Thoughts on the U.K.’s Alternative Vote Referendum

Tomorrow, voters in the U.K. will go to the polls for the second-ever nationwide referendum. The vote is to decide what electoral system is used to select members of the House of Commons.

The choice is between the present system which is known as First Past the Post (FPTP) and the alternative system known as Alternative Vote (AV).

FPTP is pretty straightforward. Whoever gets the most votes wins—even if it’s a minority of votes which often happens in a three-or-more party system.

The Alternative Vote system let’s the voters rank all of the candidates in order of preference. The candidate with the lowest total is eliminated. The votes for that candidate are then given to the next highest-preferred choice. The process continues until one candidate has a majority. In the U.S. this is often known as instant run-off.

The back story is that in the last general election, the Conservative Party fell 20 seats short of holding a majority in the House of Commons. In order to form a government, the Tories had to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The pound of flesh secured by the Lib Dems was for this national referendum.

As the U.K.’s third party, the Lib Dems naturally thought AV would help them in future elections. This looks like an historic miscalculation. According to the latest polls, AV is trailing badly. In other words, their major concession turned out to be absolutely worthless.

I’m more interested in the mathematical strategy behind the two electoral systems. Critics of FPTP say that it unfairly gives out-sized results to the established parties. The numbers certainly back up this criticism. In the last general election, Labour (which came in second) outpolled the Lib Dems, 29% to 23%. Yet, Labour won 258 seats to the Lib Dems’ 57.

In this week’s Canadian election, the Conservative Party won 39.6% of the vote but they won 54.2% of the seats. In New Brunswick, the Conservatives won 43.9% of the vote but they took eight of the 10 seats. FPTP gives an advantage to top-tier parties that have broad geographic support. AV is generally favored by smaller parties or parties with a strong regional base.

In the United States, AV is often favored by political progressives but I think they tend to overstate its impact, especially its advantage for them. I’ve often noticed that when progressives are out of power, they criticize procedural issues like voting systems or cloture or campaigns finance. I don’t mean to suggest these issues aren’t worthy of criticism. I’m merely skeptical of how much reforms will truly change things or help the political left.

In the 2000 Presidential election, I think there were many voters who favored Ralph Nader over Al Gore but voted for Gore anyway out of a fear of throwing their vote away and thereby helping George W. Bush. Of course, this is precisely what happened.

In that case, AV almost certainly would have helped Gore, especially in Florida. However, other marginal parties would be helped by AV. I think libertarian candidates or paleo-conservative candidates might get a surprisingly high number of first-round votes.

It’s possible that right-of-center coalitions are inherently larger in a multi-party system and are therefore in a stronger position to win FPTP pluralities. The thinking is that it’s easier to rally disparate groups around the “No” banner than around the “Yes” banner.

Turning to stats-speak, I think AV would fatten the tails but would probably have little discernable impact on the median.

Ultimately, I’m a strong supporter of “Elfenbein’s Electoral Law” which states that as long as you have an open society with a free press and a robust culture of political debate, the electoral system doesn’t matter so much inregard to policy outcomes.

(One counterexample would be the U.S. Senate’s archaic cloture rules which probably kept Jim Crow alive for 20 years longer than a parliamentary system would have allowed. Maybe 30 years. But that’s a chamber’s rule, not an electoral system.)

The bottom line is that if you want to see your policy choice become law, you should start with having good arguments. Sigmund Freud said “The voice of Reason is small, but very persistent.”

Finally, here’s tomorrow’s ballot question in Welsh:

Ar hyn o bryd, mae’r DU yn defnyddio’r system “y cyntaf i’r felin” i ethol ASau i Dŷ’r Cyffredin. A ddylid defnyddio’r system “pleidlais amgen” yn lle hynny?

Happy voting!

Posted by on May 4th, 2011 at 10:00 pm


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