Posts Tagged ‘Alternative Vote’

The preferential ballot favours the party with the most first preference votes

I have written several posts looking at the growing popularity of the preferential ballot/the alternative vote (AV) here in Canada – see this recent one, for example. I even attempted a redo of the 2011 Canadian federal election using the preferential ballot rather than our current FPTP. As I explained in that post, and in others, the big problem in attempting to forecast how the election would have played out using AV was the absence of data concerning voters’ preferences. Some polling firms would (and still do) regularly ask people which party was their second choice, but no one ever looked at voters’ potential 3rd, 4th, etc. choices.

However, a new poll by Abacus Data has done just that. According to Eric Grenier, in this article in the Globe and Mail, the poll asked respondents to rank seven parties from 1 to 7 (in other words, it used full preferential rather than optional preferential). I cannot find this data on the Abacus website. Mr. Grenier examined the numbers and posits that using a preferential ballot “would limit the ability of the Conservatives to win elections”:

With a preferential ballot, however, the Conservatives would come out further ahead. They would lead in 147 ridings on the first ballot (after distributing the marginal support for the smaller parties), compared to only 108 for the New Democrats, 76 for the Liberals, four for the Bloc Québécois, and three for the Greens (primarily due to an anomalous result in the poll in Atlantic Canada).

The Conservatives would have majority support in 60 ridings and win those automatically, while the NDP would win 23 seats on the first ballot and the Liberals 11. But that Tory advantage would disappear once the instant run-off was conducted.

The Conservatives would lose their first ballot lead in 30 ridings, and be reduced to only 117. The New Democrats would move ahead in 18 more seats and take 126, while the Liberals would win 17 more ridings and increase their total to 93. The Greens would hold on to two of the three seats in which they led, while the Bloc Québécois would lose all four.

I am not entirely certain how he comes to that conclusion. The last paragraph quoted above is particularly confusing to me.

Despite Mr. Grenier’s assertions at the outset of the article that the preferential ballot “is used in many jurisdictions around the world”, the only really comparable example available to us is Australia. Full preferential (where voters have to rank every single candidate on their ballot for the vote to count) is used at the federal level to elect the House of Representatives, and in some states, while a couple of states use optional preferential, where voters can choose to rank as many or as few candidates as they want. Indeed, many opt to rank only one candidate and optional preferential becomes a de facto FPTP ballot. This is what happened when AV was used in some provinces here in Canada in the past.

What Mr. Grenier seems to overlook is that the preferential ballot, in particular optional preferential, always favours the party which receives the most first preference votes – at least going by Australia’s long history with this form of voting. Grenier rightly notes that the Conservatives “would have majority support in 60 ridings and win those automatically”. However, things are a bit more complicated after that. Going by Australia’s experience, Conservative candidates would not, as Grenier posits, “lose their first ballot lead in 30 ridings” based on second preferences. It all depends on how close those Conservative candidates are to the 50%+1 needed to win the seat under AV. The closer they are to that mark, the fewer votes transfers they require. Consequently, a Conservative candidate with 45% of the vote on the first ballot count, would most likely still win the seat because they need far fewer votes to boost them over the 50% mark. Even if they were further from the 50% target, say at 40%, but the 2nd place candidate was well behind, say at 30%, the Conservative would still most likely win. Only in instances where two candidates were quite literally neck and neck on the first ballot count would the outcome be up in the air.

Readers interested in preferential voting should regularly read Antony Green’s Election Blog. Green is an Australian elections expert who blogs about both federal and state elections in that country, which, I reiterate, is really the only jurisdction at all comparable to Canada which uses the preferential ballot. As Green explains in this post:

At the 2010 Federal election, 64 of the 150 seats were won by a candidate with a majority on first preferences, and a further 75 won by the highest polling candidate at the start of the count after the further distribution of preferences. Optional preferential voting would have had little impact on these 139 contests.

However, in the 11 contests where the candidate leading on first preferences did not win, optional preferential voting could have changed the result.

(…)

The lesson here is that optional preferential voting always advantages the party with the highest first preference vote.

In other words, in the 2010 federal election in Australia, a majority of seats (139 out of 150) were won by the candidate who was ahead after the first count. Sixty-four were won by a majority on the first ballot, and 75 were won on subsequent ballots – by the candidate who’d been in first place on the first count. That is using full preferential. Only in 11 instances did the candidate who’d been leading on the first ballot fail to actually win the seat. Had optional preferential been used instead, in only 3 cases would the candidate in the lead after the first ballot have failed to win.

It is good that a polling firm here in Canada has finally started to explore voters’ preferences beyond their 1st and 2nd choices, but I don’t think Mr. Grenier fully understands how AV tends to play out – at least based on what happens in Australia.

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Preferential voting isn’t the solution some think it might be

There have been a growing number of columns and articles in various Canadian media over the past few months bemoaning the state of our parliamentary democracy and proposing various changes which might improve the situation. More often than not, electoral reform is mentioned – either in the column itself, or by a reader commenting on the piece.

There does seem to be a growing recognition or acceptance that the First-Past-the-Post voting system doesn’t quite work the way people would like. I won’t say it doesn’t work the way it should because it works exactly as it should. It simply isn’t the ideal system for multi-party democracies.

Inevitably, in these discussions, someone proposes some form of proportional representation, usually Mixed-Member-Proportional, where most MPs would be elected the usual way, but then each party’s numbers would be topped up with list MPs to more closely reflect the party’s actual percentage of the vote. And also inevitably, many other people chime in denouncing any form of PR because it leads to coalition government which is of course completely unstable – just look at (insert name of favourite basketcase country here).

The voting system change that seems to garner (or be garnering) the most support is the very one the UK rejected in the 2011 referendum – the Alternative Vote (AV), or preferential voting. As I’ve explained in the very, very many posts I wrote during the lead-up to that referendum, under AV, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. To be elected, a candidate has to get over 50% of the votes cast. If no candidate tops 50% after the first count, then the candidate with the lowest vote total is dropped from the ballot and the votes for that candidate are redistributed based on the second preferences indicated by voters. This process continues until someone ends up with over 50%. See this post I wrote back in 2011 to explain to British readers how the vote would work.

AV isn’t used in a lot of places. Australia is the best example available of a western democracy which uses it. At the federal level, they use “full prefential voting” to elect the House of Representatives (a completely different system is used to elect Senators – see this handy guide to voting systems used in Australia). That simply means that voters have to rank every single candidate on the ballot. I believe they can leave one candidate unranked, and that will be counted as their last choice, but if they leave more than one candidate unranked, the ballot is rejected. At the State level, some states also use full preferential to elect their Legislative Assemblies, while others use “optional preferential”. Under this variant, voters can rank as many or as few candidates as they want – this was the model proposed in the UK. Under optional preferential, voters can treat their ballot as a FPTP ballot if they so desire – voting for one candidate and one candidate only.

