AV And You

Over many weeks and months the AV debate has been raging, and the mudslinging from both sides has in my mind completely missed the point.

I have already voted via my postal vote, and I voted No. I will try and lay out the reasons why I voted No. I won't discuss my political affiliation, but perhaps it will become obvious to some as I write!

This referendum is not a referendum about electoral reform. The question is not "do you want a system other than FPTP?", and it is not "should the electoral system be reformed in some way?". That's the key point to make. In both of those questions I would give it a resounding Yes! But the question is: Is an AV system better than a FPTP system?

First, a little personal history of my experience with politics and voting. I was born and raised in Scotland, and I turned 18 two weeks AFTER the 2005 election, much to my annoyance. But I have always followed politics. Non-scottish readers may wonder why I would mention the fact that I'm scottish in this section. The reason for that, of course, is that the Scottish Parliament does not have a First Past the Post system of electing its members. The Scottish parliament elects 129 MSPs, 73 of which are elected through FPTP in constituencies, and the other 56 are elected through a proportional regional list system. The net effect is that parties shares of the seats more closely reflect their share of the vote. That system always seemed really sensible to me, and I didn't understand at the time (when I was a lowly teenager) why Westminster didn't use a similar system.

Fast forward to 2010, my first General Election as a voter (thanks to my annoying mid-May 2005 18th birthday). My constituency is a marginal between two parties I wouldn't vote for, with others that I might vote for sitting on far less than 20% of the vote, so no chance of getting in. Nevertheless, I did vote for the party I actually wanted, even though I knew my vote wouldn't really count in the grand scheme of things.

Then, a couple of months later, we have a new government, and a referendum on AV has been announced. At first, I'm thinking "Great! electoral reform is good! I would love my vote to have more of a say, and I'd love westminster to work more like the Scottish Parliament!"

Then I found out what AV was. AV is essentially the same as FPTP, but with the chance of second and third choice preferences counting. Oh... But I wanted something more proportional! Maybe AV will turn out to be an improvement after all. I'll look into it. And so I did.


First Past the Post is a system with a number of flaws, but also benefits. I'll address some of the key points here.

"FPTP allows MPs to get in on ~30% of the overall vote". A common claim as to why FPTP is bad. A similar claim is "FPTP winners don't reach the post because they don't need 50% of all votes" or something along those lines. Honestly, both of those claims are poppycock, and I'll explain why.
In a perfect system, the will of the voters would be reflected exactly in the MPs they send to the House. But both AV and FPTP are systems of "One MP from One Constituency". Thus, no matter what the breakdown of voters preferences is, each constituency only elects one member, and so many people will be left out, no matter what the result. First Past the Post is a simple system of "whoever gets more votes than anyone else wins". The "post" in the metaphor is not a specific number. It's simply that after the votes are counted, the one with the most votes wins. If only 30% of voters voted for the candidate that won, then that's still the correct result. Because he got more votes than the other candidates. He won the metaphorical race. The point is not that 70% of voters voted for different candidates, it's that he got the most votes.
Now, the point of AV is that it is supposed to eleminate this issue. Each candidate requires 50% of the votes to be elected. If he doesn't get 50% of the votes, votes are reshuffled and second choices are reallocated. There are two extreme scenarios, really. One scenario is the very safe seats. These are generally rural conservative seats, and urban labour seats. In each case, 50-60% of the vote for the winner is not unusual. In those cases, AV will not make a difference, and will do nothing to ease the frustration of living in a safe seat of a party you do not like.
The other extreme is a marginal seat; which under FPTP is won by a margin of less than a couple of thousand votes. This is the only kind of seat in which AV can really make a measurable difference. Under FPTP, the person with the most votes wins. Under AV, nobody wins, and votes of minor parties (which are eliminated first) are reallocated; so a UKIP supporter could vote UKIP first choice, even though he expects to see them eliminated, and conservative second, because that's his favourite major party, or a Green supporter could vote 1st Green, 2nd Lib Dem, 3rd Labour, for the same reason. Well, that's all very well and good, but what would it actually change, in a marginal constituency? Well, the will of the voters of losing parties are reallocated so that the winner is at least partially supported by the majority of people in the constituency. Well, ok, that sounds great in principle. Make sure people actually win seats instead of winning on the lottery of a few hundred votes. But hold on a second, this AV system hasn't done that at all! Whichever party won still was only the first choice of around ~30% of the voters. The rest will have said "I want this other guy. But I guess I could live with the guy that won after all". And that's exactly what FPTP is already doing. A Green voter in a LibDem marginal may have had his vote eventually counted for the LibDems, but he still voted green, and will be disappointed that his candidate didn't get in. And that brings me back to the first point, of One MP, One Constituency. If a constituency only elects one MP, everyone who didn't directly vote for him will feel left out. That's the nature of the system, whether it's AV or FPTP. Personally, I think that's a bad system. I think that MPs should be elected proportionally, to let parties other than the Big Three and the Nationalists get some seats, to get a share of seats representative of the share of the votes, and to feel like my vote mattered no matter what constituency I live in. But with One MP One Constituency that cannot happen. Full stop. In any constituency where popular opinion is divided (a marginal), then no matter what the outcome is, people have not had thier will accurately reflected, and the bigger parties getting 30-40% of the national vote share end up getting way more than that as a percentage of overall seats.

