In just over 2 weeks time, the country will once again going to the ballot boxes. However on 5th May as well as voting in the council elections in England, the Welsh Assembly elections and Scottish Parliament elections. There will also be a referendum on reforming our voting system. At the moment we currently use the first past the post system, meaning that who ever gets the most amount of votes wins. However, the system that you can vote for in the referendum is the AV (Alternative vote) system. With this a candidate needs to get 50% +1 vote to be elected. Basically instead of just placing a x next to the candidate you wanted to vote for, you would list them in order of preference, so 1 for your 1st choice 2 for you second and so on. There is also no compulsion to have to place a preference next to every candidate.
I shall tell you now, why I will not be voting in favour of this change. It is made out that the AV is fairer than that of first past the post, as it means that you have to get more than 50% of the vote to win, and therefore have the majority of people backing you. However that is not more than 50% of first preference votes, because if it was it wouldn’t matter which system we had, because they would win with either system. AV can have a lot of rounds of voting before a candidate achieves the 50%+1 they need to win. this means that they will be getting a lot of 2nd and 3rd and maybe even 4th and 5th etc votes to get them elected. when the votes are transferred from losing candidates they still have equal weighting. In my opinion that means that people whom vote for candidates that lose and are eliminated from the count are actually getting another chance to vote. Therefore meaning that their votes are actually worth more than someone whom votes for the winning or runner up candidates.
Also there has been no real debate about reform or PR from the Government. The only debate is yes to av or no to av. There is more than 2 voting systems. I believe that there should have been a real debate about PR and which voting system would be best for us.
As a member of the Labour Party, it is not every often that I would say that Michael Howard was talking more sense than Peter Hain. However, on Question Time the other night that was in fact the case. Michael Howard made the point that we need accountability within Government, and that with First past the post the majority of the time it leads to a majority government. (of course not all the time as we are in a coalition at the moment, but this is our first coalition post ww2) Where with a AV system it would be more likely to lead to more hung parliaments and more coalitions. It was pointed out by Peter Hain that in Australia they have PR and that it rarely leads to coalitions. Just one thing he forgot to mention, that there it is illegal not to vote, and is illegal to spoil the paper. We are lucky if we get 60% out voting in a general election. So really the two are incomparable.
That is another thing with this AV referendum, with it only being council elections, along with other elections in Wales and Scotland. There will be even less people turning out to vote. Maybe this coalition government should stop wasting money trying to change the voting system to one that will not work, and instead investing that money to try and engage people to why they should vote in elections. Why it does matter, and if all else fails (as much as i dont agree with it) look at adopting a system like they have in Australia, where it is illegal not to vote.
I do not think that we can have a referendum of AV if only 30% of the voting population turn out to vote. That means that the voting system could be changed on the say so of just over 15% of the voting population, and that is definitely not fair.
Until there is a real choice and a really debate on this topic. I can not vote for it. It is currently a badly thought out coalition agreement. That the LibDems only agreed to because they were told it is that or nothing, and they are that power hungry that they took it. I would much prefer to see a choice for STV that is similar to AV but gives weighting when transfering votes. for example if a losing candidate got 15% of the vote, then when transferring their votes to the 2nd perferences those votes would only be worth 15% of a whole vote, and not a whole vote like with AV. That would be PR and far fairer.
so whatever you do on 5th of may please vote NOtoAV
bethienoodles 