Debunking the Multiple Votes Falsehood with a Pub Analogy

This came about in my previous blog post, a commentary on a no2av article by @Dyslexic_Trojan from Twitter. However that's a long read, and I feel this analogy stands out well enough to deserve its own entry, on a par with my Hare and Tortoise analogy from a few months back.

So many times I've seen Pro First Past the Post people perpetuate the falsehood (call it a lie, call it a popular misconception, it could be either depending on the person who utters it) that AV means some people get more votes than others. I've come across an analogy that should clearly debunk it once and for all, in the terms that everyone should be able to understand. Buying a drink in a pub.

Everyone gets one vote. One voter, one ballot paper. Multiple preferences are declared, but the vote only ends up with one candidate. If you voted for a popular candidate your vote ends up with that candidate. If you voted for an unpopular candidate, by the final round, your vote will end up with a different one, (quite possibly the same popular candidate), but it's one vote.

Each vote is counted each round and everyone's vote gets counted the same number of times as everyone else's. It's simply not true to say that some people get more votes than others.

When you go to buy a drink and your favourite beer is off, so you end up buying a different one, you still only come away with the one pint. The difference between AV and FPTP is under AV you get a pint and you get to choose between the ones that are available. Under FPTP You instead get told "sorry that beer's off, now I have to serve the next gentleman and you have to join the back of the queue" (i.e. that's your vote used up, try again next election).

In democracy, everyone should get one vote that is worth as much as everyone else's. Everyone who queues up at the bar should walk away with a pint.

Please note, the pint in this analogy does not represent the winning candidate, it represents a vote that goes to one of the candidates in the final round before a winner is declared.

You walk away with a pint, and only one. It's not your favourite but it's one you quite like. Your vote has counted at each stage, and while you may not win, at least you've had a say in the final outcome right up to the last round. 

Only if you really have no preference at all and would prefer to walk away do you end up without a say in the final round. And even then, that is no less than what that the majority of voters must make do with under First Past the Post.

AV is simply more democratic in every sense!

Following another twitter debate with @dyslexic_trojan he led me to his blog post on FPTP and AV, and having read it I could only declare it as "stuck up nonsense". Now it would hardly be fair of me to leave it there without justifying my comment.

So here's my full analysis and response. It is a bit long. Perhaps best taken in a few paragraphs at a time.

First the link to his article: http://piemandmu.blogspot.com/2010/11/no-to-av.html

And here are my comments:

"in FPTP one is forced to make a choice for a single candidate or idea."

Forcing a voter to do anything is never good. You often talk about devaluing votes, well when a voter is forced to vote a certain way and ignore aspects of his/her views, that certainly does devalue the vote.


"AV on the other hand no one actually votes for a candidate they merely register vague sympathy for them." 

Declaring your 1st preference on an AV ballot is very much voting and not registering vague sympathy at all. Given that FPTP doesn't allow you to do this, I'd say that AV 1st preferences are of far greater value than FPTP X votes (which could be any preference from 1st down to 2nd last, whatever is necessary to keep out the disliked candidate).

The remaining preferences are used so that a voter can express their full views, showing who they really like and who they really dislike. A voter can express who they really want to win, and also express their preferences between the most popular candidates, without having to guess before hand who the most popular candidates are likely to be. It allows voters to be completely honest, and removes the horrible choice forced upon many voters between a tactical vote and a wasted vote.

"I will not labour how many lives have been lost and how many bones broke to achieve the democratic ideal that within the democratic sphere and in particular in the voting booth all men have the right for a vote and each man has the same number of votes and that is one."

I'm glad you mentioned this as I would have mentioned it myself otherwise. Democracy is important for many reasons and Britian should use the most Democratic system available to us. In may we will have a choice between two, and one of those two, the current system is the least democratic system used anywhere in the world.

"Under AV those who vote for smaller parties (as the votes are redistributed upward) are allowed to votes at least twice and in some cases several times."

Everyone gets one vote. One voter, one ballot paper. Multiple preferences are declared, but the vote only ends up with one candidate. If you voted for a popular candidate your vote ends up with that candidate. If you voted for an unpopular candidate, your vote will end up with a different one, (quite possibly the same popular candidate), but it's one vote. Each vote is counted each round and everyone's vote gets counted the same number of times as everyone else's. It's simply not true to say that some people get more votes than others. When you go to buy a drink and your favourite beer is off, so you end up buying a different one, you still only come away with the one pint.

The difference between AV and FPTP is under AV you get a pint and you get to choose between the ones that are available. Under FPTP You don't get told "sorry that beer's off, now I have to serve the next gentleman and you have to join the back of the queue" (i.e. that's your vote used up, try again next election).

In democracy, everyone should get one vote that is worth as much as everyone else's. Everyone who queues up at the bar should walk away with a pint. (Please note, the pint in this analogy does not represent the winning candidate, it represents a vote going to a candidate, who may lose but would lose only to someone else who got a majority - i.e. 50% +1)

So as you recognise how important democracy is and the price paid for it I hope you will see now that choosing to keep First Past the Post is a terrible show of disrespect to all those who suffered so that all men (and WOMEN I should add) have a vote.

"Another crime for which it is guilty is it drives votes toward the least disliked."

First Past the Post already does this. It forces voters to make a choice between what they want (a wasted vote) and their least disliked option (a tactical vote). They could go with their true preference but already know it would mean they don't make any contribution towards deciding between the disliked candidate and the next most disliked candidate - the only one who has a chance of beating the disliked candidate. They could vote for the least disliked and try to keep out the disliked, or vote for their first choice and know it's a waste as they'll have no say in the outcome.



