AV / FPTP

[emperor]

I must confess that both sides' campaign material about the AV referendum have been annoying me. They have tended to exaggerate their claims well beyond what might be considered reasonable, and I've seen a fair amount of why seems to be plain lying (e.g. the No camp's claim that we'll have to spend millions on electronic counting machines, or that no-where uses AV when our own MPs use it to elect leaders).

As a pleasing counterpoint to all this, I'd like to tip my hat to Dr Alan Renwick of the University of Reading. He's produced a nice report in the probable impact of AV, which seems clear and reasonably even-handed. There's a brief article on the BBC or his full briefing paper [PDF]. If you want to be more informed about the pros and cons of AV, then I recommend you read his article.

Personally, I'm more "No to FPTP" than "Yes to AV", but I see it as a step in the right direction, so will be voting for it.

Comments

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Lots of the 'yes to AV' brigade as going round saying that if David Cameron hates AV so much he should stand down and let David Davis be PM. I haven't checked out the detail though.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

This is nonsense. In the first place, an election with multiple rounds is not the same as an election under AV. In particular, DD received 62 votes in the first ballot, but only 57 in the second ballot, whereas under AV he would have received at least as many votes in the second round as he had in the first round.

But more importantly, the voting between MPs only served to identify the two leading candidates to put to a vote of the wider party. In every round the two leading candidates were Cameron and Davis.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I think emarkienna's point that it looks much more like AV than FPTP, and means that Cameron's election 'fails' on lots of points that he and the party as a whole are trying to tell the country are The Most Important Thing (all those cheesy pictures of people running races) smells at least a little of hypocrisy.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

I find the analogy to Usain Bolt difficult to follow, but that surely is a separate criticism. I would certainly agree with Matthew that the quality of the debate has generally been disappointing. I think that people can get carried away with searching for hypocrisy. Cameron didn't choose the voting system for Tory leader - it would have been extremely quixotic for him to refuse to take up the post on the basis that he thought he would have lost under his preferred system.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Well sure, maybe it's not suprising that Cameron would take up the post of leader, even if he doesn't believe in the system. But it's still fair game to say that, by his logic, he was elected under an undemocratic system that elected the "loser". (That the later runoff rounds weren't instant doesn't change that point that he lost under the first round of votes, which is the argument that is being made against AV. Unless people would give 1st choices under instant runoff voting differently to non-instant runoff voting, for some reason?)

As for the numbers changing, my guess would this be due to people changing their minds as a result of continued campaigning in the intervening time (at least, I'm having trouble seeing tactical reasons why a David Davis supporter would switch?) It's unclear to me why this system is different in a way that's significant when it comes to the criticisms made against AV?

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

It seems to me quite likely that, had the Tory leadership election been conducted under FPTP, people would have voted differently from the way they actually voted in the first round. Indeed, one of the key arguments made by supporters of AV is that under FPTP, a large number of voters vote 'tactically', in the sense of voting for a candidate they think has a chance of winning rather than the candidate they would actually prefer. So it seems possible that DC would have won the Tory leadership election under FPTP. But this all seems to me something of a distraction. We're not really having a debate about who ought to be Tory leader, or about what the best electoral system for selecting a Tory leader would be. The analogy with national elections seems weak, both because the Tory leadership election has two voting colleges performing different roles, and because electing a party leader strikes me as a different thing from electing an MP, so there's no reason why the two voting systems should be aligned.

The recent election in Peru seems like a much better argument in favour of AV - in fact it seems pretty compelling as an argument that AV should be used for presidential elections (see also Ralph Nader). But are parliamentary elections (where a large number of MPs are returned) sufficiently similar to presidential elections (where the winner takes all) for the argument to carry across?