The Alternative Vote appeals to many because it is fairly simple (not quite as simple as FPTP, but certainly far less complex than other voting systems out there), and it would address the issue of MPs being elected with minority support. As I’ve also repeatedly blogged, the majority of MPs in Canada win their seat with less than 50% of the vote cast in their riding – sometimes a lot less. AV would put an end to that, in theory, at least.

It is really important to understand that this is the only advantage or benefit AV has over FPTP. In many ways, it can lead to even more distorted results than FPTP currently does, e.g. a single party winning even more seats than it might have under FPTP. It is not at all proportional, so it won’t put an end to majority governments formed by a party with much less than majority support, meaning many voters will continue to feel as if their votes don’t count.

Each form of AV also presents other problems. Full preferential, where a voter would have to rank every single candidate on the ballot paper, would force many – probably most voters -  into making what can only be described as artificial choices. Some voters simply don’t have a second choice – they vote for one party and one party only, and would have no desire to even attempt to rank any other candidates. Other voters might have an easier time ranking the two or three major parties on the ballot, but here’s the big problem. Most ballot papers in Canada have several candidates listed, often as many as 10 or so. Apart from the candidates representing the three or four major parties in the country, there are also a large number of candidates representing fringe parties most people have never heard of, as well as candidates running as independents. Leaving aside the one-party-only people, for everyone else, it would be a very trying experience, if not even a complete joke, to try to rank the fringe and independent candidates. And never mind trying to rank candidates you’ve never heard of, what about having to rank candidates you dislike equally? Think about this for a minute, about how many candidates were actually listed on your ballot the last time you voted. Now imagine having to rank every single one of those individuals in order of preference in order for your ballot to count.

So go with optional preferential – problem solved. Indeed. But let’s remember that the only advantage AV has over FPTP is that it is supposed to ensure that the MP elected is elected with over 50% support in that riding. While most think that means “50% of the votes cast”, if you’re using optional preferential, what you end up with is someone elected with 50% of the votes still in play, which may be a very different number from the total number of votes cast. Under optional preferential, voters can choose to cast their vote for one candidate only, and indeed, many do just that. This is a phenomena known as “plumping”. Optional preferential has been used in Canada in the past, in three different provinces, and I have a post looking at what happened in those provinces during the time they used optional preferential. As you can see, the plumping rate was quite high – sometimes over 60%. That means only a minority of people were actually ranking more than one candidate. I am willing to guess that at best, most voters who do bother to rank will rank only two or three candidates. If the majority of ballots can’t be transferred after the first count, the one advantage AV has over FPTP pretty much disappears.

As well, optional preferential can end up costing parties seats because of voters treating their ballot as a FPTP ballot. See this post by Australian elections expert Antony Green on the recent election in Queensland. There is also evidence that optional preferential disadvantages smaller parties (and independents) – just as FPTP does. As Green points out in this post, wherein he re-does the 2010 Australian federal election using optional preferential rather than full preferential, “optional preferential voting always advantages the party with the highest first preference vote.”

It may interest some proponents of AV to know that the State of Queensland is currently conducting an inquiry into its electoral law, and an important focus of that is whether optional preferential should be retained (discussion paper PDF here). From page 37 of that discussion paper (emphasis added):

A key issue with OPV is that it has the potential to become a de facto ‘first past the post’ system. Preferences can be quickly exhausted where a large number of voters choose to vote ‘1’ only. This is particularly problematic where a large number of candidates are contesting a seat. In such a circumstance, it would be possible for a candidate to be elected with only a small proportion of the vote, which could leave the majority of the population unrepresented.

As part of its analysis of a survey of ballot papers from the 2009 state election, the ECQ found that approximately 63.03% of ballot papers were marked ‘1’ only. At the 2006 election, 62.15% of surveyed ballot papers fell into this category. Up until the 2001 election, the number of ballot papers marked ‘1’ only had been significantly lower (20.7% in the 1995 election).

Meanwhile, others in Australia are calling for a move towards proper proportional representation.

While I agree with most that AV/preferential voting might be the easiest electoral reform to implement here in Canada because it isn’t that different from FPTP, there are some very important issues associated with it that need to be carefully considered. It won’t be the panacea many seem to think it might be.

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The length of two swords

Recently, the brilliant UK actor Philip Glenister (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, State of Play, Mad Dogs, Hidden, etc.) was interviewed on the Andrew Marr show in connection with his latest role, that of Chief Government Whip in the play “This House“, which is set in 1974, when Labour had a shaky minority government.The discussion turned to the innately adversarial nature of politics in the UK House of Commons, with Marr noting that the play was in some ways an attack on the British parliamentary tradition, that of two sides against each other, and that underneath, there was a dream of a better way of doing things, a call for politics to be more consensual. Glenister noted that UK was “one of the few democracies, just by the layout of our parliament… it’s in a rectangular shape as opposed to in the round. It’s only one of two in the world.”

If Glenister is correct, and there are only two democracies in the world with rectangular Chambers which force government and opposition to face off against each other on opposing sides, then the Canada is the other one. The Canadian House of Commons, the Senate and most of the Canadian provincial and territorial legislatures are also rectangular, the exceptions being the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut and the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories.

What is being implied here is that layout of the Chamber, government on one side, opposition parties on the other, makes our politics more adversarial because it imposes an “Us vs Them” feel from the outset. This is the same argument put forward by architects in this very interesting article, “The Shape of Debate to Come“.

However, it is debatable to what extent the shape of the chamber might influence how adversarial or consensual debate will be. As Professor White notes in the above article, countries which end up with a more consensual approach to politics also tend to use some form of proportional representation rather than First-Past-the-Post:

But, in an email, he said there was “pretty much zero” chance of more co-operative behaviour in Canadian legislatures. And he put the differences in approach in legislatures such as Wales and Scotland more down to mixed electoral systems, not just first-past-the-post.

He said: ”Unquestionably the opposing rows of benches in standard Westminster parliaments reinforces the adversarial nature of the place; for my students I liken it to opposing armies or sports teams squaring off. At the same time, I see seating arrangements as very much secondary to underlying political culture and prevailing political norms.

“The Manitoba [legislature], which is semi-circular, has exceedingly nasty, adversarial partisan politics, and the US Congress these days is hardly a paragon of non-partisanship.”

