UK: ‘Choosing AV would take us back in time’
3rd May 2011
William Hague and Margaret Beckett are either liars or idiots. Either eventuality would disturb me, since Hague is Foreign Secretary and Beckett was Foreign Secretary.
The system currently in place is called ‘first past the post’ which means that whoever gets the most votes in a parliamentary election wins. Example: Candidate A gets 40% of the vote, candidate B gets 30% of the vote, and candidate C gets 30% of the vote, candidate A wins even though 60% of the voters voted for somebody else. This is the system that Hague and Beckett praise as being ‘equal votes’. I suspect that their position is informed more by vested interest than by any interest in either fairness or democracy.
The system being proposed is often called the ‘Australian system’ because they are the chief proponents of it; it is also often called the ‘automatic runoff’ system. Each voter marks his ballot in order of preference, first choice and second choice and third choice etc. When the votes are counted, if no candidate gets a majority, then the candidate who got the least votes gets dropped and the ballots that went for him as first choice get redistributed based on their second choice. If again no candidate gets a majority, then again the lowest candidate gets dropped and his ballots get redistributed. And so on until somebody gets a majority; by the time you get to two candidates, a majority for one of them is inevitable. (Hence the characterization ‘automatic runoff’.) In any event, the winner of the election is guaranteed to have a majority behind him. This is the system that Hague and Beckett call ‘unfair’ and ‘some votes are counted more than others’. (The latter, of course, is pure bullshit – they’re counted more than once only in a mechanical sense.)
Any objective consideration of the two processes reveals that the latter is actually the fairer and more democratic system. It is a measure of the degeneration of the modern Conservative party in Britain that two senior government officials indulge in such fairy tales. They might as well change their party name to ‘Democrats’ and be done with it.
UPDATE: I rarely agree with Charlie Stross in anything, but his take on this issue is spot on.