AV makes me think of pirates. I can’t help it. My brain reads the first two letters and automatically adds “-AST!” So I end up pondering not alterations to the electoral system, but eye patches and wooden legs and Johnny Depp. Ooh, Johnny Depp. Yummy…
Sorry. Politics. Right. So Nick Clegg has made The Announcement about limits on the number of MPs and fixed-term parliaments and a referendum on the Alternative Vote. Leaving aside, for the moment, the eyewatering cheek of holding a referendum on the day of the Scottish Parliament elections, despite the cockup of the last Holyrood poll being put down to two elections on the one day and the feverish protestations of the coalition government that they have a Respect Agenda with the Scottish Parliament (a Respect Agenda sounds like the sort of thing that a desperate supply teacher would attempt to introduce, but I am digressing from my digression) is this actually the reform that our political system needs?
Well, no. Will I vote for it? Yes. Am I an idiot? Possibly, but let me elaborate.
AV is not a proportional system. A proportional system allocates seats according to the proportion of the vote you get. So if a party gets a third of the votes, it should get a third of the seats. Unlike our current voting system, which is so unfair you’d think it had been cooked up by Dick Dastardly, and means that most people’s votes are wasted.
AV will improve this situation a bit. Instead of putting a cross in a box, we will rank candidates in order of preference. If nobody gets over 50% of the vote first time round, then the second-preference votes of the candidate who came last in the first round of voting are redistributed, and so on until somebody gets over 50% of the vote.
It’s an improvement, in that it just means that lots of people’s votes won’t count, rather than most people’s. That’s why I’ll vote for it, even though it’s not the system I want. Now, some people not a million miles from me think this is a bad thing. They are using the fact that people who want a Yes vote in the referendum don’t generally think that AV is the best system as an argument to vote No.
This argument makes no sense whatsoever. Campaigning against AV because it’s not PR would be the equivalent of a person in a bath full of snot being asked if they would prefer to stay where they are or move to a bath full of water, only to reply that since their preferred option of a bath full of chocolate is not on offer, they denounce water-filled baths as hypocritical wishy-washy compromise and would much prefer to continue wallowing in bogies.
Politics is all about compromise. Most of the time, you can’t get what you really really want, so you strive to get as close to it as you possibly can. Why is this so hard for some people to grasp?