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"AV is complex and unfair - a candidate who comes second or third may end up elected."

This statement isn't true and overly simplistic.

A.V. is the assessment of all votes, and peoples voting preferences only come into play as soon as a candidate doesn't have 50% of the vote, i.e. the majority of the electorate. Preferences are only counted until someone reaches 50% of the vote.

It isn't complex, is simple. If you're afraid the voting mechanism will be too hard (how do I rank 50 candidates) and you don't want/cant be bothered to state your preferences, you can simple vote for your party and they will distribute your preferences along the party lines.

A democracy as stable as Australia has always had AV and there have been few issues with the voting system and certainly no calls to adopt, a FPTP system.

will this be available in iplayer?


agree with above poster. people against av are generally 1) afraid of change 2) wanting to keep the status quo (afraid that entrenched labour or conservative candidates might lose out).

they are not really interested in the fairness of the av system over and above fptp since it is more important that their political party retains the same amount of power they have. it may be so that other smaller parties get more power, but then this reflects the actual level of support they have. this should not stop people appraising av effectively for its democratic value.

The response of the Great British public to the AV debate has been predictably, dismally complacent: we don’t want any new ideas here. The No Campaign has come up with any number of spurious arguments to dismiss this frightening, “foreign” idea.
We are told that the candidate who would have come third among voters’ first choices might win under AV amounts. Check-mate! This, of course, would only happen if more people preferred the third candidate to the first candidate. They are trying to tell us that it is better to stick with a system that all too frequently delivers one candidate when the majority of voters prefer another. How can that be right?
But won’t we lose the principle of “one-man-one-vote”? It seems to be possible to argue it both ways, so the question has little meaning in relation to AV. “One-man-one-vote” is slogan, not a principle. It appeals to the idea that everyone’s opinions should contribute equally in an election. That is a worthy principle and AV adheres to it rigidly.
Would AV deliver more coalitions? Not necessarily. It is plurality of ideas that causes coalitions, whatever system we use. So what do we want: to avoid coalitions or to take on new ideas? People talk a lot about how first-passed-the-post delivers strong government but why do they consider a government strong if, despite having a large majority, it actually only represents 30% of the electorate? Might this just be why so many “strong” British governments collapse in exasperation because they don’t seem to be able to take the electorate with them?
As for the “BNP argument”, is it better that we suppress political nut-cases by rigging the voting system against them or that we face them head on and show their policies to be the dangerous non-sense that they really are?
What about the weird argument that your first vote is only “worth the same” as my fifth vote? It is not, of course, but there is balance: your fifth vote is also “worth the same” as my first vote. More importantly, my fifth vote would only ever become important if there were a very close run contest. There would have either to be a sixth strong candidate whom I am deliberately keeping well down the list because I don’t like him/her at all, or there would be several equally strong candidates and we are all having to consider them all: the fifth one would then likely be a real contender, not be an “after-thought”. In the absence of a sensible way of measuring a voter’s degree of preference, the rankings they give the candidates is about the best we can do. The first-passed-the-post system, however, implicitly makes the extreme assumption that their first choice infinitely more than they do any of their other choices … how can that ever be right?
And why on earth would AV cost ÂŁ250 million? This is simply disingenuous: malicious mud-slinging. All AV involves is recounting a small percentage of the ballots in those seats where one candidate does not obtain the majority of votes.

AV would let in new ideas: suddenly it becomes worth voting for a small party, to register one’s interest in a new set of ideas, without feeling that one’s vote will be wasted. That is the real benefit of AV. That, I suspect, is also the really objection to it: the fear of new ideas. AV would also force politicians to appeal to ALL the voters, not just rely on the core who would never vote for anyone else. The first-passed-the-post is a simple system for simple minds. It favours the status quo so it is biased. Are we not yet grown-up enough as a nation to cope with a more sophisticated system that tackles this bias? Probably not!

Exceptionally well put, Tony. I have been working for a 'Yes' result (unlikely now, I fear) since the general election and I wish I'd read your fifth vote/first vote exchange argument before. Many of us have long wrestled with this problem when trying to explain the value of voting preferences and the main 'Yes' campaign organising committee is wholly to blame for issuing bromides about safe seats and harder MPs' work rates to their hard working interns and volunteers rather than engaging with the issues that their"'grass roots'" (a term beloved of the campaign when criticised) supporters have been discovering when talking with people on the ground.