Because PR makes it very difficult for any one party to form a majority government on its own, this means that coalition government tends to be the norm in countries which use some form of PR, and that reality alone will require parties to work harder to find some sort of consensus. As Prof. White points out, despite sitting in the round, politics in both Manitoba and the US Congress are very partisan and adversarial, and both jurisdictions use FPTP. The Australian House of Representatives is horseshoe-shaped, and politics Down Under is every bit as partisan as it is up here, particularly in the current minority parliament. Australia uses the Alternative Vote to elect its MPs, a voting system which requires voters to rank the candidates on the ballot in order of preference, and to win the seat, a candidate must gain over 50% of the vote, either outright, or through transferred preferences. AV, like FPTP, is not at all proportional, which may explain why political debate in the House of Representatives is partisan and adversarial.

This summer, it was reported that the UK Parliament could be closed for five years for extensive refurbishment, with MPs and Lords “convened in a replica chamber or a conference centre for the duration of the repair work, which could start in 2015.” This immediately alarmed some. The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson raised the threat of some advocating that a new, refurbished chamber would be “a chance to move the MPs to a lifeless, European style semi-circular chamber that supposedly encourages them to co-operate.” Fraser comments on how deathly boring debate is in the Scottish Parliament, which is circular. He does not mention that Scottish Members of Parliament (MSPs) are elected using Mixed-Member Proportional representation (MMP).

But is the electoral system alone enough to determine how consensual or adversarial politics will be in a given jurisdiction? Thomas Carl Lundberg, in his paper “Politics is Still an Adversarial Business: Minority Government and Mixed-Member Proportional Representation in Scotland and New Zealand“, concluded that while both nations introduced MMP in part to bring about a “new politics”, in the end, “the impact of institutional engineering upon the behaviour of politicians has been limited.” New Zealand adopted MMP in 1996, Scotland in 1999. New Zealand has seen the formation of mostly minority governments under MMP (albeit minority coalition government rather than single-party minority government) supported by other smaller parties through confidence and supply agreements, while Scotland has experienced two terms of majority coalition government, one term of single-party  minority government, and most recently, to the surprise of most, a single-party majority government.

The reasons why MMP has had limited success in curbing adversarial politics in Scotland and New Zealand, according to Lundberg are varied. Long before New Zealand adopted MMP, it had a very strong two-party system (Labour on the left and the National Party on the right) and a long history of single-party majority government. With the introduction of MMP in 1996, that didn’t really change. Politics remained quite adversarial between Labour and the National Party, but both of the main parties learned to work with the much smaller parties in order to form governments.

Scotland on the surface may appear more consensual, but there are other tensions at work. Scotland has a true multiparty system, that is one in which “there are three to five relevant parties which are not separated (polarised) by a large or intense ideological distance” (which isn’t the case in New Zealand). Rather, Scotland’s party system “is characterised by two significant cleavages” – class divisions and “the process of building the UK (with England at the centre dominating the periphery composed of Scotland, Wales and Ireland) in the latter.” The two largest parties in Scotland are Labour and the Scottish National Party – both are centre-left, and they have a long, adversarial relationship dating back before devolution, or to quote the former leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats: “there is a level of visceral hatred between the Nationalists and Labour to this day. So, it just transferred from London to Edinburgh … we just so massively underestimated how important it is for people to have good, personal relationships across all parties.”

Simply put, how adversarial or consensual politics might be in a given democracy will depend on many factors. While the shape of the debating chamber and the voting system used to elect members undoubtedly play a part, changing one or both will not necessarily bring about more polite politics.

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Artificial preferences

There continues to be interest among many Canadians in the Alternative Vote (AV). Most recently the Liberal Party of Canada adopted a resolution calling for the implementation of a preferential ballot for national elections. This blog attempted to redo the May 2011 election using AV, and other bloggers have produced similar posts. This blog continues to get queries from individuals about that AV projection post.

It is fair enough to say that AV is not the preferred option of most who favour electoral reform for one very important reason: it is not at all proportional and will do little to rectify the main failing of First-Past-the-Post (FPTP), namely, the election of a legislature where the number of seats won by the various parties in no way reflects how people actually voted. In some instances, AV can actually lead to even more disproportionate results than FPTP.  Please read this post for a more detailed look at the many problems associated with preferential voting and why it really isn’t an ideal reform. The only issue AV would address is that of MPs being elected with minority support in their ridings. Under AV, it would not be possible to win a seat with less than 50% of the vote cast in a giving riding. Votes would be redistributed based on indicated preferences until one candidate emerged with at least 50% support.

Despite AV’s many glaring shortcomings, the above does redeem it in the eyes of many. However, they may be overlooking a very real issue with AV – and that is the practice known as “plumping”.

Under AV, voters are supposed to rank the candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference. Australia, for federal elections to the House of Representatives, uses compulsory preferences: voters are required to rank each and every candidate on the ballot. Failure to do so results in a spoiled ballot. The Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales use optional preferential voting, meaning voters can rank as few or as many candidates on the ballot as they like. This is where plumping comes into play.

Plumping is the practice of voters indicating support for one and only one candidate. In other words, the voter treats their ballot the same as they would under FPTP – they select one candidate only and refuse to indicate any preferences for any of the others.

The ramifications of this are clear. If a significant percentage of voters refuse to take advantage of an AV ballot and rank candidates in order of preference, this impacts the number of ballots available for vote transfer on subsequent counts. A candidate may well eventually win with 50% of the vote, but the number of votes in play by the final count may be far fewer than the total number cast.

As discussed in this post, AV was used in three provinces in Canada many decades ago (and only briefly in one province).  Professor Harold J. Jansen has studied the use of AV in those provinces and one of his findings is that plumping was very prevalent as the following table shows:

Incidence of “Plumping”: Proportion of Voters Indicating only a First Preference

Manitoba

Alberta

British Columbia

Year

% Plumped

Year

% Plumped

Year

% Plumped

1927

40.7

1926

42.8

1952

33.5

1932

53.9

1930

43.5

1953

27.9

1936

57.6

1935

47.0

1941

Data n/a

1940

38.0

1945

68.1

1944

63.7

1949

65.9

1948

63.7

1953

51.4

1952

52.3

1955

29.8

(Source: Harold J. Jansen, The Political Consequences of the Alternative Vote: Lessons from Western Canada, Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 37:3 (September/septembre 2004) 647-669)

The above numbers are rather disturbing. If well over half of voters refuse to indicate any preferences, that rather undermines the one main advantage of the Alternative Vote. Proponents of AV tend to ignore the fact that a significant percentage of voters really don’t have any second choices. They support one party and one party only, and any “choice” they would make to indicate a preference for other parties would simply be false.