" Think of the labour leadership election, it was not the most popular or the most controversial; it was the least offensive to both sides. They where not selected by first or even second preference votes but by fourth and fifth, they were elected by the “there okay I suppose” preference."

The Labour leadership outcome was skewed by a perculiar vote weighting between the different people eligible to vote in the election. The fact that Ed beat David had nothing to do with whether it was FPTP or AV. Ed would have won under FPTP as I understand.

HOWEVER: Let's suppose for a minute that it really WAS that simple. Let's suppose that David would have won under FPTP, but lost to Ed instead under AV. Think about what that would have meant. It would have meant that the majority of voters preferred Ed to David. Ones who put Ed 2nd would have put David 3rd or lower. Ones ho put Ed 4th would have put David 5th or lower and so one.

If it had been a head to head between Ed and David, Ed would have won. Even if it were true that FPTP would have meant David won instead, he could only have done so thanks to vote splitting between the other candidates. In situations where AV and FPTP would produce different winners, the winner under AV would always beat the winner under FPTP in a head-to-head, because the majority PREFER the AV winner to the FPTP winner.

That's the significance of AV requiring a majority. Even though it draws some of that majority from preferences that aren't 1st, anyone who is beaten by those preferences received even LOWER preferences from the same voter. That's democracy at work and First Past the Post just can't cope with such situations and produces winners that displease the majority of voters.

"As we know candidates follow and are pushed by electoral trends and if moving toward blandness and indecisiveness if the key to win on the great surge of “there okay I suppose” votes then this is exactly what they will do."

Candidates FOLLOWING what the voters want is exactly as things SHOULD be. If the majority of voters wanted a candidate who would make it law to wear pink hats every 3rd sunday of the month, then it is RIGHT that a candidate who would introduce that law should win. You may not like Pink hats, and I may not like Pink hats, but if that's what the majority want then that's how it should be, and you and I are free to go and live somewhere else.

Now take that Pink hat rule example and give it another name, such as the Iraq War, or Tuition Fee increase. In both cases, the majority didn't want it. But we got stuck with both because a government was elected with a minority of votes. It may have been the largest minority, but it was still a minority and resulted in the majority of voters being particularly unhappy. We need to replace First Past the Post with a system that rewards candidates who listen to the majority of voters if we want anything resembling democracy in Britain. AV goes some way towards doing that. At the very least it's a big improvement on the current system.

"Another crime for which it is guilty is it drives votes toward the least disliked."

First Past the Post already does this. It forces voters to make a choice between what they want (a wasted vote) and their least disliked option (a tactical vote). They could go with their true preference but already know it would mean they don't make any contribution towards deciding between the disliked candidate and the next most disliked candidate - the only one who has a chance of beating the disliked candidate. They could vote for the least disliked and try to keep out the disliked, or vote for their first choice and know it's a waste as they'll have no say in the outcome.



" Think of the labour leadership election, it was not the most popular or the most controversial; it was the least offensive to both sides. They where not selected by first or even second preference votes but by fourth and fifth, they were elected by the “there okay I suppose” preference."

The Labour leadership outcome was skewed by a perculiar vote weighting between the different people eligible to vote in the election. The fact that Ed beat David had nothing to do with whether it was FPTP or AV. Ed would have won under FPTP as I understand.

HOWEVER: Let's suppose for a minute that it really WAS that simple. Let's suppose that David would have won under FPTP, but lost to Ed instead under AV. Think about what that would have meant. It would have meant that the majority of voters preferred Ed to David. Ones who put Ed 2nd would have put David 3rd or lower. Ones ho put Ed 4th would have put David 5th or lower and so one.

If it had been a head to head between Ed and David, Ed would have won. Even if it were true that FPTP would have meant David won instead, he could only have done so thanks to vote splitting between the other candidates. In situations where AV and FPTP would produce different winners, the winner under AV would always beat the winner under FPTP in a head-to-head, because the majority PREFER the AV winner to the FPTP winner.

That's the significance of AV requiring a majority. Even though it draws some of that majority from preferences that aren't 1st, anyone who is beaten by those preferences received even LOWER preferences from the same voter. That's democracy at work and First Past the Post just can't cope with such situations and produces winners that displease the majority of voters.

"As we know candidates follow and are pushed by electoral trends and if moving toward blandness and indecisiveness if the key to win on the great surge of “there okay I suppose” votes then this is exactly what they will do."

Candidates FOLLOWING what the voters want is exactly as things SHOULD be. If the majority of voters wanted a candidate who would make it law to wear pink hats every 3rd sunday of the month, then it is RIGHT that a candidate who would introduce that law should win. You may not like Pink hats, and I may not like Pink hats, but if that's what the majority want then that's how it should be, and you and I are free to go and live somewhere else.

Now take that Pink hat rule example and give it another name, such as the Iraq War, or Tuition Fee increase. In both cases, the majority didn't want it. But we got stuck with both because a government was elected with a minority of votes. It may have been the largest minority, but it was still a minority and resulted in the majority of voters being particularly unhappy. We need to replace First Past the Post with a system that rewards candidates who listen to the majority of voters if we want anything resembling democracy in Britain. AV goes some way towards doing that. At the very least it's a big improvement on the current system.

"Added to this the fact that I very much doubt that AV will alter the electoral landscape, indeed I believe it will reinforce the dominance of the two party system."

