"Majority Support" is an AV myth

The proponents of the Alternative Vote (AV) make several exaggerated claims for the system that are myths, at best. The biggest of these are around the claims that it delivers MPs with "majority support".

This claim fails on both the micro and macro levels. Let's pull it apart at the detailed level first.

The problem with "majority support" is that "majority" does not mean majority and "support" does not mean support in any normal usage of these words.

Clearly the majority referred to is not a majority of constituents as a high percentage of people don't even vote. Amazingly this claim is still made by some people - and they say AV is easy to understand!

Nor does it mean a majority of voters as many people will only vote for candidates that are eliminated before the final round of counting and so are not included in the final result. For example, if I vote Green then Labour in Richmond Park I am not included in the final run-off between the Conservatives and Lib. Dems.

What it actually means is a majority of votes that are left in the final round of counting. At this point calling it a majority is meaningless.

It would be just as sensible to carry on the reallocation of votes from the lowest candidate in each round until there is only one candidate left and then claiming that MP had unanimous support. This is clearly ridiculous but the claim for majority support under AV is equally so.

And "support" is a problem too. If I vote Green then Labour it's reasonable to suppose that either of those parties has my positive support but if I then vote Conservative to keep the Lib. Dems. out then it is hardly fair to say that I support the Conservatives. Hating one party slightly less than another is not the same as supporting them.

A simple way of dismissing the majority support argument is to just think about what voting actually does. Voting tries to measure our support for candidates, it does not, of itself, determine that support. That is we feel the same way about each of the candidates irrespective of how we then vote for them.

So under FPTP we get MPs elected on a minority of votes but under AV we get mostly the same MPs elected but now we claim that they have greater support than they had before. This is clearly madness but, sadly, is exactly the confused thinking that most AV proponents are guilty of.

AV tries to fool people in to thinking that it will deliver more popular MPs when all it does is redefine what "popular" means. It's an AV myth.

Debating the Alternative Vote (AV) at the LSE

I find LSE events bit of a mixed bag but a debate on the Alternative Voted tempted me out for the evening. Or rather, to stay out, as I was spending the day doing bits and pieces in London anyway.

As with the recent debate at UCL, it was held in an impressive lecture theatre, this time it was the New Theatre in the East Building. A change for me as I'd previously only been to the Old Theatre and the Newer Theatre (real name the Sheikh Zayed Theatre).

I arrived just a little early so I sneaked in to the student bar, The 3 Tuns, to celebrate Paddy's Night with a £2 pint of Guinness, about half the usual Richmond price. That's what I call a good deal!

The debate took the usual format with two speakers each for and against the motion, Should we say Yes to AV?

In favour of the proposition were Katie Ghose, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society, and Helen Margetts, Professor of Society and the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute.Opposing them were Mark Wallace, experienced political campaigner and former Campaign Director of the Tax Payers' Alliance, and James Forder, Fellow at Balliol College Oxford.

Our chairman for the evening was the LSE's Professor Simon Hix. More on him later.

With such a high-powered set of speakers I had high expectations for the debate.

These were soon dashed.

Katie Ghose opened the debate with the usual bland promises, such as AV would make MPs work harder, but with no evidence or even a reasonable hypothesis as to why this might be the case.

We also heard the old deceit about AV producing majority support for MPs.

In response, Mark Wallace, calmly and comprehensively demolished every pro-AV argument that we had heard and summed this up well by calling AV a false promise.

And that's the real problem. Lot's of people want AV for all sorts of reasons, like hard-working MPs, and they will all be disappointed if we get AV as it can deliver none of these.

Helen Margetts gave us a PowerPoint presentation that tried to explain why FPTP is no longer suitable and while there was some merit in that argument there was none in the subsequent claim that AV would fix the faults. For example, we will still have a high proportion of very safe and reasonably safe seats where MPs will have a "job for life".

My hero of the evening, James Forder, took an analytical fact-based view of AV's faults. He even used some of Helen Margetts' presentation to make his points, replacing her flawed reasoning with something logical.

Our chair became bit of a problem. Professor Simon Hix made it clear early on that he was for AV and he intervened in the debate on that side. I was seriously tempted to write to him complaining about his behaviour but I got my revenge when I found this video on YouTube, where, just a few months ago, he explains why AV is a poor substitute for FPTP.





Some other good points were made against AV during the debate.

AV would deliver beige MPs as all three main parties, already fairly similar, will move even closer into the safe territory in the middle, scared to offer views that could be considered extreme buy either Left or Right.

By treating all preferences equally AV tells us nothing about how voters actually feel. If I vote Green then Labour, is my Labour second-preference vote a strong left-wing vote or a tactical anti-right one?

The pro-AV vagueness aside, this was a good debate conducted in good spirit and was fair use of a spare evening.

That evening got even better when the No to AV camp won the debate on a show of hands at the end.