This was an argument against AV that I regularly encountered during the lead-up to to the AV referendum held in May 2011 in the UK. It was especially prevalent on Conservative blogs and forums. Take for example, this piece by Robert Halfon written for ConservativeHome in September 2010. In it, Halfon writes (emphasis mine):

Similarly, the Alternative Vote places an artificial construct on voter’s intentions, forcing them to make second preference choices – before they actually know the result, which inevitably would disproportionately favour the Liberal Democrats as being the ‘centre’ party.

(…)

The beauty of TSB (The Second Ballot system) is both its fairness, and simplicity.  Instead of having an ‘Alternative Vote’ and artificial second preferences, a ballot is held a week or two later in which the top two candidates slug it out for pole position.  Not only does this give electors a few extra days to consider their options based on the first result, it ensures that they are not forced into making a ‘saccharine’ second choice (which AV would force them to do), before they know whether or not their first preference candidate will get over 50% of the vote.

You may well disagree with Mr. Halfon that any preferences indicated on an AV ballot would be “artificial”, but that is indeed the reality for a great number of voters. They don’t want any party but the party they support to win, and so would most likely opt to plump their ballot. If past experience in Western Canada is anything to go by, the only real advantage of AV over FPTP would be undermined by voters refusing to rank more than one candidate and instead treating the election as FPTP election. If only a minority of voters are ranking candidates, a candidate may still end up with over 50% of the votes still in play, but that might result in a “false” majority.

The obvious way to avoid plumping is to adopt compulsory preferences as used in federal elections in Australia, in other words, forcing voters to rank every single candidate on the ballot paper. This would certainly give more credence to Mr. Halfon’s claims of artificial choices. People might grudgingly force themselves to seriously rank 2-3 candidates, but some ridings in Canada have 8-10 candidates on the ballot. Most of these individuals represent fringe parties, or are running as independents. I doubt very much that most voters would be putting serious thought into how they rank the majority of the candidates on their ballot paper. Being forced to vote that way might actually lead to a decrease in voter turnout.

Beyond the issue of plumping, which rarely gets discussed by proponents of AV, Jansen’s paper explores many other aspects of AV based on Alberta’s, Saskatchwan’s and British Columbia’s experience with that voting system. His conclusions include the following points:

  • AV differed little from FPTP in most aspects of its operations;
  • none of the three Western provinces experienced any increase or decrease in turnout that could be attributed to AV;
  • AV contributed to higher rates of ballot rejection in all three provinces;
  • it was associated with an increase in the number of parties seeking office (electoral parties), but not with an increased number of parties represented in the legislature (legislative parties);
  • AV did little  to encourage less adversarial politics or to encourage coalitions to form between the parties (hence the propensity of voters to plump their ballots);
  • there is little evidence that election outcomes under AV would have been any different under FPTP – only a minority of contests required multiple counts and of those, only a tiny fraction of candidates who were not leading after the first count managed to attract enough second and subsequent preferences to win.

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Nicked – the musical (revisited)

Back in February, I wrote about a musical being produced in the UK based on the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. Entitled Nicked, it was staged in Suffolk on 30 April, as part of the HighTide Festival. You can read a review of it here.

And even better, you can see a performance of one of the numbers from the show on YouTube. The song is called Tinderbox and features Labour leader Ed Miliband trying to drive a wedge between Nick Clegg and David Cameron. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would love to see the entire show.

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How the AV referendum killed the republican movement

In an earlier post, I wrote that referendums aren’t very useful means of deciding key policy issues and that the entire referendum campaign on the Alternative Vote has been rather disgraceful.

This view has only been reinforced following news today that the No side admits it used completely made-up figures when it claimed adopting AV would cost £250-mn. Of course, this revelation came out on the day of the vote, too late for many who had already voted by postal ballot and who might have voted No in large part because they believed these claims.

However, the way in which the referendum on AV has transpired raises another interesting point. If a referendum on a relatively minor issue such as changing the country’s voting system can be defeated by a campaign based largely on lies, half-truths and hyperbole, how on earth would a referendum on a much more emotional issue, such as doing away with the monarchy be handled?

During the lead-up to the 29 April wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, debate on the continued existence of the monarchy surfaced, with many calling for a move to an elected head of state. I don’t really know how strong the UK’s republican movement is, but there were certainly a fair number of op ed pieces and people commenting that the monarchy was an anachronism, and didn’t reflect a modern, democratic and egalitarian country. Many also pointed out that while the Queen herself remains fairly popular, the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, is not, and that the thought of Charles becoming King would only accelerate the move towards a republic.

However, if the referendum on AV is anything to go by, the big loser here may very well be Britain’s republican movement, as Alex Massie wrote yesterday in the Spectator:

If the British public rejects a relatively minor change to the electoral system there is almost no chance, at any conceivable point in any conceivable future, they will vote for a republic. Custom and the Burkean arguments for custom are powerful things (and probably the best arguments in favour of FPTP). I know that republicans often think that time is on their side and that the stupid people will eventually “wake up”. They won’t. If electoral reform is a goner that’s even more reason to suppose that a republic will, happily, remain an eternally lost cause.

The No2AV side repeatedly claimed that AV wasn’t “British”, and that alone was reason enough to vote against it. If a change to the voting system can be considered an assault on the very essence of what is “British”, how on earth could anyone even contemplate doing away with the monarchy – which predates FPTP by a few centuries at least.

Massie may sound elitist when he writes that the ‘stupid people’ won’t ever wake-up and see the light, but I have to agree with him. People aren’t so much ‘stupid’ as they are indifferent. If they’ve never given much thought to the merits of an elected vs hereditary head of state, they will be easily manipulated during a campaign to move from one to the other. Nothing is more typically British than the monarchy, and if a voting system can be undermined for not being ‘British’, then the idea of an elected head of state could surely be considered treason.

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The May 2011 Canadian election under AV

(Note: If you are looking for statistical data re: the 2 May 2011 Canadian federal election, please visit Elections Canada or the Pundits’ Guide to Canadian Federal Elections [which uses Elections Canada data].)

I came across a couple of blog posts written by people in the UK looking at what transpired in Monday’s general election and arguing that had said election taken place under the Alternative Vote rather than FPTP, the Conservative party would not have emerged with a majority government.