If Labour and the Tories continue to dominate British Politics under AV it can only mean that they deserve to. If they're still winning the lion's share of seats once everyone's stopped voting tactically and each seat is won with majority support then it proves that all those Labour and Conservative MPs deserve to be there.

Furthermore there'll be no comfortable jobs for life for MPs of any party. They'll only continue to win and keep their seats if they work hard for it. Any sign of sleaze, promise-breaking, expenses fiddling, warmongering and the like can easily be punished because the majority of preferences will end up going elsewhere. Everyone's accountable. And I include the Lib Dems here. Rightly or wrongly, they are rather unpopular at the moment, but it'll be just as easy to punish them under AV as anyone else. They even, may find themselves making way for Greens or UKIP as the third party, IF it's what the people want.

What the people want by the way is the key issue here. Under AV voters get more say. They express their views fully with a full spectrum of positive and negative opinions of candidates. No-one can hide, or sit comfortably with their core vote alone.



"Let us use the Ed Balls seat as an example. Labour where only defeated by UKIP votes from the Tories, had AV been used those preferences would have transferred to the Tories."

Ok, what happens here is that people who prefer UKIP to Tories will vote UKIP first. All of them. And it'll be clear how many of them there really are. They'll see it, and the UKIP candidate will see it, and all of the other voters will see it as well. And they'll think, "Hang on, it may only take so much more to overtake some of the other parties in this constituency over time." As a result you'll see UKIP working really hard to build a momentum. Their chances will instead of being impossible, will just be rather difficult. They'll push hard to turn that "rather difficult" into "not particularly easy" and so on. Meanwhile all the other candidates will be working hard too. Everyone will be under pressure, to stay ahead of the game, or to make ground on others who don't do so well.

Under FPTP you have people who can't win, people who can't lose, and very occasionally people with even chances between them.

You'll get the least effort from people who can't lose. They know whatever they do, they're in a job for life and they'll be coming back. All they have to do is dress smartly and not say anything overtly racist. They certainly won't have to do much between elections. Just a bit of campaigning before an election and then once they're in office they can relax.

The next least amount of effort comes from people who can't win. They don't have any chance of winning but they're there and it's the taking part that counts and they at least can try and beat their personal best in share of the votes.

The only time you see people firing on all cylinders is when they've got a fair chance of winning but also a fair chance of losing. They can win if they really go for it, but if they don't they won't. AV makes that situation the most common one for candidates across the country. And that's how AV makes our MPs work harder to win and keep their seats.

"Added to this the fact that I very much doubt that AV will alter the electoral landscape, indeed I believe it will reinforce the dominance of the two party system."

If Labour and the Tories continue to dominate British Politics under AV it can only mean that they deserve to. If they're still winning the lion's share of seats once everyone's stopped voting tactically and each seat is won with majority support then it proves that all those Labour and Conservative MPs deserve to be there.

Furthermore there'll be no comfortable jobs for life for MPs of any party. They'll only continue to win and keep their seats if they work hard for it. Any sign of sleaze, promise-breaking, expenses fiddling, warmongering and the like can easily be punished because the majority of preferences will end up going elsewhere. Everyone's accountable. And I include the Lib Dems here. Rightly or wrongly, they are rather unpopular at the moment, but it'll be just as easy to punish them under AV as anyone else. They even, may find themselves making way for Greens or UKIP as the third party, IF it's what the people want.

What the people want by the way is the key issue here. Under AV voters get more say. They express their views fully with a full spectrum of positive and negative opinions of candidates. No-one can hide, or sit comfortably with their core vote alone.

"Let us use the Ed Balls seat as an example. Labour where only defeated by UKIP votes from the Tories, had AV been used those preferences would have transferred to the Tories."

Ok, what happens here is that people who prefer UKIP to Tories will vote UKIP first. All of them. And it'll be clear how many of them there really are. They'll see it, and the UKIP candidate will see it, and all of the other voters will see it as well. And they'll think, "Hang on, it may only take so much more to overtake some of the other parties in this constituency over time." As a result you'll see UKIP working really hard to build a momentum. Their chances will instead of being impossible, will just be rather difficult. They'll push hard to turn that "rather difficult" into "not particularly easy" and so on. Meanwhile all the other candidates will be working hard too. Everyone will be under pressure, to stay ahead of the game, or to make ground on others who don't do so well.

Under FPTP you have people who can't win, people who can't lose, and very occasionally people with even chances between them.

You'll get the least effort from people who can't lose. They know whatever they do, they're in a job for life and they'll be coming back. All they have to do is dress smartly and not say anything overtly racist. They certainly won't have to do much between elections. Just a bit of campaigning before an election and then once they're in office they can relax.

The next least amount of effort comes from people who can't win. They don't have any chance of winning but they're there and it's the taking part that counts and they at least can try and beat their personal best in share of the votes.

The only time you see people firing on all cylinders is when they've got a fair chance of winning but also a fair chance of losing. They can win if they really go for it, but if they don't they won't. AV makes that situation the most common one for candidates across the country. And that's how AV makes our MPs work harder to win and keep their seats.

Which is the TRUE Winner then?

A common argument posed by those in favour of First Past the Post over a preferential voting systems is that First Past the Post gives you 'true" winners who've got all their support out of people making only one choice. They also say that First Past the Post is fairest as the one with "the most votes" wins. 

