Commons Reform Debate
With the Mayoral outcome most likely hinging on whether Boris or Ken are better at picking up the second preferences of Liberal Democrat and minor party voters, it will be fascinating to see what effect this has on the interest in introducing a preferential system of election to the Commons. The GLA result may also have an effect on perceptions of proportional representation, especially in context of discussion of the BNP.
Government Floats 'Aussie Rules' / Alternative Vote Plan:
On Easter Monday, The Guardian had a front page story saying "Ministers back radical plan for voting reform". We had early indications of this thinking, when Justice Minister Michael Wills MP voiced support for the Alternative Vote at a Progress-MVC public meeting at the beginning of March Then Jack Straw in his Statement to the Commons on the Draft Constitutional Reform Bill, on 25 March, went further. He said that there is to be a discussion on the Alternative Vote, which "we got going when we published the review of voting systems".
What is potentially being discussed is "The Australian Model" - a package of reforms that includes the Alternative Vote for the Commons (maybe restricted to just putting first and second choices), weekend voting and compulsory voting. To replicate Australia fuller, this package would also include STV for the Upper House, which is one measure which Labour may already be favouring.
Make Votes Count's Response
The "radical plan for voting reform" (Guardian, 24 March 2008) that is being floated by the Government is a welcome acknowledgement that elections where only a small amount of seats and voters really matter is bad for the health of our democracy. Finally, after nearly a year of the Ministry of Justice's Governance of Britain consultations, there is recognition that changing the voting system is a necessary part of the constitutional reform programme. But the 'Australian model' is hardly a radical proposal - at least not compared to Labour's own 1997 manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on a more proportional system for electing MPs.
Nonetheless, discussions on introducing the Alternative Vote may be a good first step. Especially if there is them some public process that might - by galvanising support - lead on to further reform later on. If we are to go down this route, from the start voters need to be able to express their preferences numerically and as many as they would like (as Labour allows for its own internal party elections and selections); rather than the truncated and problematic 2-choice version (the Supplementary Vote) that Londoners use for electing their Mayor.
Michael Wills is right to reiterate that electoral reform shouldn't be done for party advantage. And interestingly, the Alternative Vote no longer clearly favours one party or another. Conservative fears over the system were based on 1997 and 2001 election results, but now things are very different and AV's anti-incumbency tendency may even work to their benefit. All this number-crunching and systems talk is for another time though. For now, we wait to hear what the Government is actually proposing and, importantly, how they are going to involve the public in the discussions and decision-making process
Research on the Alternative Vote
It is worth noting that AV in 2009/10 or anytime in the 2010s is a different beast from AV in 1997 and 2001, or even 2005. "In the 2005 election the Conservatives in 2005 would be the principal losers from AV because they would still attract relatively few second preferences from supporters of other parties. This need not be a permanent feature. If the party manages to recast its appeal it could yet become attractive as a second choice, and the political circumstances of future elections need not replicate those of previous elections." (ERS report of 2005 General Election, p43-44)
Back at the end of 2006 MVC commissioned (then internal) research by Electoral Reform Society's Lewis Baston as part of our ongoing analysis of different systems. It was this research that was referred to by Patrick Wintour in his Easter Monday Guardian front page article which kicked off the present AV discussion. Although a broad sweep of possible election results was taken into consideration, the position of the parties in the polls now would suggest some scenarios are more likely than others, likewise the transfer ratio of Lib Dem second preferences. Plus the data was done under old boundaries, as the new ones hadn't been officialy finalised at that point. Thus AV may actually be far from detrimental to the Conservatives; quite the contrary, especially given the rise of an element of anti-Labour tactical voting in the 2006 and 2007 local elections. Labour may win over some Lib-Dem waiverers by introducing AV within a proper package of democratic reforms, but there is little evidence to suggest Labour would be the actual beneficiaries of any such system change.
Supplementary Vote versus Alternative Vote
The amount of choice available when voting is constrained by the system (although SV still marks an important extension of voter choice compared to FPTP). SV wastes votes on a large scale. Voters are allowed to use only their first and second preferences and all but the top two candidates are eliminated for the second count. This means that if the voter's first preference candidate is eliminated, the only way their vote can affect the final result is if it is cast for one of the two candidates who have gone through to the second round. Leaving aside double voting and void second preferences, there is a large proportion of ballots where people have filled the paper out completely correctly but just chosen two candidates who did not make it to the second round. In order to cast an effective second preference, voters need to guess which of the candidates will be in the final round, and which out of those two they would prefer.
Perhaps the basic flaw of SV is that it is implicitly based on a two-party model of politics. The assumption is that people may vote for anyone in the first round to make a point but the important choice of who governs is between two of the established parties (usually Conservative and Labour). This is decreasingly the case in national politics and has been comprehensively invalidated in the mayoral elections that have taken place to date. It has become the norm for there to be strong non-party challenges at mayoral elections, from the first surprising monkey-suited success of Stuart Drummond in Hartlepool through Ray Mallon in Middlesbrough to other less famous independent victories in Bedford and Stoke. Torbay saw a further development of this trend with 59.1 per cent of the vote going to independent candidates, although it was so scattered that the two candidates in the run-off were Conservative and Liberal Democrat.
The Alternative Vote, instead of requiring voters to guess who will be in the run-off election, allows voters to give as many preferences as they like. It would have enabled the majority of Torbay voters who favoured independents, if they so wished, to ensure that an independent rather than a party candidate was elected mayor. AV is a much more appropriate system to accommodate the plural nature of mayoral politics. It would be a modest and sensible improvement for the government to change the mayoral electoral system to the Alternative Vote.
[Text taken from ERS: Britain's Experience of Electoral Systems, p109-110]
