What Is AV And Why Do We Need It?

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.

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References:

1. AV referendum: Everything you need to know | Politics | guardian.co.uk
2. BBC NEWS | Election 2010 | Results | United Kingdom - National Results
3. Instant-runoff voting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
4. Yes to fairer votes - Yes to AV - Alternative Vote
5. NO to AV » Against the Alternative Vote
6. How much will AV cost? | Full Fact
7. Ministry of Defence | About Defence | Organisation | Key Facts about Defence | Defence Spending

Why Did It Take So Long For The Winner Of The Election To Become The Prime Minister?

We have just heard that David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party, has this evening become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain. But the election was held 5 days ago and his party had the greatest number of elected Members of Parliament, and the most number of votes cast in its favour. So why has it taken so long for him to be declared as Gordon Brown's successor?

In Britain we have a system that elects local candidates, not a US style presidential system. Each winning candidate in every constituency takes one of 650 seats in the House of Commons. Each individual in this lower chamber represents their people back in their local constituency. If more than 50% of these seats are held by one political party then that party is said to represent the majority of the people and is thus entitled to choose its leader as the Prime Minister.

And therein lies the problem. David Cameron's Conservative party only holds 306 seats, 20 short of a majority (disregarding the fact the Sinn Fein MP's won't take their seats and the one ward, Thirsk & Malton, which hasn't yet elected an MP due to the death of a candidate). This means that the Conservative party cannot be said to represent the people.

This principle of a majority government is deeply enshrined in British democracy. Each bill, or law, that the government proposes is voted on by every MP. If less than half of the MP's vote in favour of the legislation then it is not passed and the law doesn't change. And it is exactly for this reason that minority governments are so ineffective.

Mr. Cameron had only one option if he wanted to form an effective, decisive government that represented the people, and that was to discuss with the leaders of other parties the possibilities of forming a coalition, thus making up the number of seats needed to form a majority. The most obvious choice was the Liberal Democrat party. If you combine both their seats together, they would have 363 seats, a comfortable majority of 37 seats.

So what's the problem, why wasn't that done last Friday? Well; the Tories and the Lib Dems have core values, policies, ways of doing things, which are completely opposed. For example, the Conservative party wants to raise the Inheritance Tax threshold to £1 million, this would only benefit people set to inherit between £325,000 and one million pounds, in other words, some of the richest people in our society. The Liberal Democrats on the other hand wanted to raise the threshold at which basic rate tax is paid to £10,000, which would benefit everyone earning over £6,475, some of the poorest people in our society.

Just these two manifesto pledges demonstrate how different the parties are. The Tories represent the values to the right of centre and the Lib Dems to the left. And although it may look as if the people haven't decisively voted in favour of any particular party, they have decisively voted for a neither right wing, nor a left wing government. A Lib Dem/Tory pact would represent exactly this.

What has been happening over the past few days is that Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has been talking with David Cameron trying to find concessions that both parties can agree on. As part of this process Mr. Clegg has also been in talks with the Labour party. Not with any real expectation that they could work with them to form a government, but to prove to the electorate that they considered every avenue.

The debates were no doubt heated, and certainly went on well into the night. Bear in mind that any deal is not just up to the leaders of the parties, but of their MP's and senior party members. One of the biggest concessions the Liberal Democrats wanted was a referendum on electoral reform, and this is exactly what many Tory members very much didn't want. There were also many Lib Dem members that felt a deal with the Conservatives was impossible as it went against what the two parties believed in.

But finally, after several days a deal has been struck. David Cameron will be the 12th Prime Minister since our Queen's coronation, Gordon Brown has resigned, not only as PM, but also as the leader of the Labour party. It has also been rumoured that Nick Clegg will be offered the post of deputy PM and that George Osborne will step aside and let Ken Clarke take the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer with the Liberal Democrat's Vince Cable as his deputy.