First of all watch out for the phrase "the most votes". It might look similar to "most of the votes" but it means something very different. Having more votes than any other individual does not mean a majority. A majority is defined as more than everyone else put together, i.e. more than half. Merely having the largest minority does not mean you have the most support. It does not mean that on the whole you are in the best position to represent everyone. To form a single party government in the House of Commons, a party needs a majority of seats, more than half. It SHOULD be the same to win a seat, a candidate SHOULD need a majority of votes to win, but under First Past the Post, they don't. How is that fair?

So, putting aside this wordplay slight of hand, let's have a look at a slightly more developed version of the pro-FPTP argument. First Past the Post supporters might say "Ah, but under AV the 50% comes from a mixture of preferences, so it's not a true majority." My reply to that is that First Past the Post votes are a mixture of preferences as well. You only get to make one choice under FPTP so you often have to make a decision about whether to give it to your 1st preference, or to give it to someone else for tactical reasons.

The difference is that under FPTP you don't know where the votes come in the voters' preferences. And FPTP X vote could be anything from 1st right down to 2nd last - whichever is required to keep out the least liked candidate. What AV does is make it clear what the preferences are. So while a majority in AV can come from a mixture of 1st, 2nd and 3rd preference votes, a FPTP victory often comes from a MINORITY that is ALSO a mixture of various preference votes, and may of them probably lower down the scale than they would be under AV.

To any FPTP supporter who says "only 1st preferences should count", I say, you have to know what the 1st preferences are to make them count. You can't know that without inviting voters to include as many preferences as they like. If you restrict voters to a maximum number of choices, especially only one choice then you'll just never know.

What it really comes down to, is that there are situations where a candidate would win under AV when he/she got fewer 1st preference votes than one of the others, but got a majority over all once the preferences of voters for elminated candidates are considered. FPTP-backers think this is unfair. They think this for two reasons, both of which I intend to show are incorrect:

Incorrect reason number 1) They assume that all the 1st preference votes are equivalent to the X votes in FPTP, and therefore whoever got the most 1st preference votes in AV would have won under FPTP.

This is wrong for the reasons I have already explained. FPTP votes aren't all first preferences. They are distorted by tactical voting and in fact are made up of a whole range of preferences, from people who really like the candidates, and from people who see candidates as the only realistic alternative to the ones they really don't like. Under FPTP many people vote for their 2nd-least preferred candidate as they see it as the only way to keep out their most disliked. FPTP votes are NOT all 1st preference votes, so you can't look at the 1st preferences in an AV vote and say that that's how the votes would have gone under FPTP.

Incorrect reason number 2) They believe that because the majority that leads to a victory in AV is made up of some voters 2nd and 3rd preferences (possibly even lower down in some case) it invalidates the victory.

Putting aside the fact that FPTP also includes a mix of preferences, I'm going to show mathematically how a winner under AV would always beat the FPTP winner (unless they're the same person as is very often the case) in a head-to-head.

We're describing a situation where a candidate a) wins under FPTP b) gets the most 1st preferences under AV and c) doesn't win under AV.

Under FPTP one of the candidate wins with the largest minority. Let's say it's Bob with a number of votes X. It's a minority, so X < 50%

Under AV the maximum number of 1st preferences Bob could get is X. He could get fewer (if, say, some of his FPTP votes were tactical and not real 1st preferences) but he wouldn't get more as there'd be no reason to vote tactically against a likely winner under FPTP.

So Bob has the most 1st preferences X, and he has <50% therefore so must everyone else. 

So no-one has a majority of 1st preferences and the process of elimination and redistribution of votes begins. The end result is one of the other candidates, let's say it's Anne, wins, getting a majority of votes after the other candidates have been eliminated. 

Anne's total is Y. As Bob comes second, he isn't eliminated at any stage so his total is either X or >X. But because he comes second he must have fewer votes than Y. Anne on the other hand has Y votes, >50% > X.

So Anne would have beaten Bob in a head-to-head. With just the two of them standing and the voters choosing one or the other, more would have chosen Anne and Anne would have won fair and square in a FPTP sense. And with only two candidates FPTP has meaning as there's a real Post: the 50% mark.

At this point it is clear that more voters preferred Anne to Bob than Bob to Anne. Some put Anne 1st, some put Anne 2nd, or 3rd, or even 4th. But wherever they put Anne, they put her higher than they put Bob. If a voter put Anne 3rd and his/her vote went to Anne, then Bob would have been placed lower than 3rd by that voter.

However little of an endorsement for Anne it may appear to be, it's LESS of an endorsement for Bob. If the voter really didn't care whether it should be Anne or Bob, he or she would have given neither of them any rankings at all. By including Anne and Bob, the voter indicated a preference of one over the other, even though they also declared that they really prefer someone else to either Anne or Bob.

Since Anne would win the straight head-to-head with Bob, Anne is the more democratic choice and the more valid choice. The fact that Bob would have won under FPTP, and that Bob gets more 1st preference votes is dependent entirely on the number of other candidates. Bob only APPEARS to be popular, because of the X votes in FPTP and the 1st preferences in AV being split across a number of candidates. But once preferences are considered with the least popular candidates eliminated one at a time, it boils down to a straight head-to-head between the two strongest, Bob and Anne, which Anne wins.

AV accounts of the number of other candidates. It removes the vote-splitting issue and makes sure that the majority view is considered. Because Anne would win the head-to-head between Anne and Bob, Anne is the true winner, and so it is AV, that produces the true winners, not FPTP.

Whatever Your Opinion of the Lib Dems May Be...

