AV stands for the Alternative Vote and is a voting system where the electorate, that's you, can rank the candidates in order of preference, rather than only being able to express your opinion about one person. On 5th May 2011 the British public are being asked in a referendum to vote if they want to change to this new AV system.
In the United Kingdom we currently elect our politicians using a voting system called First Past the Post, this is where all the votes are counted up and the candidate with the most wins. Sounds simple, but it does have one important drawback. And that is that a candidate can win even though the majority of the votes were not for them.
Let me explain how, for simplicity I'll use rounded numbers. Let's assume 4 candidates received the following number of votes, 7,000 to the blue party, 6,000 to the red party, 4,000 to the yellow party and 3,000 to the green party. That's 20,000 votes in total, but only 35% of them were for the candidate with the most votes, the one for the blue party. In other words, the majority of the voters, 65%, voted against the blue party. Yet, in the First Past the Post system, the blue party candidate would have been declared the winner.
In the 2010 general election the conservative party won the most seats. However, when you add up all the individual votes cast by everyone across the entire country, nearly 64% of the electorate voted for a different party. The Alternative Vote is the first step in attempting to redress the balance.
It works by asking you to rank the candidates in order of preference. So if, for example, you liked the red party the most, then the yellow party, then blue and finally green, you'd vote by putting a number 1 next to the red party candidate, a 2 next to the yellow party, a 3 for the blues and a 4 for the greens.
It does not, as some people have claimed, mean you get several votes. You can still only vote once, but instead you get to list the candidates in the order in which you like them. If you only like one party and have no preference in order for the other parties, you can of course choose to just put a number 1 next to your favourite candidate and ignore the rest.
The way that it works when deciding who the winner is, is by counting up everyone's first preference. If the candidate with the most votes has less than 50% of all the votes then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the second preference for everyone who voted for that candidate is counted and added to the ballot, this continues until someone has at least 50% of the vote, or there are no preferences left.
In the example I provided earlier, the green party would be the first one eliminated. Then, all the voting cards for the people who put the green party in the first position would be collected and re-counted using their second preference. If we assume 2,000 second preferences were for the yellows and 1,000 for the reds, the votes would now be distributed thus: 7,000 to both the blues and reds and 6,000 to the yellows.
We still wouldn't have a majority, so the yellow party, the one now with the least number of votes would be eliminated, all the voting cards where the yellows were first or second preference would be collected and re-counted, but this time choosing the third preference. Let's say 1,000 chose the blue party and the rest red, the red party candidate would have 60% of the vote and would be declared the winner.
Why is this fairer than the First Past the Post system? Well, in the example above the majority of the electorate prefer the winning candidate to the runner up, only 40% like the second candidate more. Therefore, the winner can truly say they stand for the majority. Remember, you wouldn't have to work any of that out, that would be done by the counters, all you'd have to do is put the candidates in order from most to least favourable.
Changing our election system will incur a small cost, most of which will actually be in running the referendum, money we wouldn't get back regardless of the outcome. Nevertheless, this is something a few have objected to. Let me put this cost in perspective, our nation spends more on defence each week running military campaigns like those attempting to bring democracy to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, than the total one off cost of switching to AV, that's one week of defence spending versus a lifetime of electoral reform! So it really is a very small price to pay to make our electoral system more fair and democratic.
References:
- AV referendum: Everything you need to know | Politics | guardian.co.uk
- BBC NEWS | Election 2010 | Results | United Kingdom - National Results
- Instant-runoff voting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Yes to fairer votes - Yes to AV - Alternative Vote
- NO to AV » Against the Alternative Vote
- How much will AV cost? | Full Fact
- Ministry of Defence | About Defence | Organisation | Key Facts about Defence | Defence Spending
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