How to vote?

First off, here's a link to the Guardian article explaining the differences between the current and proposed voting systems. I'm now going to explain them all again, in my own words, in the hope that doing so will grant me a firmer understanding and maybe even help me decide which I prefer.

Come May, we're going to have a referendum on how we elect members of parliament in this country. Our current system is known as First Past The Post. In this system every citizen chooses one candidate they prefer in their own constituency and whichever candidate gets the most votes becomes their representative and gets that seat in parliament. By convention whichever party wins over half the seats (currently 650) becomes the winning party and their leader becomes Prime Minister. Or, like we have at the moment, no party gains the necessary 326 seats so two parties from opposite sides of the political spectrum form a coalition and nobody is happy with the result.

So if there's four parties running, and the vote is split

A: 28%
B: 25%
C: 24%
D: 23%

then A wins the seat and nearly three quarters of the population get a candidate they didn't want.

I know I'd prefer some sort of AV system, I just don't know which one yet.

In its simplest form, Alternative Voting means rather than choosing one candidate you prefer, you rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate is ranked first by at least fifty percent of the people, the candidate with the least first preference votes is eliminated and the ballots for them are split across the survivors according to second preference. Still no fifty percent? Eliminate the least popular candidate and split their votes again amongst the survivors by second (or, if necessary, third) preference. Keep going until we have a winner.

So let's try those numbers from before again.

A: 28%
B: 25%
C: 24%
D: 23%

No winner here, so we eliminate D and split their votes. Let's assume A is very Right wing, B is moderate Right, C is moderate Left and D is very Left. Most of the second place votes from D will go to C. New figures look like this:

A: 31%
B: 32%
C: 37%

Oh how the tables have turned. The far left candidate has been removed but at least they won't be stuck with a far right representative. Still no winner so lets remove the A from the equation, with most of their votes going to B.

B: 57%
C: 43%

Big Winner! The moderate Right Wing candidate from the B Party takes the seat. B's popularity increased by 7% when D got eliminated and by a further 25% when A dropped out, while C's popularity went up by 13% then 6%.

Perhaps all 24% of C's first choice voters really hated that B guy and put him last place on their ballots. Even in this extreme case only 30% of the voters ended up with the candidate they least wanted. I know politics isn't a straight line from right to left, but it's still more likely that moderate left wingers would prefer a moderate right wing candidate to a far right one, perhaps also to the far left wing choice.

So that's Alternative Voting, but what about AV+?

One issue with AV is that it's not proportional. That is to say, if 5% of people across the whole country want to vote for the Green Party then shouldn't 5% of the house of commons be made up of members of the Green Party? Well, yes, I can see why that makes sense but at the same time no. People don't just vote for a candidate because of his or her party's politics, but also because of their own personal politics. It might be that Simon Wright of Norwich South is a member of the Liberal Democrats, but he opposes the party view on the issue of the Student Loans cap. Voters who want Simon Wright in and not just any Liberal Democrat should have the right to elect him, not whomever the party chooses.

This is where AV+ comes in. It works just like AV as described above, but we all get a second vote, for a party, not for any individual. This second vote is added up country wide and each party gets a few extra seats in parliament, based on the percentage of this national vote they won. Prefer Simon Wright to Charles Clarke but Labour to Lib Dem? AV+ has you covered.

Well this seems fairer than First Past The Post. I'm not sure though, will the Bonus MPs be voted for by name, or chosen by the winning party? I'm not too keen on anyone getting into the House of Commons without the general public wanting them - specifically them - there. There's complaints that this will cause two types of MP, though I'm not sure that's such an issue. The vast majority of MP's primary focus will be representing the people of their own constituency, with a small minority devoted to more national concerns.

Another change AV+ could bring is greater power to smaller parties, the ability to win votes even without candidates. Welshmen living in England could still throw their support behind Plaid Cymru, for example. I'm taking all the following figures from Wikipedia: The BNP ran candidates in just over half the consituencies in the last general election. None of them got elected, thankfully, but they did get nearly 2% of the total votes. On the flawed assumption that their popularity is just as strong across the whole country, 4%(ish) could be enough to win them one of the bonus seats.

I might be wrong, you might only be able to vote for a party who ran a candidate in your constituency. Even in that case, the UK Independance Party got 3% of the votes without any candidates elected. The Green party won their first seat but got 1% of the vote, so in an entirely proportional system with 650 seats they're owed five more MPs. The Liberal Democrats actually got 23% of the votes winning only 9% of the seats, while the Conservative Party got 36% of the votes but just shy of half the seats. The proportional element of AV+ would grant voices to these smaller parties and as much as I dislike the BNP and as much as I disagree with the Greens on some points, I do think this is a fairer version of democracy.

Which brings us at last to the Single Transferable Vote.

Under this system each constituency can now support more than one MP, the number depending upon the population of the constituency. You rank your MPs by order of preference, just like in AV. To win one of the seats available, a candidate must gain a certain number of votes (one more than the number of votes cast divided by (seats available + 1), so with 50,000 votes cast and three seats available, a candidate would need (50,000 / 4) + 1 = 12,501 votes to get a seat. Once a candidate has that magic number, any excessive first choice votes would go to that voter's second choice. All the while the least popular candidate is having their votes divided between the more successful ones, AV style.

What I'm not sure about is how you determine which votes count towards the candidate, and which are considered Excessive. Let's say the first 12,501 voters for candidate A put candidate B as their second choice, but every A voter from then on had candidate C as their second preference, does C get all the excess votes? Maybe we just take a random selection from the A pile until it's down to just 12,501. Ireland and Malta, apparently, use variants on the Random system. There's a 'Gregory method' where the excess is transfered over as fractions of votes, but these systems need computers to count and cannot feasibly be done by hand.

Single Transferable can be even more proportional than AV+ while allowing voters to still choose individual candidates, rather than parties, but will mean either fewer, larger constituencies or a much greater number of MPs and a radical overhaul of how votes are physically made and counted.

So I can see the advantages and disadvantages of AV+ and of STV. I still can't decide between them but I'm swaying in favour of STV. I'm not sure that matters for a while though, as the May referendum seems to be simply FPTP vs AV, with none of this Plus or Single Transferable stuff getting in the way, and I know where I stand on FPTP vs AV.

Vote Yes to the Alternative Vote.

--

In a twitter conversation I've been having while writing this, @justinpickard mentioned the possibility of abolishing the House of Lords (not outright. He's a clever chap and put more thought into it than that). I do have some issues with the House of Lords. The Hereditary peerages and the Lords Spiritual are two things I dislike. Actually, I wasn't keen on any of them avoiding popular election, but as @newsmary pointed out, some of them are there on the merit of knowing or doing useful things, rather than because they smile nicely on camera and know which promises to break without upsetting too many people. It's become pretty clear to me that I really don't know enough about the House of Lords to make any sort of informed comment, so I think I'm going to read up on that next and then tell you all about how the Lords works. Maye that's a better use for this blog: an excuse to learn about politics rather than these occasional polemics against religion's influence on society. Don't pretend you hadn't noticed that trend forming.

We're going to need a new title.