Over the last few weeks the understandable anger that a large number of people are feeling towards Nick Clegg, and/or the Liberal Democrats has rather clouded the issue of electoral reform and caused many to question whether voting Yes to the Alternative Vote might be a good idea after all.

So it's about time I set out my own thoughts on this and argue why not only is anger at a particular party a bad reason to say No, but in fact saying No to AV won't punish them.

Let's go over what we already know first of all. We had a general election. At the time of voting the Labour government had disappointed many people from going to war against our will, introducing expensive unnecessary infringements on our liberties such as ID cards, and failing to keep our economy as healthy as it ought to be. Oh and an expenses scandal as well with which very few of us were best pleased.

You'd expect this to mean a comfortable walkover for the Conservatives. It had been 13 years, Thatcher a distant memory to many voters and Cameron promising all sorts of change, and change sounded like something that could be good. Only the Conservatives didn't really work hard enough to capitalise. Labour handed the election to them on a plate, but they weren't able to take it. I wouldn't have been at all surprised had we seen a mirror image of 1997 where the opposition capitalised on a Conservative government that had completely lost the plot in the eyes of the public. But no, it didn't happen.

This was the first election to occur following the ubiquity of social media, and we had televised party leader debates as well. There was Gordon Brown looking tired, and there was David Cameron failing to wipe the floor with him, and there was Nick Clegg picking up on both of these things and grabbing the opportunity with both hands. He certainly won my vote.

But then came polling day and the reality of First Past the Post hit home. Thanks to the current voting system many voters' choices were limited. There were many who weren't that keen on Labour but couldn't let the Tories in so they voted Labour anyway. There were many who were absolutely fed up with Labour and saw that despite looking rather weak themselves the Conservatives were the only realistic possibility if you wanted change. And so far more of the votes went to those two parties than they merited. Even then, between them the two parties only managed about 65% of the vote but still got nearly all of the seats.

I must at this point make a special mention to those wonderful people in Brighton who said "you know what, stuff tactical voting, I'm going to vote for what I really want!", and they got what they wanted as well, but it shouldn't have been so difficult and wouldn't be under a fairer voting system.

The Lib Dems ended up in a bizarre position with almost a quarter of the votes, but a far smaller proportion of the seats. The weakness of both the Labour and Conservative parties left the Lib Dems in a position where they could form a coalition with either party. So they did this, and following massive demonstrations from Take Back Parliament they did it on the condition of electoral reform, namely a referendum on the Alternative Vote. At first we were all disappointed with this offer because we wanted a proportional system and the Alternative Vote isn't proportional.

However looking at the positives AV is still a massive improvement on the current system, requiring a majority to win and allowing voters to express more complete opinions of the available candidates, and not forcing anyone to choose between a tactical vote and a wasted vote. Small change, big difference, giving power to the voters and momentum to those pushing for further reform. So that's why all those who want reform enough to campaign for it in the first place are backing this change so that we're in a better position to ask for more. But that's another story.

So fast forward a few months and the Lib Dems are in a coalition government with the Conservatives. The Conservatives make up most of the government so they come up with most of the policies. The Lib Dems made promises before the election not consistent with Conservative policies and now find themselves having to break their promises in order to keep the government together. It's upset people, understandably.

But voting No to AV just to punish them is not the answer.

First of all: We'd be condemning the country, voters of every party to at least another generation of First Past the Post elections sending any hope of electoral reform right to back square one. We'd be ensuring that we keep the voting system that got us into this situation in the first place so it could very easily happen again. They've had 11 hung parliaments in Canada under FPTP after all. Only one in Australia under AV.

Secondly: It would be the Lib Dems again that have to make these deals in each hung parliament. They're the third party and would never be overtaken as such by the likes of Greens or UKIP under FPTP. The Lib Dems would still receive tactical votes in many constituencies despite their damaged reputation and gain more votes than they would under AV.

Thirdly: If your main interest really is in hurting the Lib Dems, voting Yes To AV would be your best option. Under AV voters would be free to punish any politicians who don't do a good job. Even if there are parties more disliked than the Lib Dems you wouldn't have to vote the Lib Dems first just to keep them out. That's one of the wonderful things about preferential voting.

Finally: The people you're really angry at are the ones who are the present day Lib Dems. Not the Lib Dems of the 90s, or their SDP predecessors, and not necessarily the Lib Dems of 10 years or 20 years from now. You might want to punish Nick Clegg, but I would speculate that he's doomed anyway. AV would allow you to punish him, and/or the Lib Dems as long as he's in charge, and still leave yourself the option to forgive the Lib Dems under a better leader if you so wish, or you could bury the Lib Dems entirely and let them be overtaken by another party if they show no signs of improvement. AV gives you that power as a voter to reward hardworking MPs and punish bad ones.

The point is that you've got to look beyond present day situations, and beyond party politics and see the big picture. The longterm goal is to ensure that voters get as much say as possible, as much say as each other, and more say than the politicians. That is why you must say Yes to AV, especially if you are upset with any politicians from any party.

Clash of the Polls

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,

http://today.yougov.co.uk/commentaries/peter-kellner/can-yes-campai...

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?

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.

How Sophisticated Are Your Views?

INTRODUCTION:
Over the last week I ran a little experiment comparing First Past the Post (the current system) and the Alternative Vote (a voting system that we will have the chance to adopt instead pending a referendum on it on May 5^th).


I wanted to look at how accurately the two systems allow voters to represent their views on available candidates in an election. It seems pretty clear that people are not simple-minded when it comes to making a choice. They weigh up competing factors and deliberate of which of them are more important before making a final decision.


