“Only three countries use AV?” – Nonsense

By Martin Linton

There is a lot of competition for the most ridiculous argument that the NO2AV campaign has used in its desperate attempts to get people to vote ‘no’. Is it that marking 1-2-3 on a ballot paper is too complicated for British people to understand? Is it that AV leads to hung parliaments when Australia has had just one in the last 70 years? Is it that AV will help racist parties – when the BNP are voting ‘no’ precisely because AV will hurt them?

All of these are contenders, but surely the most ridiculous is the argument featured on the front page of their national leaflet, that we should not support AV because “only three countries use it – Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea”.

That argument is wrong on so many different counts, the least of which is that it is not factually true. Other countries that use AV are Ireland (for presidential elections and parliamentary by-elections), Scotland and Northern Ireland (for council by-elections), and Sri Lanka (for presidential elections).

An almost identical system (where you vote for a first and second preference) is used for mayoral elections in 13 English towns and cities, including London, Bedford, Doncaster, Hartlepool, Mansfield, Middlesbrough, North Tyneside, Torbay, Watford and four London Boroughs.

AV is also used for mayoral elections in a number of American cities, and for elections in the British parliament itself – including for select committee chairs and of hereditary peers to the House of Lords.

A two-round version of AV is used in all French elections and in presidential elections in Afghanistan, Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Finland, Ghana, Guatemala, Indonesia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Uruguay and Zimbabwe.

AV is used to elect the leader of the Lib Dems and Labour, and to select Oscar winners. The multi-round version of AV is used to elect the Conservative Party leader as well as the winners of The X-Factor and Big Brother. If Cameron he really thinks it is unfair, he should hand over to David Davis, who won the first round of the 2005 leadership election by 8 votes.

The No campaign’s argument implies that the experience of new democracies such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea has no value. In fact the experience of Papua New Guinea should be of great interest, since it is the only country that has switched to FPTP and then switched back again to AV. Anyone with any spirit of inquiry would want to know why their experience of FPTP was so bad that they quickly reverted to AV.

As an Australian colony, Papua inherited AV for its first three elections, but at independence in 1975 the new country changed to FPTP on the grounds that AV was ‘excessively complicated’, made a difference in only a few seats and was a colonial imposition.

The consequences were disastrous. With the majority of the population still village-based, voting tended to be in blocs for a clan’s favoured candidate. The crucial difference under AV had been that voters could and did assign preferences to candidates from outside their immediate clan area, enabling candidates with a limited clan voted but widespread secondary support to win seats. Especially in the highlands, constituencies often encompassed hundreds of villages which had little communication with one another and often spoke different dialects. AV favoured the candidates who campaigned outside their own clan area and translated their speeches.

By the time of the third AV election in 1972, 11 of the 84 constituencies were electing MPs who had not won on first preferences. Typically candidate Bono, with massive support from his own region but negligible support elsewhere, lost to candidate Ugi who attracted a smaller clan vote but a considerably broader range of support.

FPTP removed the incentive to appeal across clan lines. In the first post-independence election in 1977 more than half the MPs were elected with less than 30% of the vote. This was not only because every village was putting up its own candidate but because many candidates were standing with little hope of winning in order to split the opposition vote. The average number of candidates per seat rose in every election, from 6 in the last AV election to 15 by 92.

As more and more candidates stood, it was possible to win a seat on a lower and lower percentage of the vote, reinforcing the encouragement to stand. In 1992 one constituency had 48 candidates and the winner was elected with just 6.3% of the vote. Only 8 MPs that year had a majority; nearly half – 48 out of 109 – had less than 20%.

This caused heightened tensions between the clans and polarised electorates, in some cases to the point of violent conflict. Candidates in the highlands were actually at risk outside their own clan areas. The aggressive campaigning contrasted markedly with campaigning styles in previous elections.

A combination of high candidate numbers, low levels of support for winning candidates and campaign violence forced a return to AV. Former PNG justice minister Warren Dutton campaigned on the grounds that FPTP encouraged electoral violence and tribal fighting and AV would make elections “more peaceful, more respected and would return to parliament members supported by a majority of their electorate”.

It is easy to see the differences between democracy in Papua New Guinea and the UK, but it is even easier to miss the similarities.

FPTP is having the effect of increasing candidate numbers, lowering the election threshold and sharpening the adversarial nature of elections in the UK as well.

The MP elected with the lowest proportion of the vote remains Sir Russell Johnston, the Liberal who won Inverness East in 1992 with just 26% of the vote. But the number of MPs elected on minority mandates reached two-thirds in 2010, with 108 failing to reach 40%, many below a third and one below 30%.

The average number of candidates is also rising as is the proportion now voting for ‘minor’ parties which is now over a third.

It is difficult to believe any candidate would ever be elected in the UK with only 6.3% of the vote, but then a few years ago it would have been difficult to believe that two thirds of our MPs would be elected on minority mandates.

The reason why Papua New Guinea abandoned FPTP after only 17 years was that it has a strong tendency to make politics more acrimonious and less consensual. The difference with the UK is only one of degree.

Martin Linton is the former Labour MP for Battersea