Blair was loathed by many after Iraq, but still clung onto power. Thatcher was able to exploit the split in the left at the time to stick around and Blair held on through sheer luck and the inherent brokenness of FPTP.

To prove this point, look at the results of the first Blair election, and then the second:

With a little over a third of the vote, Blair still held a good majority in the HoC. Now, it’s impossible for me to predict what would have happened under AV (since we can’t know people’s second, third, etc, preferences). My point is simply this: just how easy is it to depose an unpopular government with FPTP? Not so much, it would seem.

In actuality, AV makes it easier to get rid of unpopular governments.

To explain as simply as possible: if a government is unpopular, under AV you can vote for anyone else. The party in power cannot rely on its core supporters (because its core supporters will not be enough to give it the 50% it needs). FPTP allows unpopular governments to hold on with the support of a minority of voters. However, with AV, you introduce the preferences of the people who do not usually vote for them, and – boom – government gone. Simple, no?

TLDR: AV makes it easier to get rid of unpopular governments.

Firstly, I find this argument slightly confusing. Do they mean that AV is too complicated to implement and use, or that it is too complicated for the voter? We’ll tackle both.

The first option: AV is too complicated for the voter. Now, I know a cynic might consider the electorate in the UK – shall we say – below average in intelligence. But, I think anyone is capable of counting to three or four. AV is, in my opinion, very, very simple. You rank candidates in order of preference with numbers until you run out of candidates or stop caring. Simple, right?

I fail to see how anyone could consider this complicated. The only difference you need to be aware of is that instead of marking your most favourite candidate with an X, you use a 1. If you have a second favourite, you mark them with a 2.

(One solution to this ostensible problem I can imagine is to allow the voter to make their first preference with either a 1 or an X. That way, if they really do not understand and think that we are still using FPTP and make an X then their paper can still be counted. Problem solved, right?)

That, in my opinion, dispels the idea that AV is complicated for the voter.

The second part – AV is complicated to implement or count. Well, again, this isn’t true. Votes are firstly counted exactly the same as they are now – splitting the papers into piles based on candidate. Normally, a winner a declared from this. But, with AV, the smallest pile is picked up and then the second preferences are viewed and placed on the relevant piles. And so on until one candidate has 50%.

Is that really hard? Does this really make AV too hard to possibly consider implementing?

Even if you – the individual voter – doesn’t understand the behind the scenes intricacies of how the system works, it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t tell you how my computer works – but it’s still better than paper. I couldn’t tell you how a car works – but it’s still better than walking.

“AV is complicated” is certainly the most specious in the group. It’s one of those things that people hear and repeat without thought: it has no real merit or meaning on its own, it’s just three words put together to confuse you.

TLDR: AV is not complicated at all.

“Does your cat just sit around looking dazed and confused? Then your cat may have questions about the upcoming UK referendum.”

Australia, Papua New Guinea and Fiji use AV and so, the argument goes, we shouldn’t.

But, I find this argument deeply flawed. The most simple of rebuttals to this argument is that “most countries don’t drive on the left either”, or “most countries don’t have a Royal Family, either” or “most countries don’t have a TV licence fee” or “I could go on all day”.

The small number of other people that do something does not inherently mean that thing is awful. Of course, if the reason few countries use AV is because AV is bad then that is an argument. But, to judge that, you need to judge AV on its own merits, rather than declare it awful.

Let’s also clear one thing up: Australia does not want to “get rid” of AV, as the No campaign would have you believe. Firstly, Australians currently have AV but with one very big difference: they have to rank every single candidate, whereas in the UK system for AV you just rank as many as you want. If Australians don’t rank every single candidate then their paper is considered spoiled and never counted.

Here is the survey which was asked to Australians, and the question was as follows (which was read out loud by the people conducting the survey:

Currently, elections for the Federal House of Representatives, or lower house, use a preferential voting system. This is where voters indicate an order of preferences for all candidates, and these preferences are taken into account when deciding which candidate wins. (PAUSE). An alternative system would be “first past the post”, where voters only vote for one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins. Would you personally prefer…?

