totalPolitics: The myths of the alternative vote

In another totalPolitics article published today, Alan Renwick charts how both sides in the referendum are guilty of pushing some dubious claims.

Thus, the NO campaign:

The prize for the biggest porky goes to the No campaign. They claim that the AV gives voters for minor parties (they always helpfully add ‘such as the BNP’) multiple votes, while the good, honest mainstream voters get just one vote. This is just nonsense. Under the AV, every voter gets one vote, and no one’s vote counts more than anyone else’s.

The No camp is exploiting confusion over the AV’s system of vote transfers. Candidates who win few first preferences are eliminated, and their voters are reallocated to other surviving candidates according to lower preferences. So it might seem that a voter who first supported the BNP or the Greens or the Monster Raving Loonies is given a second vote when that candidate is eliminated. But it’s completely untrue to say that they have two or more votes.

And the YES campaign:

Does the Yes camp do any better? With their roots in the intellectually earnest Electoral Reform Society, we might hope so. However, they are not immune to a little airbrushing of the facts themselves.

Ever since the expenses scandal, the electoral reform lobby have been pushing the argument that changing the voting system to get rid of safe seats would prevent such abuses in the future. There’s actually no evidence that MPs in safe seats were more likely to abuse the expenses system - and the worst offending MPs could be removed whether they were in safe seats or not. Still, safe seats have other undesirable effects, so reducing their number is no bad thing.

The trouble for the Yes camp is that AV wouldn’t significantly change the number of safe seats. Certainly, the claim made in the Commons by one rather excitable Liberal Democrat that “AV would end safe seats” is simply untrue. In many seats, the winning candidate would still get more than 50 per cent of the vote under AV and these seats would remain just as safe as they are today.

Worth reading completely in order to clarify potential points of confusion and to achieve a balanced view of electoral reform.