Now, some AV supporters will probably be saying at this point "See? You think FPTP is bad! Therefore we should vote AV, because it lets the government know that we want change!" But that is entirely flawed logic, becuase AV still has the same problems. There are still unsurmountable safe seats. There is still tactical voting (if you don't believe me, go read articles about how AV works in Australia). There is still the feeling of "The candidate I wanted didn't win! now I'm represented by someone other than my first choice!".
As I said at the very beginning, the referendum is not asking "Do you think FPTP is bad?" or "Do you think we need political reform?" it's asking if AV is a better system than FPTP. The AV system still has all of the flaws of FPTP. It does not change the result of the majority of seats, and in those where it does, it can be considered flawed, due to the nature of party alliances and tactical voting.

Ok, so I've established that neither system is what I would want in an ideal world. That still leaves open the point of "You may as well vote for reform, even if it's a crap reform, as it lets them know we want more reform" kind of idea. And while this may be a valid point, it is also highly speculative. A Yes vote would mean we're using a system equally as bad as FPTP, but have voted for it. So in 10 years time the government isn't say "look, they wanted reform in 2011, let's go further!"; they could just as easily say "they voted for AV, so we're using AV". Likewise, if we vote No, in 10 years time they could just as easily say "they voted No, therefore they like the current system and we're keeping it" as say "they voted No to AV because AV wasn't enough of a change for them, let's see if they want a bigger change". The point I am making is that there's no way to tell the future, and voting Yes to an equally bad system is senseless, since the outcome of "future reforms" is so uncertain.

So why No rather than Yes, if there is no clear advantage to either system or to either vote? The answer to this is that of proportionality. While AV makes no difference in safe seats (held by major parties - the Big 3 plus Scottish and Welsh nationalists), it can and will make a difference in marginal seats. But think about that for a moment. Sure, most marginal seats are major party seats. But we also have independent MPs, and even a Green MP! The AV system would drastically favour major parties over minor parties and independents. Under FPTP, 31.3% of Brighton Pavillion voters voted Green, giving the Greens a seat. But 31.3% is not enough to please AV supporters. They demand 50% when other preferences are taken into account. Even in this case, where more voters voted for Green than anyone else, there is no guarantee that other preferences would line up to elect the Greens. And in fact, the major parties would receive an advantage, since it requires minor parties to get an even MORE concentrated base of support in order to get seats. FPTP is better than AV for minor parties.

I don't want a repeat of the 2010 election, where 3.1% of people voted UKIP and gave them no seats; 1.9% voted BNP and got no seats, and 1.0% voted green and only got them one seat; whereas 1.7% voted SNP and got them 6 seats, due to their concentrated support in Scotland. I want a system where the proportion of people voting for a party reflects the proportion of MPs representing that party in parliament. I do not want the "miserable little comrpomise" that is AV. I do not want to vote for a system which is essentially more useless than FPTP for reflecting the will of the people.

I want genuine reform; not AV. And that's why I voted NO.

Now, I wrote this relatively quickly, and in one sitting, so it's probably pretty rambling, and I've probably left out many important points which crossed my mind at one point. But the tl;dr is this:

AV has no real benefits over FPTP, and eliminates none of FPTP's flaws; while its only effect would be to shift marginal seats towards the major parties. A vote for AV is not a vote for reform; it is a vote for AV. AV needs to be substantially better than FPTP in order to secure my vote; and it didn't.