Notice the emphasis the asker was told to place on the “all”.

The posible responses were:

A preferential system A first past the post system

Notice that they refer to a first past the post system, not actual FPTP. By the definition in the question, “a first past the post system where voters vote for one candidate” could be deemed to be any proportional representation system.

What Australians are actually being asked is, “do you want to have to vote for ALL candidates by preference or just pick one?”. I think this is a leading question at best. Notice also how the survey doesn’t give them the option to switch to “British AV”. Anyone who doesn’t the like the compulsory preference voting is given no choice in this survey but to vote for FPTP – even though they may like AV.

I don’t think this survey can be trusted.

There is also the fact that there are so many different voting systems. According to this list, my rough count tells me that there are 187 voting countries (irregardless of their supposed legitimacy).

Of these 187, 79 use FPTP. It is clearly the majority, but it is still just 42% of them. There are a slew of other systems used, from runoff to SNTV, from STV to the D’Hondt method. (According to the list, Hong Kong uses AV, too. Not sure why it doesn’t count alongside Australia & Co., but apparently not.)

There are, also, around 30 possible systems which could be used. According to math, this means that if you split the methods between the 187 countries (purely for argument’s sake) you get 6.2 countries for each method.

The second most popular system seems to be ‘runoff’, with 76 countries using it (by the way, the numbers don’t exactly add up because some countries use multiple systems depending on certain criteria of the time). That means runoff is 3 users behind FPTP. If we were voting on runoff instead of AV, would the No campaign be saying we shouldn’t use it because it’s less popular than FPTP?

In this rambling post, my point is simply this: there are a hell of a lot of different voting systems, and because few people use one does not mean that system is bad.

TLDR: Few people may use it, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

This point cleverly shrouds a basically true statement with a false and confusing one.

On the face of it, it evokes an image of people being randomly handed more ballot papers on the day. Of course, this isn’t the case. What they mean is that some people’s second and third preferences count while other’s do not.

However, this argument is deeply flawed.

The principal reason for this is that AV doesn’t mean you have more votes, it means you have more opportunities to change your vote. If your first choice party is eliminated, your vote becomes irrelevant because they have, essentially, lost, and your vote changes to your second preference.

In fact, this argument would be better placed with the Yes to AV campaign: if you get “more votes”, your vote changes from your first preference to your second – something you wanted less – so shouldn’t actually be something you want to happen. In an ideal world, your first preference would always be used.

And yet the No campaign would have you believe that, say, BNP voters get five votes and that decent, normal Conservative voters get just one. Which, as we just discussed, isn’t the case at all.

And that brings us to a second point: the BNP. Surely, if the BNP voters do get more than one vote their votes transferred, then this can only be good? Suddenly, you take what the No campaign characterises as evil people voting for the BNP and turn them into Labour voters. Again, a point which the No campaign makes as a disadvantage is really an advantage.

(While we are on the topic – the crux of this argument made by No to AV is that “BNP voters get more than one vote, and this is terrible – but it doesn’t matter that Green Party voters get more than one vote”, which I think is an abhorrent thing to say. BNP voters are not evil people who shouldn’t be able to vote. Sure, most people may not agree with the party (a typical nonsense quotation from their manifesto is “At current immigration and birth rates, indigenous British people are set to become a minority well within 50 years. This will result in the extinction of the British people, culture, heritage and identity.”) But, because we don’t agree with them doesn’t mean we should ban them from democracy. BUT, I digress…)

So, although you can make a preference for more than one party under AV, these aren’t individual votes, because one vote becomes redundant if another is taken. The terminology used is that your vote is “transferred”, but I’ve yet to see the word transferred used in No to AV literature…

Once again, it’s a case of a half truth being worded to make AV sound like an undemocratic, evil system. Don’t believe it…

TLDR: Everybody gets one vote with FPTP and AV.

What could the British understand better than tea and beer?