AV means Additional Votes (for some)

The debate around the Alternative Vote (AV) referendum is clouded by vague terms like “reform” and “fairness” and by accusations of telling lies that fly around like confetti thrown by both sides. The aim of this article is to try and raise the quality of this debate by presenting one simple argument against AV using a real data to show how it works.

The proposition I prove here is how AV gives some people more votes than others.

Richmond Park constituency

I am using Richmond Park constituency as an example partially because I live there but also because it is a marginal (it changed from Lib Dem to Conservative last time) and so is one of the constituencies where AV could make a real difference.

The result in 2010 was:

Conservative. 29,461
Liberal Democrat. 25,370
Labour. 2,979
UK Independence Party. 669
Green. 572
Christian People’s Alliance. 133
Independent. 84

I appreciate that the numbers would have been different if we had AV but this is a meaningful profile to work with. The example works equally well with others,

Let’s look at what happens when we add some specific voters to the mix to see what impact their votes have under AV.

A Tory voter

Clearly a large number of constituents are true-blue Tories and they are not going to vote for anybody else and as they are one of the two largest parties there is no point in specifying anything other than one preference for the Tory.

Impact, Tory vote goes up by one.

A leftie (like me)

I have voted both Green and Labour previously and AV lets me vote for both. My Green first preference raises their support by one but they still get eliminated so my vote gets transferred to Labour and their vote goes up by one also. Both parties will welcome my vote and claim me as a supporter.

Impact, Green and Labour votes both go up by one.

At this point the Tory voter is, rightly, feeling a little aggrieved that I have had more impact than them, as I get counted twice and they only get counted once, but other voters have it even worse.

A Green voter and a Labour voter

As with the Tory we mentioned earlier, there will still be many people who will vote just Green and others who will vote just Labour.

Now if we add both a Green only and a Labour only voter to the equation we see that the Green voter adds one to the support for Greens and likewise the Labour supporter adds one to the support for Labour. But that is exactly the same impact that my one vote had.

Impact, two voters have the same say as one voter.

Conclusion

These are examples of real voters so this will happen many times over under AV. Some voters will get more votes than others. And that’s unfair.

Debating the Alternative Vote (AV)

In recent weeks I've become a little embroiled in the Alternative Vote debate on Twitter.

The debate there is very limited, not because of the 140 character limit, but because most of the vocal protagonists (particularly on the #yes2av side) just throw blandishments like "fairer", "better" and "reform" around as if vocabulary was a fair substitute for debate.

And so I was easily tempted to go to a real debate on the topic organised by the UCLU Debating Society.

I had been to a few events at UCL before, mostly in connection with SSEES, but this was my first time in the magnificent Wilkins Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre.

Getting there was something of an achievement in itself as UCL is as well signposted as most hospitals and there were obstacles like a keep fit class along the way.

Arriving early meant a good choice of seats (on the end of a row about a third of the way up) and also time for a little wine kindly provided by the society.

This was billed as a public event but, apart from the speakers, I'm pretty sure that I was the only non-student there. It was a little weird so it's lucky that I don't get fazed by things like that.

The speakers for the motion, This House Would vote YES to AV, were Jonathan Bartley and Murad Qureshi AM (2nd and 1st right) who were opposed by Dr. Robert McIlveen and Stephen Parkinson (3rd and 4th right).

This was a formal debate, rather than a discussion and normal debating rules regarding length of speeches, interruptions and rights or reply.

The disappointment was immediate with Jonathan Bartley's opening remarks repeating the familiar vague claims and also the misleading claim of needing a majority of votes to win.

Robert McIlveen responded well by pointing out that AV will make no difference at all in the 1/3rd of seats that are already held with over 50% of the vote going to one party.

He also pointed out that a more complicated voting system will work against the less intelligent to which Murad Qureshi later responded by saying that it was OK for these people to vote with a single X. An appalling attitude.

The AV leads to PR claim was also demolished to complete a very convincing speech by Robert McIlveen.

Sound-bite of the evening went to the Nos with "AV moves us from wasted votes to wasted elections" as coalitions will means, as we have seen with the current administration, the policies we voted for being discarded by politicians in favour of agreements made behind closed doors.

The debate livened up a little when the audience were allowed there say. Unfortunately most of these were written beforehand and so were unrelated to what had gone before. For example, one speaker argued that AV would lead to PR when this had already been dismissed.

The two best speakers were both for abstaining on the vote. One pointed out that the debate was not being taken seriously by the government as they had put the referendum on the same date as other elections that the political parties would give priority to. Another said, quite rightly, that nobody had explained why AV changes anything.

The lowest point of the evening came in Jonathan Bartley's closing remarks when he mentioned his disabled son meeting David Cameron for no apparent reason.

The evening recovered a little after that when I joined some of the student in the nearby The Bar @ TCR for some closing drinks.

If this is a sign of the standard of debate that we can expect over the next three months then politics is going to be the loser, whatever the result of the referendum.