In a previous post, I wrote that my initial impression was that even under AV, the Conservatives would still have emerged with a majority. I hadn’t had a chance to examine riding by riding results, but given how AV has worked in Australia, in most instances, the candidate that emerges in first place after the first count, but short of a majority of votes cast, retains the seat even after preferences are factored in.

I have since had a chance to look at the preliminary results from the May 2 election in some detail.

(Note: what follows is based on preliminary results from the Elections Canada website, not certified final results. Consequently, some of these number might change in the coming weeks. Two seats will undergo mandated recounts due to the closeness of the results.)

Based on the preliminary results available on the Elections Canada website, there were 163 seats (53%) that were won with less than 50% of the vote (out of 308). This is a slight improvement over the 2008 election, I should point out. In 2008, 61% of the seats were won with less than a majority of the vote.

Of those 163 seats, I quickly determined that 136 would have yielded the same outcome under AV. The main reason for this was because in a majority of these ridings, the candidate who finished first was very close to the 50% mark, and so would have required few votes transferred on preferences to achieve a majority. In other instances, the winning candidate was further from the 50% goal, but had a significant lead over the second-place candidate. With such a large gap between first and second, the odds of the candidate in second-place after the first count moving ahead of the first place candidate were at best remote.

This left me with 27 seats that might have had a different outcome under AV.

I decided to try to guesstimate how many of these likely would have changed hands under AV. Please note that my methodology is, to be blunt, deeply flawed. There were no mock AV polls conducted in Canada as occurred in the UK in 2010. I got the impression that some of the UK bloggers I referenced above may have been working on the assumption that, for example, all NDP voters would have indicated Liberals as their second choice, and vice versa, and that few, if any votes would have transferred to Conservative candidates. Others may simply have added up all the votes cast in a given riding for the non-Conservative candidates and found that total to exceed the total votes won by the Conservative, and concluded that under AV, obviously, a non-Conservative would have won. While my methodology is far from scientific, anyone doing what I’ve just described is using an even more flawed methodology.

The closest thing I had that indicated potential second-preference voting trends was an EKOS poll conducted just before the election (April 26-28 2011) which asked voters about their second choice (click on the gallery images and scroll through to find the second choice chart – I can’t link to it directly). EKOS asks this question to try to determine how committed supporters are to their party of choice, not to guess at how they might vote if they could rank candidates. They don’t ask about 3rd or 4th preferences.

The poll indicates two important facts to keep in mind. First, a significant number of those polled (30.6%) stated they had no second choice. This is important because, as we know, not everyone would indicate a second preference on an AV ballot. Of course, they weren’t being asked about second preferences under AV voting, but the fact that many voters are very committed to one party and have next to no interest in other parties matters. Among party supporters, Conservative voters are the least likely to indicate a second preference – 47.4% said they had no second choice. They were followed by Green party supporters (27.4%), BQ supporters (21.7%), NDP voters (17.4%) and Liberals (17.1).

Next, it’s a mistake to assume that NDP, Liberal and Green supporters wouldn’t indicate a Conservative as their second choice. While the Conservatives were the party least likely to be chosen as anyone’s second choice (not counting the BQ since most Canadians can’t vote for BQ candidates), 13.5% of NDP voters, 12.6% of Liberal supporters, 11% of Green supporters and 7% of BQ supporters indicated that the Conservatives were their second choice. That is why it is a huge mistake to conclude that all “progressive” voters would favour another “progressive” party as their second choice.

Conservative supporters’ second choices were: NDP 21%, Liberal 16%, Green 11% and Bloc 0.5%; NDP supporters opted for the Liberals 37.7%, Greens 19%, Conservatives 13.5% and BQ 11%; Liberal supporters said their second choices were: NDP 54%, Conservatives 12.6%, Greens 12.0% and BQ 3.3%, while Green supporters favoured the NDP 40%, Liberals 17%, Conservatives 11% and BQ 2.6%. Finally, BQ voters’ second choices were the NDP 48%, Liberals 13%, Greens 8% and Conservatives 7%.

Using this poll as a guide, to simulate voting under AV using preliminary results from Elections Canada, I first reduced the number of transferable votes for each eliminated party by the percentage of those who indicated they had no second choice. Meaning, if the Green candidate was the first eliminated, I reduced the total number of votes cast for the Greens by 27% since that is how many Green supporters indicated they had no second choices. Before anyone jumps in to criticize this methodology, I know full well that this wouldn’t necessarily hold up if we were actually using AV rather than FPTP, nor would they apply across every riding. For example, I would think that Conservative supporters in provinces outside Alberta would be more likely to rank other candidates, and Conservatives in Alberta even less likely to rank candidates (but since only one seat in Alberta was won with less than 50% of the vote, this is a rather moot point). Still, I preferred to be rather conservative in this exercise and thought it made more sense than simply blindly transferring all the votes cast for a given party.

After I had eliminated those with no second choice, I then redistributed the remaining votes based on the numbers listed above. So of my remaining Green votes, 11% went to the Conservative candidate, 40% to the NDP candidate, etc. I repeated this process, eliminating one candidate then the next, until someone had a majority of the vote.

These preference transfers are problematic on another front. Just as EKOS poll only hints at how voters might have ranked a second preference, there is no way to know how they might have ranked third or fourth preferences. In this exercise, I am treating transferred votes from one party as votes for that party and further tranferring to the next party based on the second party’s overall preferences. Meaning, If I transfer 400 votes from a Green candidate to an NDP candidate in one riding, and the NDP candidate is the next one to be eliminated, I am treating the transferred Green votes as NDP votes and redistributing them as per the EKOS poll results for the NDP (so most would go to the Liberals, then the Conservatives). I have no way of knowing if this is how most Green voters would have ranked candidates on an actual AV ballot. It probably isn’t, which is why this entire exercise is completely hypothetical and should not be held up as any sort of gospel truth.

With all of these caveats in place, my non-statistician calculations lead me to revise my initial assessment.

Had the 2 May 2011 election occurred under the Alternative Vote, it is possible that the Conservatives would not have won a majority government.

Of the 27 seats that I thought might potentially change under AV, 24 of them did, using my horribly flawed methodology described above. Three seats remained the same. Using my new results, the standings in the House of Commons would look like this:

Conservatives 148 (down 19)
NDP 122 (up 10)
Liberals 48 (up 12)
BQ 1 (down 3)
Greens 1 (no change)

The Conservatives lost five seats to the NDP and 14 to the Liberals (mostly in Ontario where the NDP surge caused a horrible spoiler effect, leading to Liberals being defeated by Conservatives. Michael Ignatieff would still have lost his seat in my scenario, however.). The Liberals lose two seats to the NDP, but gain 14 from the Conservatives, for a net gain of 12. The Bloc loses three seats to the NDP.

