Alternative Voting
I appreciate that a lot of my readers are from outside of the UK, this paragraph is for you. On Thursday the 5th of May 2011 the UK is voting on a referendum to change the way we vote. At the moment we use “First Past the Post” we have the option to switch to “Alternative Voting” the first step to “Proportional Representation”. Read on, tomorrow could be a record day for democracy.
With the vote tomorrow, I thought it was time that I made up my mind. The first thing I did was educate myself to how the system works. At first glance it seems to be fairer with more people’s votes actually counting.
In case you are unaware as to the working of the system, watch this video http://bit.ly/hwyPZ3. It explains it clearly. I will wait for you to go watch that now…….
Glad your back, from this point on I will assume you know what I’m talking about. With the current system, FPTP it’s less about who has the most votes but who has the best distribution of supporters. If you have 40~% of the population voting for you but they are evenly distributed between all constituencies then you will probably not win very many seats. This is unfair because if people everywhere are voting for you then it probably means that your policies are more suited to everyone than if all of your voters are concentrated in the rich constituencies.
People say that AV will lead to more coalitions, yes; this however is not a bad thing. This makes the parties think “How can we work with the other parties for the good of the people”. Do you really want a system that gives a majority that you didn’t want, a system where your vote against them is meaningless?
The other advantage of AV is that it makes MPs work harder for your vote. In areas where a certain party wins by FPTP with 30% of the votes this becomes apparent. The candidates have to try and secure the “Second Vote” of the people that didn’t give them their “First Vote” or they might not win.
What this means for you, it is no more confusing when you got to vote. All you have to do is rank the people you would like to win, or not.
By this point you might realise that I am voting YES tomorrow. Now i would like to address some of the points I saw on a “Vote NO” poster.
1. People who vote for fringe parties can have their vote counted more than once.
This does not mean that they get more than one vote. It means that when their first choice is eliminated their vote will be counted again and added to the votes for their second choice. This means that someone will physically count their vote more than once but it will not count more than once.
2. AV is a Lib Dem fix
This is not a rational argument. They are using this because the Lib Dems are out of favour at the moment for breaking their promise on Tuition Fees, a promise that would have caused the tax payer to put the students through instead of them paying it themselves.
3. It is complicated and expensive
This is rubbish. Although it is more complicated it is not more complicated for the voter, just the people counting the votes. You are not going to be asked to do any tricky maths in the voting booth just to put a “1” instead of an “X”. If you can manage it you can also rank the parties you want to win. As for being expensive, they are correct. It is more expensive. Not massively so, it’s not suddenly going to cost us £20 each in taxes. Can you put a price on true democracy? Where more votes would matter than ever before?
Vote YES to AV