So it would make sense to have a voting system that allows you to express your sophisticated views accurately. When presented with a list of options you have positive and negative views of them all. There might be a candidate you want to win more than anyone else, but your opinion will also view the remaining candidates differently. Some of them, while not your favourite might be reasonably satisfactory winners in your eyes, especially compared to some others which you might find particularly objectionable.


THE EXPERIMENT:
So onto the first part of my experiment: I ran a ballot where voters voted for the same outcome using FPTP and AV in parallel. Rather than use a political theme and risk a cross-over with party political issues, and to make it a bit more amusing and interesting for the participants, I picked five deeply unpopular figures and asked the voters to vote for one of them to be executed. 31 participants submitted their ballots to me by email after I sent an open appeal with a link to a zip file containing four kinds of ballot papers and detailed instructions of how to participate, appealing on twitter, facebook and a few internet message oards I frequent.


Here is the First Past the Post version of the ballot:





The results are as follows:


Rupert Murdoch 20 (65%)
Sepp Blatter 4 (13%)
George Osborne 3 (10%)
Gordon Ramsay 3 (10%)
Simon Cowell 1 (3%) n.b. percentages are rounded





OK, so it certainly looks like the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of Murdoch. Even if all the other voters desperately wanted Murdoch to live and had all voted for the same rival candidate, the outcome would have been the same. Still, it would be helpful to take the voters holistic views into account. We don’t know, for example, how fond the voters were of the other candidates, neither in absolute nor in relative terms. It would certainly help everyone if a party could know how popular their candidate was compared to all of the others and use that information to inform future campaigns. Supposing Murdoch was pulled out of the running at the last minute, how might people have voted between the other four candidates? You have no way of knowing from this.




MODIFYING FPTP TO INCLUDE A POSITIVE AND A NEGATIVE VOTE:
So I have devised a crude modification to FPTP to allow voters to show the negative end of their views as well as the positive. It is my aim to show that AV is merely a more sophisticated modification of FPTP. In my simple modification I asked the voters to mark a candidate whom they would like to be saved. I used a separate ballot, but if such a system were ever used in a real election it could be done with an alternative symbol to go along with the X on one ballot. Here is the ballot used in this experiment.



This negative vote could be subtracted from the totals of positive votes. In FPTP where the winner is the one who has more votes than any other individual, it’s possible for more voters to actively dislike the winner than the number who voted for the winner. Although in this case Murdoch has a clear majority so the outcome wouldn’t be affected, the results do show that voters’ views are more sophisticated than a straightforward FPTP vote indicates.
Here they are:


Cowell +1 -3 = -2
Blatter +4 -0 = 4
Osborne +3 – 16 = -13
Ramsey +3 -12 = -9
Murdoch + 20 – 0 =20







So comparing the modified set of results with the straight forward FPTP results shows us a few interesting things.


First of all Murdoch’s “victory” is shown to be even more convincing because voters had an opportunity to vote against his execution without detracting from their preferred victim. That they declined this opportunity, gives Murdoch an even stronger mandate to be executed. This shows that the modification benefits a strong candidate who appeals to more than just a core group of voters.






Secondly, the rankings of the candidates change rather dramatically.
Simon Cowell has gone from being the least popular execution victim to being ranked in the middle. What has happened here is that compared to the other candidates few voters have much of an opinion of Cowell at all. In First Past the Post having very little opinion of a candidate is translated as having a negative opinion. The modification shows that a negative opinion and a neutral opinion are quite different things.


Similarly, the inclusion of the negative votes shows that George Osborne is clearly the darling of the electorate in that a considerable number (although not a majority), would like him saved. Gordon Ramsay is not far behind, but then there is a gap which was not indicated by the standard FPTP vote.
Both have gone from being just behind Blatter and just ahead of Cowell to being definite NOs for execution. Had Murdoch not been a candidate, who knows what the outcome might have been? Either of Ramsey or Osborne might have been executed in a FPTP ballot, upsetting a very large number of the voters.


So one can already see that voters’ views are too sophisticated to be represented by First Past the Post with any real accuracy.


FURTHER MODIFICATION TO AV:


OK, well that’s all well and good, but how does AV fit in?
Well AV is simply another modification of First Past the Post, along the same lines. Instead of marking a ballot with one positive vote and one negative one, you rank all the candidates in your order of preference. So not only does it allow voters to convey the extreme positive and negative end of their views, it also allows them to rank all of the other candidates in between.
As well as asking the participants to submit me an FPTP ballot, and a ballot of negative votes, I also asked for two AV style ballots. One ranking in order of preference to be executed, and another ranking in order of preference to be saved.




Here is the first AV ballot used:









And the results are as follows:

Cowell	0
Blatter	5
Osborne	2
Ramsay	3
Murdoch	21

This from first preferences alone, and under the rules of AV if a candidate has a majority (more than 50% of the votes) then they are declared the winner there and then. As one might expect having already seen the FPTP ballots Murdoch has a clear majority and gets executed without the need for any elimination of candidates or redistribution of votes.
It is worth noting though that the 1^st preferences in the AV ballots are similar, but not identical to the FPTP votes. Murdoch and Blatter have one more vote each and Cowell and Osborne one fewer each.
The X vote that you give in FPTP doesn’t always go to your first preference, especially when you are in a constituency where there is a lot of pressure to vote tactically instead of preferentially. There are other reasons as well. Choosing one candidate and ignoring the others is often more difficult to do than to rank in order of preference.
Ok, so this result has showed that AV does not compromise things for MPs who have a majority. They will continue to win their seats under AV and rightly so, as they have backing from more than half of their constituents. In a sense this is all that matters regarding the outcome of this particular vote. Murdoch dies, and the other four live and the majority are happy with that outcome in both cases.




