OneAndOneIs2

Continuing along with a second post relating to politics, there's this AV referendum coming up.

The AV, or Alternative Vote, proposal, is that instead of everybody just going along to the voting station and putting a cross next to their favourite candidate's name, they should instead be able to put numbers against ALL the candidates, putting them in order of preference.

To understand the proposed benefits of this system, let's imagine we have a vote for the following parties:

• Fairly Sensible party
• Reasonably Sensible party
• Moderately Sensible party
• Moronic Party

Now, the thing is, all the sensible voters can only pick one of the sensible candidates. So although we might have 3/4 of all the voters making a sensible choice, because their vote is split amongst three sensible candidates, there won't be an outright win for any one sensible candidate.

Worse, you might get, say, 30% of people voting for the moronic choice, 20% for the FSP, 22% for the RSP, and 28% for the MSP. And so even though 70% of the voters went for a sensible option, the dilution of the vote means that the moronic choice is the one with the most votes.

So that's bad. AV is proposed as the solution. It says that if no single candidate gets 50% or more, then the candidate with the lowest score is eliminated. And the people who voted for that candidate then get their SECOND choice. So, in the above scenario, the FSP get eliminated and so the new situation is:
Moronic: 30%
RSP: 32%
MSP: 38%

Still no 50% yet, but now the moronic party is the one that's eliminated. And so a sensible candidate gets in, and the world is saved by democracy.

So that's the theory. And I do like the idea of being able to express a preference for more than one single candidate. I do.

But I don't like AV. Because let's now invert the situation. Let's have:

• Fairly Sensible party
• Reasonably Sensible Party
• Stupid party
• Daft party
• Moronic Party

And the results come in:
FSP: 30%
RSP: 30%
SP: 13%
DP: 13%
MP: 14%

And you can see the problem.

What the AV system does is take all the votes for the LEAST popular parties, and lump them all together. Sometimes, this will indeed mean that there are several good choices and the sensible votes get diluted.

But it also means that if you have several bad choices, their votes get counted repeatedly and lumped together. And the only people whose votes get counted more than once are the people who voted for the least-popular options

If we assume (Big assumption, I grant you) that most people will vote sensibly, then a system that gives more votes to the people who vote for the least-popular options means by definition that we're giving more votes to non-sensible people. It's all the wrong way round.

A system that, for example, awarded 10 points to a candidate who was your first choice, 8 points to your second, 6 to your third, and so on, I could get behind. Because then EVERYONE'S vote gets counted more than once.

So I like fundamental idea of AV, but I find the implementation to be the worst possible system that they could come up with.

So sadly, my vote for AV will be 'no'. Not because I think "First past the post" is the best system, but because it's just not quite as bad as AV is.