The nonsense of the alternative vote

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

Sometimes our political system has a real knack of messing up change. The fuss over who might benefit from an alternative vote, the associated gerrymandering, the phrasing of the question, the difficulty of having a government half of which opposes its own referendum on principle, and even the arguments over the date are conspiring to achieve an undesirable outcome. This is alternative voting introduced without proportional representation and without support from a majority of the electorate.

The silliest thing about the alternative vote when applied to single seats is that it is profoundly anti-democratic. That was true of both Labour’s and the current coalition’s proposals. Changing the first past the post system so that the winner does not always win is simply nonsense to the man in the street. It might make some kind of convoluted sense to a psephologist but there are more men in the street than there are psephologists. The fact that if you get the most votes you should win the election is separate from the question of what you might do with the votes of those people who did not vote for the winner but, somehow, they have become confused.

Where there is a need for some clear common sense, Labour is tied to fudging because it appeared to offer the same option before the election. Also, the potential leaders are sitting on some spiky fences. The Liberal Democrats support it because even though there are arguments about whether or not it would make them a third force in politics for the foreseeable future it is essential in making their followers bite the coalition bullet because they can pretend it is proportional representation. The Conservatives seem to think it is not entirely absurd for a government to propose, organise and fund a referendum which they don’t believe that anyone wants and which they hope to lose.

Another reason why we have been launched on this soapbox towards an ugly compromise is the assumption that the British people do not like proportional representation. In this fractured land of increasingly homogenous communities, celebrity cults and social networking the man in the street wants to know who is representing him. The fact that for most people this is a total irrelevance does not reduce the level of emotional attachment to the idea. Also, some of this emotional attachment comes from sitting Members of Parliament in those homogenous seats with large majorities. They have no incentive to move to lists. And, even thinking people are not altogether enthusiastic about lists. They create a different breed of politician which may or may not be a good thing given the eccentricities of some people who do get elected (the recent election being a case in point) but it is a genuine change in how people are represented and needs to be thought about in that way.

So, before we crash, burn and find when we put the bits together that we have a change nobody wants, it is time for a principled party to stand up and say stop, think again. The real question is not whether the person who came second should come first because the people who voted for someone else would prefer him rather than the other bloke. Instead, it is whether you can find a system which takes the votes of people who did not vote for the winner and gives them some kind of representation. That is important because if you live in one of our homogenous constituencies but vote the other way you will never have the slightest impact on the electoral system. There might possibly be greater disincentives to participate but it would be hard to imagine what they are.

One option which works well in some democracies is to use first past the post for one chamber of government and proportional representation for the second. That could make everyone’s vote count but because our first chamber is so much more important than our second it doesn’t work well for us. The voting system is not a good reason for changing the political system although the political system should be based in fair votes.

Bearing in mind the way our politics work, can we produce an electoral system that reflects and improves it? Well, maybe. Suppose that we took our existing first past the post system and retained it after coming to some agreement over constituency restructuring which took account of population and economic and geographical entities. The first past the post outcome would deliver one cohort of Members of Parliament. Then, suppose we took all the votes and redistributed them to parties and on the proportional outcomes elected a certain number of Members of Parliament from lists produced by the political parties. It would not make a significant difference but if there were concerns about the winner’s votes counting twice, you could simply distribute the losing votes.

The end result would be that you had two different categories of Members of Parliament, FPTPs and List. Personally, I think this might be a good thing. You could avoid the parachuting into safe seats of potential but locally unconnected politicians so emphasising local representation and you could provide a proper route for – without naming names – easing the unelectable into Parliament. If a party’s list did not provide a proper gender and racial balance then that would be obvious to all as well. Finally, of course, you could use this system to introduce a compulsory vote, something which any democracy in the 21st-century should be able to embrace and deliver.