More interesting to many, is that the NDP and Liberals together would command a majority of 170 seats.

So there you go. As I’ve stressed, repeatedly, my methodology is very imperfect. But it’s the best I have to go on. Perhaps when Elections Canada makes available its raw data, someone else will take a crack at this exercise and end up with different results. I was mostly just having a bit of fun.

 

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The 2011 Canadian Federal election – initial thoughts

(Please see this post for an update – the May 2 election redone using AV.)

I will write a more detailed post at some point in the future once final statistics are available. What follows are simply a few quick observations, mostly aimed at UK readers pondering how to vote in the AV referendum.

Canada’s Conservative party emerged with a strong majority mandate following yesterday’s vote, winning 167 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons – 54% of the seats. They won this with only 39.6% of the popular vote.

The New Democratic Party finished second with 102 seats, 33% of the seats in the House of Commons. They received 30.6% of the vote.

The Liberals finished third, winning 11% of the seats (34) but receiving 18.9% of the vote. The Bloc Quebecois won 4 seats (1.2%) with 6% of the vote and the Green Party picked up its first ever seat in the House of Commons, 0.3% of the seats, but received 3.9% of the vote.

Would this outcome have been different under AV? While I don’t have complete riding by riding final breakdowns yet, I would have to say no. AV tends to produce results similar to what would occur under FPTP. If anything, it might have produced an even stronger Conservative majority. However, in some ridings there was a very definitive spoiler effect in play, which undermined parties other than the Conservatives, and in those instances, the outcome might have been different.

It is important for voters to understand that AV is not proportional. It simply ensures that any MP elected will have majority support in his or her constituency.

However, there was a lot of strategic voting taking place, again, in this election. If voters had the option of AV over FPTP, how they voted may well have been quite different. There would have been more freedom to support parties they want to support rather than vote for parties they don’t particularly like in the hopes of blocking a party they dislike even more. Would that have affected the outcome? Possibly somewhat, but without a more proportional voting system, a Conservative majority was probably inevitable.

Once I have a chance to more closely examine riding by riding results, I will probably write up another post.

 

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How are votes counted under AV?

Quite a few people seem to be looking for a clear explanation of how AV voting will work in the UK if the referendum comes to pass on May 5.

I’ve posted this before, but here is a quick video that provides a very simple explanation, delivered in an amusing way:

For those who want more detail, read on. Please note, this is quite simplified and is meant only to provide an  overview of how AV works. For a more official explanation, please consult the Electoral Commission website.

How to vote

Voters will be handed a ballot very similar to the ones currently used in general elections, with the names of all the candidates standing for election in that constituency listed.

What will be different is that voters will have the option of ranking the candidates, if they so choose. By that I mean, if you want to vote for one party and one party only, you can vote exactly as you do under FPTP by putting a “1″ next to your preferred candidate’s name.

However, under AV, you also have the option of ranking candidates based on your political preferences. For example, if your first choice is the Green party candidate, you would put a “1″ next to their name. If you recognize, however, that there is a good chance that the Greens won’t win that seat, you can then indicate which candidate would be your next preferred choice and mark a “2″ next to their name. You can continue this way, ranking all the candidates on the ballot from your most preferred to your least, or you can choose to rank only a few. For example, if there were eight candidates on the ballot paper, you might opt to rank them: Green 1, Labour 2, Liberal Democrat 3, UKIP 4, Conservatives 5, but then decide that you don’t know enough about the remaining parties to rank them, or simply dislike the remaining ones, and so opt to not rank them.

How the votes are counted

The ballots are counted exactly the same way they are under FPTP on the first count. The difference is that to win the seat, a candidate has to get a majority of the votes cast, rather than simply more votes than the second place candidate. For example, if there are 11,000 valid votes cast in a constituency, to win on the first count, a candidate would have to receive 5501 votes (50% + 1). If a candidate succeeds in getting a majority of the votes cast in that constituency on the first count, then that candidate is declared the winner.

If no candidate receives a majority of the votes cast on the first count, the candidate who finished last is eliminated and this is where the preferences come into play. The ballots cast for that candidate which have a 2nd preference indicated will then be transferred to the vote piles of those second preference candidates and all the votes for the remaining candidates will be recounted a second time. Again, to win, a candidate will have to receive a majority of the ballots still in play. This number might be different than the number required in the first round since not all voters may have indicated a second preference. For example, of the 11,000 votes cast, the last place candidate received 124 votes, but of those 124 votes, 34 had no preferences indicated. Those 34 ballots are retired, so now there are 10,966 votes in play, and a candidate will need 5,484 votes to win. If no candidate again achieves this 50% + 1 mark, this process is repeated. The new last place candidate is eliminated, and their votes redistributed. This process continues until a candidate wins 50% +1 of the votes in play.

For example, suppose we have the following candidates with the following vote totals on the first count:

Smith – 40
Duncan – 35
Grossman – 15
Porter – 6
McNeil – 4
Total ballots: 100

No candidate has a majority (in this case, 51 votes), so McNeil is eliminated. Of McNeil’s 4 votes, 3 have second preferences and they are Grossman 2, Porter 1. The fourth ballot had only a vote for McNeil and nothing else, so it is not transferred.

Smith – 40
Duncan – 35
Grossman – 17
Porter – 7
Total ballots: 99 (because 1 vote had no second preferences indicated and so does not transfer beyond McNeil). Ballots needed for majority: 50.

Porter is then eliminated, and those seven votes redistributed based on preferences: Smith 5, Duncan 2.

Smith – 45
Duncan – 37
Grossman – 17
Total ballots: 99

We still don’t have a candidate with a majority, so Grossman is eliminated and the votes transferred: Smith 15, Duncan 2. The new count is:
Smith 60
Duncan 39

Smith is elected.

In this example, the result didn’t change from the initial first count – Smith was ahead after the first count and remained ahead and won. Going by Australia’s experience with AV, in a majority of instances, this is what will happen under AV – whoever is first on the first count will most likely remain there, especially if they were already very close to the 50% mark. In some instances, however, the final result will be different and the candidate who finished second on the first count will end up winning. It is possible, but extremely unlikely, that a candidate who is third on the first count might win the seat. Since 1981, in 1500 elections using this same form of AV in the Australian states of New South Wales and Queensland, this has happened only once.