WITH AV WE CAN ASK OTHER QUESTIONS THAT FPTP CANNOT ANSWER:
In this case we have a clear winner and any voting system would show Rupert Murdoch as the obvious choice for execution. However, situations are not always going to be that clear. Remember, after looking at the situations I asked “Had Murdoch not been a candidate, who knows what the outcome might have been?” While it’s not possible to tell from looking at the First Past the Post ballots, not even when you factor in the negative votes, the AV ballots make it quite clear.
We can let the same AV ballot with Murdoch removed as a candidate represent a situation where the competition is somewhat closer. So I shall now eliminate Murdoch (as if he had come last in an AV vote without a majority) and transfer his votes over to the second preferences of those who voted for him.


So redistributing the 2^nd preferences of the Murdoch votes and adding them to the 1^st preference votes of the other candidates the results were as follows:


Cowell 0 + 7 =7
Blatter 5 + 8 = 13
Osborne 2 + 5 = 7
Ramsay 3 + 1 = 4


The first thing to notice is that no candidate has a majority. The total number of votes cast is 31 and so a majority would be 16 votes or more.


Another interesting thing is that although Simon Cowell received no 1^st preference votes he was ranked very highly among the 2nd preferences of those who chose Murdoch as their 1^st preference.
Since there is no winner, the lowest ranked candidate needs to be eliminated and his votes redistributed according to the preferences of those who voted for him. In this case it’s Gordon Ramsay.
Note that at this stage the redistributed vote could either be a 2^nd preference or a 3^rd preference, depending on whether the voter placed anyone other than Murdoch or Ramsay as their 2^nd choice.


So, of the 4 votes that had been previously assigned to Gordon Ramsay, 3 go to Sepp Blatter and 1 goes to Simon Cowell with the resulting totals being:


Blatter 16
Cowell 8
Osborne 7


And so this time Sepp Blatter has a majority and is executed after the last minute withdrawal of Rupert Murdoch as a clear choice of the voters. Thus AV is able to give a clear answer to the question “How would people have voted if Murdoch hadn’t been a candidate?” where FPTP is not.


The AV result is consistent with the modified FPTP ballot putting Murdoch clearly in the lead and Blatter a good way ahead of the others. The AV ballot even yields the same ranking order of the top three candidates, Murdoch, Blatter, Cowell as the modified FPTP ballot while Osborne and Ramsay are never in any danger of being executed in either case.


But AV is a significantly further improvement on FPTP than the simple modification looked at earlier. Rather than just catering for the extreme ends of a voter’s preference spectrum it allows the voter to compare the relative merits of all candidates and express his or her full view. In the situation without Murdoch, people who voted for Ramsay, haven’t wasted their vote because they got to make a contribution to the eventual decision between executing, Blatter, Cowell or Osborne.
On the other hand the meaning of putting Blatter first isn’t compromised, as Blatter with his healthy quota of votes from the previous round had a head start on the others, so the voters for Ramsay didn’t get any more power out of transferring their votes than is their democratic right. But at the same time they weren’t robbed of their democratic right by a voting system that would have forced them to choose between a tactical vote and a wasted vote.




REVERSING THE POLARITY OF THE AV BALLOT:


The fourth and final ballot asked voters to rank the candidates in order of preference for them to be Saved (rather than executed). I did this for two reasons:


The first reason was to see how many voters would submit mirror images with their two AV ballots.
As it happened only 21 out of the 31 pairs of AV ballots submitted were mirror images of each other. This demonstrates that people tend to think slightly differently when considering a positive and a negative vote. How much you don’t want one person to win an election is just as important as how much you do want another to win, but if you are concentrating on the positive or the negative end according to the ballot’s question you may find that you contradict yourself between one and the other. The more candidates you have the more diversity there would be.


FPTP can only really cater for this when there are only 2 candidates. With just 2 candidates, a vote for one is a vote against the other and vice versa and all of the pairs of FPTP ballots would be mirrored. With 5 candidates even the AV ballots aren’t entirely mirrored which is a big indicator of how important it is to represent voters’ views as fully as possible.
The second reason was to demonstrate that AV allows voters to vote both positively and negatively on the same ballot and to a fairly sophisticated extent. If this is the case, then despite the slight variations among the non-mirrored ballots, one should be able to ignore the first AV ballot and still execute Murdoch with a convincing majority. One would then be able to ask what might have happened if Murdoch had been withdrawn and see if Blatter is still the executed candidate. Let’s have a look at what actually happened then.




Here is the 2^nd AV ballot used:





It is identical to the previous one, just with the word EXECUTED replaced with the word SAVED. It is still for an election to execute one candidate and save all of the others and the participants were clearly informed of this.


To decide whom to execute from these reversed ballots, the first preferences of candidates to be saved was counted. If only one candidate has less than an equal share of the vote (20% in the first round between the five candidates) he is executed. If not, the candidate with the most 1^st Preference votes to be saved is eliminated and as many further rounds as are necessary ensue.


