The Alternative Vote System

Well, the political news is full of the planned Commons vote-on- referendum for electoral reform.

The system to be voted on is a classic – the old ‘AV’ system. This is no surprise. Elements of the Labour party have long preferred the Alternative Vote as the basis for electoral reform (though I suspect that the majority of that parliamentary party has never quite seen the point).

The main two advantages of AV:

• All MPs would have the support of a majority of their constituents,

• It eliminates the need for tactical voting. Electors can vote for their first-choice candidate without fear of wasting their vote.

The main two disadvantages of AV:

• It is prone to a certain amount of 'Donkey voting', where voters rank candidates randomly, not knowing enough about all of them to make an informed decision.

• It would not do anything to end the relentless focus on a handful of key marginal seats.

The political motivations of Labour’s move appear to be twofold. Firstly, they hope to show up the Conservatives as visibly opposed to a reform that, following the whole Adventure of the Abused Expenses, may be viewed as a popular measure to hand stronger accountability to the public.

The other reason boils down to electoral mathematics: by building the mandate for electoral reform now, Labour is eyeing a future election where the Conservatives are still broadly the most popular party nationally, but will be unable to build anything resembling Labour’s 1997-2005 unofficial super majority in the Commons. It’s possible that serious treatment of voting reform could only ever emerge from a vaguely leftist, unpopular government.

Very few Tories support any Proportional representation system. Personally, I would prefer us to slim down parliament, establish larger constituencies which would allow us to use Single Transferable Vote (STV), by far the fairest form of PR which preserves individual votes for individual candidates, and a constituency link - although it would be a much larger constituency.

At present - There is only one reason that I could support this move towards AV would be because it would shut the Lib Dems up. Actually, no matter what happens, they’d have to shut up: if they voted against it, they’d have said no to the change, and if they said yes, they’d have to be satisfied with AV.