Ballots that rank only one candidates will be counted only for that candidate each time there is a new round of counting, until that candidate is eliminated (or wins). Once that candidate is eliminated at any stage, the vote will remain in that pile and will not transfer to another candidate.

This is why some argue that some voters have more votes than other voters. This isn’t strictly true – everyone has one ballot and the option to rank candidates or not. If you vote for only one candidate, and that candidate finishes third out of 9 candidates, your vote will still be counted for that candidate each time there is a new count following the elimination of a lower-finishing candidate, until a candidate achieves a majority of the remaining votes. Of course, if you vote for only one candidate and that candidate is eliminated on the first count, your ballot is no longer in play. Similarly, if you did rank other candidates, but they all get eliminated before your first choice, and it’s your first choice that is now being eliminated, none of your other preferences will come into play since those other candidates have already been eliminated. For example, let’s say you vote this way:

UKIP 1
Greens 2
Monster Raving Loony Party 3
Respect 4
You don’t rank the other candidates: Lib Dem, Labour, Conservative.

After the first count, the UKIP candidate is 4th behind Labour, the Lib Dem, and the Conservative. Monster Raving Loony Party is the first to be eliminated. Your vote stays in the UKIP pile. Respect is then eliminated. Then the Green candidate. Then the UKIP candidate is eliminated. Because you ranked only the Greens, MRLP and Respect candidates, and they’ve already been eliminated, none of your transfers will be used.

Some argue that this gives people who vote for smaller parties an advantage, since their vote gets counted several time (potentially). However, when you think about it, it isn’t actually an advantage to have all your preferences come into play. If you rank several candidates, and all or most of those preferences are used, it means that your first-choice party is eliminated, and your second-choice party, and your third-choice party, and your fourth-choice party. However, if a voter has only one preference come into play, that means their party is either the party that wins or the party that comes second. In the first case, they obviously do better by far than the person who had their vote transferred many times. In the second case, it is not clear: if you vote Labour and Labour come second to the Conservatives, then you might well have preferred the Liberal Democrats or the Greens, however, they were behind Labour and so already eliminated, and right until the final round your vote was counting for your favourite party rather than for lower and lower choices. So is it really an unfair advantage to have your vote transfer several times? Not when you really think about it. (Source)

I know some will pick holes in this description of voting under AV – my goal here was simply to provide what I hope is a fairly clear explanation of how the voting process will take place, without going into loads of technical details.

It is important to understand that in most cases, the outcome in a given constituency will be the same under AV as it would be under FPTP – the candidate that is first after the first round of counting, but shy of the required 50% + 1 vote, will most likely end up getting that required majority. In some cases, the candidate who was second on the first count might end up moving ahead and winning. It is extremely unlikely that a candidate who finishes third or lower will ever win a seat. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. What AV does is put an end to candidates winning seats with the support of less than 50% of the votes cast (some MPs are elected with as little as 30% of the votes cast in their constituency). If the fact that some people are elected with minority support doesn’t bother you, you may as well vote No in the referendum. But if you believe that an MP needs the consent of those they represent, and that they should have the support of a majority of those they represent, than you should vote Yes to AV.

In the end, we need to remember that elections are not about winners and losers, elections are about consent to be governed. This is the point of the Alternative Vote. If a candidate does not have the consent of the majority of voters to represent their constituency, they have no right to represent them.

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Fisking David Cameron

Fisking: A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form.

The following is my attempt at fisking this essay by Prime Minister David Cameron on why people should vote No to AV. I don’t know how witty it might be, but it’s bound to be somewhat sarcastic and factual. Note: the PM’s text has not been altered, but for considerations of length, I have altered the formatting, merging of some his “paragraphs” together to address a common point.

In four days, Britain votes in a referendum that is critical to our democracy and our future. Normally, when we vote, those votes have a use-by-date. We elect Councillors, Mayors, MPs and governments for four or five years. But the referendum on AV is about voting in a change that is permanent.

(Unless, of course, further reform takes place in the future. Nothing is ever truly permanent in politics.)

Unless enough people turn out to vote on Thursday, Britain is in real danger of exchanging an electoral system that works for one we would come to regret profoundly.

(Problem number one with Cameron’s arguments – he believes the current electoral system actually works. But even if AV is adopted and after a few elections, proves to be a dud, there’s nothing stopping the country from moving back to FPTP, or trying an even better system.)

To me there are four important reasons to save the First-Past-the-Post system we use today.

The first is its simplicity. It’s so simple it can be summed up in one sentence: the candidate who gets the most votes wins.

(True – the candidate with the most votes does win – even if far more people voted against them.)

Just compare that to AV: a confusing mess of preferences, probabilities and permutations.

(Here he assumes that voting under FPTP is very simple for everyone. For a lot of voters, voting under FPTP involve preferences, probabilities and permutations and other varied contortions as they try to decide if they should vote for the candidate they really like, or the candidate they feel might actually have a shot at winning so that their vote “counts”, or for another candidate they don’t like that much but who might have a shot at winning and beating another candidate they really dislike. Yes, FPTP is very simple and straightforward.)

Leaving aside the clear danger that this complexity could encourage negative campaigning – as in Australia, where voters are greeted at polling stations by party apparatchiks with ‘How to Vote’ cards, telling people the exact order in which to rank each candidate – it would also throw up some patently unfair results.

(Because negative campaigning doesn’t exist at all under FPTP? Cameron obviously hasn’t seen any of the ads being run by Conservatives here in Canada during our current election campaign. As for the matter of “party apparatchiks” greeting voters at polling stations with cards telling them how to vote – a) people don’t have to follow those instructions, they are free to vote any way they damn well please, and b) isn’t political campaigning on election day banned in the UK? It is in Canada. As for patently unfair results, is it fair when a party wins a majority despite coming in second in terms of the popular vote? Is it fair when a party receives 35% of the vote and 55% of the seats in one election, while in the next election, a different party wins 36% of the vote but only 47% of the seats? Is it fair that a party see its share of the popular vote increase, but it actually loses seats from one election to the next? Is it far that a party win over a million votes, but fail to elect a single candidate?)

Under AV, the person who comes third in people’s first preferences can end up coming first in the race.

(Barely true. In 30 years of AV in elections in the Australian states of NSW and Queensland, this has happened ONCE. In most instances, whoever is ahead on first preferences will win. Sometimes, the second place candidate will win. Almost never will anyone below second win.)

It makes winners of losers and losers of winners. The result could be a Parliament full of second-choices who no one really wanted but didn’t really object to either.