So here are the results:


First round:


Osborne 16 (52%)
Ramsey 9 (29%)
Cowell 6 (19%)
Blatter 0 (0%)
Murdoch 0 (0%)


Already it’s looking consistent with the previous ballots.
There is no clear loser so George Osborne is Saved and Eliminated and the votes are redistributed to the 2^nd preferences of those who voted to save him.


This time we’re looking for only one candidate to have less than 25% of the votes to be saved.


Second round:


Ramsey 9 + 11 = 20 (65%)
Cowell 6 + 3 = 9 (29%)
Blatter 0 + 1 = 1 (3%)
Murdoch 0 + 1 (3%)
So now Ramsey is the next favourite to be saved and because Blatter and Murdoch are still neck and neck at the bottom we must Save (eliminate) Gordon Ramsay and proceed to another round.


This time we’re looking for just one candidate to have less than a third (let’s call it 33%) of the votes to be saved and it’s the votes for Gordon Ramsay that are redistributed among the remaining three candidates.


Third Round:


Cowell 9 + 13 = 22 (71%)
Blatter 1 + 6 = 7 (23%)
Murdoch 1 + 1 = 2 (6%)


So although we can see an inevitable conclusion ahead of us, we don’t have a definite loser as both Blatter and Murdoch have failed to gain 1/3 of the vote. This means in the interest of fairness we must save Simon Cowell and distribute his votes to see out a head to head contest between Sepp Blatter and Rupert Murdoch.


Final Round:


With only 2 candidates remaining in this round, it is not necessary to worry about who voted for whom in which order. All that is necessary is to look at each ballot and see who is ranked lowest out of the two (unless the voter declined to give a preference to either of them, as is their right).


In the case where one is given a preference and the other is not, that is viewed as a vote for the ranked candidate to be saved. In other words there is no difference between leaving one candidate blank while ranking the other four, and ranking the remaining candidate 5^th.


After redistributing the votes that were previously assigned to Simon Cowell the count is as follows:


Sepp Blatter 26 (84%)
Rupert Murdoch 5 (16%)


And so even by asking voter to vote negatively, AV is able to produce a result that is not only convincing in its own right but in full agreement with the positive AV ballot, and with the FPTP ballots. Murdoch is executed once more.


It is also clear without doing any recounting that Sepp Blatter would have been executed had Murdoch been withdrawn as a candidate, because Murdoch had no 1^st preference votes to be redistributed and only one 2^nd preference, not enough to bring Blatter anywhere close to Simon Cowell’s share of the vote.




CONCLUSION:


So each of the four Ballots have pointed towards a clear mandate for Rupert Murdoch to be executed ahead of the remaining four Candidates. This shows that the added complexity of AV does not compromise the position of a candidate with strong support who clearly deserves to win. This should alleviate the fear that a preferential system detracts from the conviction of a clear victory that one is accustomed to under First Past the Post.
We have also seen that First Past the Post on its own does allow a voter to convey any more information than which candidate they most wish to choose. From the point of view of the FPTP ballot each voter would like one candidate to win and would be equally unhappy with any other winner regardless of who it may be. This doesn’t matter so much in the case of the experiment because there was a winner with a clear majority. But when the winner does not have a majority you have a problem and you need to be able to ask questions.
One question you need to ask is are there more who are happy with the winning candidate than are unhappy to the same degree? The modification of FPTP to include one negative vote and one positive vote to cover each voter’s most extreme preferences would show this. After this modification the candidate with the highest total would be the one with the clearest mandate from the people.


However this modification is fairly crude. It isn’t perfectly equipped to deal with closer encounters where there are 2 candidates dividing the positive votes and the negative votes between them. And when there are many more than 5 candidates all the less extreme candidates get left out altogether and we simply don’t have enough information to distinguish between them.


That is where AV comes in. Ranking the candidates in order of preference from top to bottom allows us to extend the simple modification of First Past the Post to one sophisticated enough to be worthy of conveying a voter’s holistic view. We saw that AV produces the same outcome where there is a clear majority. We also saw that AV is capable of answering the question “What if Rupert Murdoch had been withdrawn as a candidate?” which also served to demonstrate how AV comfortably deals with close contests taking into account all of the voters views to find the result that suits the most people.


Finally, we saw that you can even reverse the polarity of the AV ballot asking voters to vote negatively saving a candidate from execution being analogous to keeping a parliamentary candidate from office. The result was the same. Murdoch is still executed. And even the will of the voters regarding the order of the remaining candidates remained the same. This serves to demonstrate that an AV ballot can cover the full range of a voter’s views from positive to negative because even when you run it backwards it still works out to be consistent with what we know from First Past the Post and with the modified version, and of course with the standard positive voting in AV.


I hope I have managed to demonstrate with this experiment that the Alternative Vote gives voters the most say, allowing them to express their full view, without compromising the chances of a deserving candidate to win an election.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:


I'd now like to thank people who helped me with this by participating in this experiment. The reason I haven't included 31 names is that some did not give their full name and others asked to remain anonymous.


Luke Curner, Chris Read, Hywel Davies, Ben Cadwallader, Richard Shaw, Samantha Best, Laura Blyth, Kenny Aisling, Gavin McLaughlin, Amy Sellers, Angela Upton, Lydia White, Mary Wright, Rachel Speed, Kirsty Bagnall, Nicola Beckett, Katie Sharratt, Amy Nathan, Penny Homer, Manisha Gandhi, Dusty La Rue and Gareth Colwell.


The rest of you, you know who you are, thank you too!


Special thanks to Mevan Babakar for spreading the word and recruiting many of the participants for me.




Say Yes to AV!