Chris Torney, Confused.com personal finance writer and expert, cuts through the nonsense being talked about May’s voting system referendum to explain what it all means.
On 5 May we are being asked to decide whether Britain should change its voting system. The choice in the upcoming referendum is between sticking with first-past-the-post (FPTP), or moving to a new system called alternative vote (AV). So how do the two options compare?
First-past-the-post
In each constituency, voters select their favourite candidate and the candidate who receives the highest number of votes is elected to parliament.
Let's say we have a constituency with three candidates from the Red Party, the Blue Party and the Yellow Party.
The Red Party candidate receives 33 per cent of the votes, the Blue Party candidate 38 per cent of the votes, and the Yellow Party 29 per cent - the Blue Party candidate is duly elected.
Alternative vote
With AV, voters are asked to rank the candidates in order of preference. (But if you only want to vote for one candidate, you can do that by giving him or her your first preference and ignoring the others.)
Once the votes are cast, returning officers see whether any of the candidates has received more than 50 per cent of the first-preference votes cast. If so, that candidate is elected.
If not, the candidate with the lowest number of first-preference votes is eliminated and his second-preference votes are shared among the remaining candidates.
Using the example above, and assuming the votes cast in FPTP translated directly to first-preferences under AV, it would be the Yellow Party candidate who was eliminated in the first round.
Returning officers would then tally up the second-preferences of the Yellow Party voters. If they were split 50-50 between the Red and Blue candidates, the Blue candidate would be elected with more than 50 per cent of the votes.
But the Red candidate could win if two-thirds of Yellow voters had put her down as their second preference.
Pros and cons of the two systems
As you can see from these descriptions, FPTP is certainly simple but it has been criticised because it often leads to the election of candidates on a minority of the vote (in our example, 62 per cent of the electorate voted against the eventual winner).
This type of outcome is frequently reflected in the government: in the 1997 election, for example, the winning Labour Party got just over 43 per cent of the popular vote, but won almost 64 per cent of seats at Westminster in a landslide.
Together, the Conservatives and LibDems got 47.5 per cent of votes cast that year, but won only 32 per cent of seats.
What AV does is enable those people who didn’t vote for the most popular candidate to still have a say.
Another argument for FPTP is that it often delivers “strong” government (that is, a party which can control parliament on its own), while AV is more likely to produce coalitions (even though the current coalition is a result of FPTP).
There are a few other issues:
- Cost: a change to the voting system would require expenditure on new counting machines and voter education. The “No to AV” campaign estimates this cost to be around £250 million, but it’s not clear how accurate this figure is.
- Smaller parties: it is argued that voters would be more likely to express support for the likes of the Green Party or UKIP if they didn’t see this as a waste of a vote. Under AV, you could give your first preference to the Greens, say, and second preference to the major party you’d normally vote for. It may not change the outcome of the election, but your support for environmental issues would be on record (which could influence government policy).
- Safe seats: FPTP is thought to increase the likelihood of a constituency becoming “safe” – where a candidate for a party which regularly enjoys, say, 40 per cent of the vote or more is very unlikely to lose. AV wouldn’t eradicate safe seats, but it would probably result in some of them being more keenly contested.
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