(The problem here is that under FPTP, with most MPs winning their seat with less than 50% of the votes cast in their constituency, often much less than 50%, it looks as if Parliament is full of MPs whom most of their own constituents didn’t want. Again, the reality of AV is that in the majority of cases where preferences will come into play, the candidate that was ahead on first count will end up the winner. AV will not produce grossly different results than would FPTP, but it will ensure that every MP in the House of Commons is preferred by a majority of voters, even if he or she wasn’t everyone’s first choice.)

The second major strength of First-Past-the-Post is its effectiveness.

Throughout history, it has risen to the demands of the time, often with a brutal decisiveness. That’s what happened when it brought in the Thatcher government in 1979. The British people recognised it was time for change – and the electoral system didn’t let them down. On other occasions, when the public has felt that none of the major parties have all of the answers, it has led to a hung Parliament – as it did last year.

(And AV would in most instances have returned the same result, and perhaps even more so.)

Under AV, such decisiveness is much less likely. It will make hung Parliaments more commonplace and make it more difficult to kick out tired governments.

(Not true. It is the reality of more people voting for parties other than the two biggest that leads to hung parliaments. Canada uses FPTP but has had 3 consecutive hung parliaments in a row, with a 4th likely on 2 May.)

Indeed, if it had been in place at the election last year, Gordon Brown could still be Prime Minister today.

(Dubious. AV simulations show that Labour would have won more seats than it did and the Conservatives fewer, but Labour would still have finished second and it still would have been a hung parliament. It might have allowed the Lib Dems to form a coalition with Labour, but they were adamant that Brown step down as Labour leader – which he agreed to do.)

I can’t imagine anything much worse than a voting system that leaves half-dead governments living on life support.

(And this never happens under FPTP?)

The third reason to save First-Past-the-Post is its efficiency.

Everyone knows this country needs to cut spending and get back to living within its means. At this time, we need to protect those things that provide our country with real value for money.

Our current voting system does that – it’s cheap to administer and comes with little bureaucracy.

(Personally, an electoral system’s relative “cheapness” really doesn’t figure on my list of desired features.)

There is a real danger that AV could come with additional costs, from public information campaigns explaining the complexities of AV to the extra expense of counting votes at election time.

(Again – there NO evidence anywhere that vote counting machines will be needed, and the Yes side recently pledged that no vote counting machines would be brought in.)

At this time I think our money is better spent on public services than on our political system.

(Personally, I think a better democracy is worth any cost. It shouldn’t ever be an either-or proposition.)

The fourth reason to save First-Past-the-Post is to do with our history.

Each democracy in the world has its own story, shaped by its own chain of events. The American system, with its strong checks and balances, was born of revolution – designed to avoid the possibility of over-mighty government. In Europe, both after the Second World War and the fall of Communism, many countries adopted other more plural voting systems, again constructed to avoid the experience of being dominated by over-mighty governments.

Britain’s democracy has its own story. Two centuries ago, voting was limited to a privileged few. Generations of campaigners fought and died to change that. Their struggle gave us the principle that sits at the heart of our democracy today: we are all equal, therefore we all have an equal say at the polls. One person, one vote.

(Except that some voters are more equal than others. In 2005 it took a mere 26,906 votes to elect a Labour MP, but 44,373 to elect a Tory MP and a massive 96,539 votes to elect a Lib Dem MP. Almost four times more votes were required to elect a Lib Dem MP, compared to a Labour MP. That didn’t improve in 2010: it took 33,000 votes to elect a Labour MP and 35,000 votes to elect a Conservative MP, but no fewer than 119,000 votes to elect a Liberal Democrat MP.)

So First-Past-the-Post isn’t just one way of counting votes; it is an expression of our fairness as a country. It is enshrined in our constitution and integral to our history – and AV flies in the face of all that because it destroys one person, one vote. If you vote for a mainstream candidate who comes top in the first round, your other preferences will never be counted. But if you vote for a fringe candidate who gets knocked out early, your other votes will be counted. That means the second, third, even fourth votes of someone who supports the Monster Raving Looney Party can count as much as the first vote of someone who supports a mainstream party. That is unfair and undemocratic.

(Everyone gets one ballot under AV. Everyone has the choice of ranking as few or as many candidates as they want. The main point that Cameron misses here is that it’s not an advantage to have all of your preferences counted. To quote a maths professor:  “Consider first what it means if you get five bites of the cherry. It means that your first-choice party is eliminated, and your second-choice party, and your third-choice party, and your fourth-choice party. Compare that with the poor old voter who gets just one bite of the cherry. Their party is either the party that wins or the party that comes second. In the first case, they obviously do better by far. In the second case, it is not clear: if you vote Labour and Labour come second to the Conservatives, then you might well have preferred the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. But (i) they were behind Labour and (ii) right until the final round your vote was counting for your favourite party rather than for lower and lower choices. GETTING MORE BITES OF THE CHERRY IS A DISADVANTAGE STUPID!”)

Don’t take all this from me. You can judge the relative merits of First-Past-the-Post and AV by how popular they are overseas.

Our current system is one of Britain’s most successful exports – used by almost half the electors on the planet, embraced and understood by 2.4 billion people from India to America.

(All the countries that use FPTP only do so as a result of historical pressure (such as the UK). Every single new democracy since 1945 has rejected AV. Three of them did start off with FPTP but quickly changed it for better systems. Only three countries use AV in national elections though plenty (such as the USA and the UK) use it for non national elections and most of the countries that don’t use AV or FPTP use something far more proportional. And just because FPTP is used in other countries doesn’t mean that there isn’t a desire to change the system in those countries, or at least a recognition that it’s not working well. Candidates to India’s Lok Sabha (the lower house) can win seats with as little as 10% of the votes cast. There is growing recognition in Canada that FPTP is clearly broken. The US really does have a two-party system – not really comparable to how party politics are evolving in the UK.)

So in the next few days ask yourself a few questions: do you want to switch to a voting system that is hopelessly unclear, unfair and indecisive? Do you want elections that are – as Churchill put it – “determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates”?

(If we’re going to quote Churchill, let’s remember that he had this to say about FPTP: “The present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any party, nor to any section of the community. In many cases they do not secure majority representation, nor do they secure an intelligent representation of minorities. All they secure is fluke representation, freak representation, capricious representation.”)

And do you want to rip up a valuable part of our constitution and centuries of British history for a system that is unpopular the world over? If the answer is no, make sure you get out to the polling station on 5th May – and vote no to AV.

(How does Cameron know AV is unpopular the world over? You can’t equate quality with quantity. Billions of people eat at McDonald’s yet I don’t see anyone arguing that means it’s the best restaurant out there.)

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