Ok first of all, please relax, my UKIP-Voting fellow Yes to AV supporters. This is not a misspelt reference to Eastern European Immigration, but a reference to two polls from ICM and YouGov offerening guidance to would-be predictors of the outcome of the referendum on the Alternative Vote.
I have been aware of ICM’s poll for a fortnight or thereabouts, and the YouGov poll for somewhat longer, and of their contrasting results, the ICM poll indicating that more people are inclined to vote Yes than to vote No, and the YouGov poll suggesting vice versa. However I have not yet commented on either poll just yet, despite having had a few discussions about it on twitter with various people on both sides. I had been planning for my next blog post to be about the Liberal Democrats, but I’ve decided to put that off for now having just seen Peter Kellner’s commentary and comparison on the two contrasting polls. Here’s the link to what he has to say,
and here’s what stood out for me as the most important part of his commentary:
My belief is that the answer is to be found in what Mark Pack dismissed as the unimportant ‘other differences’. Here are the standard ICM and YouGov questions in full:
YouGov:
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government are committed to holding a referendum on changing the electoral system from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to the Alternative Vote (AV). At the moment, under first-past-the-post (FPTP), voters select ONE candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. It has been suggested that this system should be replaced by the Alternative Vote (AV). Voters would RANK a number of candidates from a list. If a candidates wins more than half of the ‘1st’ votes, a winner is declared. If not, the least popular candidates are eliminated from the contest, and their supporters’ subsequent preferences counted and shared accordingly between the remaining candidates. This process continues until an outright winner is declared.
If a referendum were held tomorrow on whether to stick with first-past-the-post or switch to the Alternative Vote for electing MPs, how would you vote?
If a referendum were held tomorrow on whether to stick with first-past-the-post or switch to the Alternative Vote for electing MPs, how would you vote?
ICM:
A referendum is due to be held in May 2011 on adopting a new voting system for British parliamentary elections. The proposed new system is called the ‘Alternative Vote’ (AV). If the referendum on AV were held tomorrow, how would you vote?
The big and obvious difference is that the YouGov question explains the difference between AV and FPTP, while the ICM question does not.
I believe that this holds the clue to the main difference between the two sets of results. It should be noted that ICM and YouGov agree on the proportion of people who support AV. The two sets of results differ in support for FPTP (YouGov in late November 41%, ICM 22%) and the number of don’t knows (YouGov 17%, ICM 35%).
It looks as if many people say ‘don’t know’ when the rival systems are not explained, but prove averse to change when they ARE explained.
Kellner then goes on to suggest three reasons why the difference in questions could have contributed to the difference in response to the polls. I agree with him completely that the wording of the questions is the key to the difference. But my agreement with Peter Kellner ends there. Unfortunately he misses one aspect of the question wording that is highly obvious to me. In light of his allegiance to YouGov one can easily forgive him for the oversight but I’m going to have to point it out anyway.
Kellner suggests that the YouGov poll gives explanations of the two systems and this makes the difference with a lot of people who would otherwise be in the “don’t know” category instead choosing to support First Past the Post. What he misses here is the “explanations” that are given in the YouGov poll question are misleading and push previously uninformed sample members towards First Past the Post in a number of ways.
First of all, the explanation of First Past the Post is short and simplistic, while the explanation of the Alternative Vote is longer and makes the system seem complicated and confusing from a voter’s point of view, where it really isn’t.
Secondly the description of First Past the Post is misleading, using a wordplay trick to describe its main weakness as a democratic strength. “It says of First Past the Post, ‘the candidate with the most votes wins’, and while this is not a lie, it is not the whole truth. Also, it conveniently omits the whole reason for proposing the alternative vote. The phrase ‘the most votes’ really only means ‘more votes than any other individual, whether it means a majority or not.’ But it appears to be reasonably close to ‘most of the votes’ which would be a true majority and a democratic outcome. If YouGov had used my alternative description: ‘The candidate with more votes than any other individual, whether it means a majority or not, wins,’ it would come much closer to the needlessly complicated explanation of the Alternative Vote in terms of the amount of detail included, and it would be a much more informative explanation of First Past the Post.
Contrast this with what’s written about the Alternative vote: (AV). Voters would RANK a number of candidates from a list. If a candidates wins more than half of the ‘1st’ votes, a winner is declared. If not, the least popular candidates are eliminated from the contest, and their supporters’ subsequent preferences counted and shared accordingly between the remaining candidates. This process continues until an outright winner is declared.
As I said, that is needlessly complicated and in conjunction with the simplistic and incomplete explanation of First Past the Post it is no wonder that it encourages people to move from “don’t know” to “no”. Allow me to provide a clearer and fairer explanation of what I believe to be a fairer voting system than First Past the Post:
Voters rank candidates in order of preference, as many or few as they wish. A candidate must have the majority of votes (over 50%) to win. If no candidate does, then the least popular candidates are eliminated one at a time, with their votes redistributed according to the preferences of the voters.
I must stress that I cannot find fault with Kellner’s suggestion that in playing it safe and not explaining either system, ICM could well be distorting the figures too. However, if I had to place money on which distortion was bigger I’d put it on YouGov’s.
If the polls instead included something along the lines of my descriptions of the two voting systems I would expect to see something in between their two sets of results, probably just favouring the Yes Campaign. Perhaps either YouGov or ICM would be interested in taking this into consideration.
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