British Voters Should Vote Yes In Referendum on "Alternative Vote"

When Prime Minister David Cameron asked the Liberal Democrats to serve as coalition partners with the Conservative Party after the most recent British general election, the Liberal Democrats made sure to extract their pound of flesh before signing on. The most important concession the Conservatives made, without which the coalition negotiating would have failed, was agreeing to hold a national referendum on whether to replace the existing "First-Past-The-Post" electoral system with the so-called "Alternative Vote" electoral system for elections to the House of Commons.

The vote is scheduled for May 5. This is a critically-needed reform and it is imperative that British voters approve the change in the upcoming referendum.

The First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system is the same system that Americans generally refer to as "Winner-Take-All". The electorate is divided up into individual districts and voters within each district are able to cast a singe vote for a single individual. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. It's quite simple, but it's also deeply flawed.

The main problem with FPTP is that in any election with more than two candidates, it is quite likely that the winner will be a person whom the majority of the citizens actually voted against. Using a British example, imagine a district in which a Labour candidate received 40%, a Liberal Democrat received 30%, and a Conservative candidate received 30%. The Labour candidate would win, even though 60% of the people voted against him.

Since most voters aren't stupid, FPTP also leads to the phenomena of people voting for candidates other than the ones they actually favor, in order to deny victory to a candidate to whom they may be especially opposed. In the UK, this is usually known as "tactical voting", and it means that legislative bodies are not fully genuine representations of the democratic will of the people.

Similarly, FPTP results in "spoilers" skewing the outcome of elections. In American politics, candidates from the Libertarian or Green parties tend to get a few percentage points in congressional elections, but this is often enough to throw the election, resulting in a Republican district electing a Democrat or a Democratic district electing a Republican. The most glaring example of this was in the 2000 Presidential election, where a small number of Green voters resulted in George W. Bush becoming President of the United States, even though it was the clear will of the people that Al Gore win the election.

So, despite its simplicity, it is clear that election results obtained through FPTP systems do not manifest the democratically expressed will of the people in the composition of the legislative bodies they produce. The so-called Alternative Vote (AV) system would be a great improvement.

In AV systems, rather than casting a single vote for a single individual, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of "first choice" votes, the candidate with the fewest "first choice" votes is eliminated and the "second choice" votes of the people who had cast their "first choice" votes for the eliminated candidate are distributing among the remaining candidates. This continues until one candidate receives a majority of the vote, and is declared the winner.

Watch this video to get a better idea of how AV voting works (note that they use the American term "Instant Runoff"):



AV voting sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is. As far as any individual voter is concerned, they show up at the polling place and simply cast a ballot in which they rank the candidates by order of preference. For ordinary citizens, it's no more time-consuming than a FPTP election.

AV elections are more democratic than FPTP elections because the spolier effect and tactical voting are completely eliminated. No candidate who did not earn a majority of the cast votes at some point in the proces will be elected. In short, it is a far more accurate way to gauge the will of the people than a simple FPTP election.

There are other advantages. By eliminating the need for runoff elections, public money is saved. They may even reduce negative campaigning by candidates, as those competing for office will be less willing to alientate the supporters of their opponents so that they may obtain their secondary votes.

AV election systems are already in use in Australia, Ireland, and other places. It is also used by several municipalities in the United States to elect local officials, British political parties to elect their leadership, and even by many companies to elect their boards. Experience has proven that it is an effective and democratic system.

British voters should choose greater democracy by voting yes on the proposed referenfum to scrap FPTP election and replace them with AV elections. If the referendum passes, the United Kingdom will take a big step forward.