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!

So What Does AV Mean in Terms of Coalitions? Part 1

The "coalitions" question is one that comes up a lot in discussions about the merits of AV (or PR for that matter) and it's been on my list of things to address for a while. Having just poured out all of my thoughts on the subject I ended up with a ludicrously long blog post so I've decided to divide it into two parts. This first part just looks at what coalitions are, whether they're in principle a good thing, and whether the current government is a really representative example of coalition governments.

It's true that it's taken a coalition situation for us to be even offered a referendum on the voting system. This is because up until now British politics has been dominated by two parties, and those two parties have benefitted from First Past the Post, in the way it skews the proportions of the votes by encouraging tactical voting, and then further skews the proportions in favour of those two parties between the proportions of votes cast and the proportions of seats won. Thus, the only time a government would consider changing the voting system, would be when a party other than one of those two, Labour and Conservative, has a say.

That doesn't necessarily mean though, that the Alternative Vote would necessarily lead to more coalitions. In fact, in Australia, there's only been one Coalition government under AV, and that's one fewer than the two we've had here under FPTP. PR possibly would lead to more coalitions, but we're not voting on PR just yet, so this is not really the time to worry about it.

Then again, who's to say coalitions are necessarily a bad thing? The current coalition government doesn't seem to me to be a representative example. The two parties involved are a huge mismatch for one thing, and for another, one party is heavily outnumbered by the other. That smaller party is suffering a great deal, having to put its name to decisions that suit only the views of the larger party, and absolutely destroying their own reputation.

The Lib Dems probably knew this outcome was likely, but they entered into this situation for a number of reasons. Firstly, a chance to be involved in the government, and at least have more say as a minority in the government than as a minority in the opposition, an opportunity that they had a duty to their voters and members to take; and secondly to take the only sniff of a chance of electoral reform that we've seen in a long time and are likely to see in quite probably an even longer time. Even though it's AV and not the PR that the Lib Dems wanted, it's a chance to show we want change (for more on this see http://brdonnelly.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-those-in-favour-of-pr-should-say.html )

But as I say, the current coalition government isn't really the best example of a coalition. I'd say the best example would be the Labour Party, or the Conservative Party, or any other party really. All parties are really coalitions. They're united under one colour, one name and one leader, but the reality is they're a coalition of different political views working together, compromising on various issues and only really united to stand themselves a better chance of forming a government, than they would if they subdivded according differences of views. That is pretty conclusive proof to me that coalitions can indeed work.

In the second part I look at how we ended up with the current coalition government and argue that First Past the Post had a massive hand in it, and that the Alternative Vote would be far less likely to lead to such a bizarre mismatch.

So What Does AV Mean in Terms of Coalitions? Part 2

In part one of my blog entry on coalitions I looked at what coalitions are, whether they're in principle a good thing, and whether the current government is a really representative example of coalition governments. Now I want to look at how we ended up with the current coalition government and show that AV would be less likely to give us
such bizarre mismatches in power.

In fact I would argue that the formation of this government owes a great deal to FPTP. First of all you have the laziness of many MPs that arises from FPTP's minority safe seats. Many MPs simply do not have to work very hard to win or keep their seats if they're lucky enough to be in a certain constituency. We saw the decline of the Labour government, which any opposition worth their salt should have ripped apart in the last general election. But
unfortunately the conservatives, because of the very same FPTP-induced indolence failed to capitalise on it. So voters were not particularly keen on Labour or the Conservatives. Certainly not enough to give either of them a
majority of seats.

But instead of voting elsewhere and giving power to promising looking alternatives (apart from a praiseworthy group of voters in Brighton who had the courage to go with what they wanted instead of just voting tactically for one of the big parties), most voters, again because of FPTP made a choice between Labour or the Conservatives, feeling that any other vote would be wasted (and quite probably had this idea rammed home to them by their Labour and Conservative candidates too). For all the promise of the television debates and internet coverage, the Lib Dems performance in the election was poor. First Past the Post meant that voting for them would have required a lot of courage, courage that not enough voters had. But that's not the fault of the voters, that's the fault of the system. I give a huge amount of credit to those voters in Brighton who had the bottle to go with what they wanted and won the Greens their first seat, but it shouldn't have had to be that difficult really.

Under a fairer voting system, we would have seen one of two things:

1)Labour and/or Conservatives pulling out all the stops to maintain their dominance fair and square,

2)the voters would have had the means to say that the Labour and Conservative parties weren't enough for them any more. We might have ended up with a coaltion government still, but it would have been a much more sensible match than a Lib Dem/Conservative one. And at least thanks to this at times farcical coalition government we now have an opportunity to begin the long road towards mending our broken political system and ensure that we never have this problem again. This is why we must vote Yes to AV on May 5th.

I should add another few sentences in anticipation of a fair question "How do you know the Labour Conservative dominance isn't merited/wanted?".

Well the voting figures show it for one thing. I quote from Andrew Rawnsley's article:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/28/andrew-rawnsley-electoral-reform?cat=commentisfree&type=article 

"At the 1951 election, more than 96% of the vote was scooped by Labour and the Tories. Only a tiny minority of voters did not associate with either the red tribe or the blue one. By the two elections of 1974, a quarter of the
voters were refusing to make a cross for either Labour or the Tories. The decline of class-based identification with the big two has been accompanied by diminishing respect for the duopoly that dominated British politics for decades. At the most recent election, more than a third of voters rejected both blue and red – and more than a third of the total electorate declined to vote for anyone at all."

So it really does appear that the dominance isn't wanted. That doesn't necessarily mean it isn't merited, but to assume it is when it isn't wanted would be undemocratic. The voters should have what they want regardless. If we
change the voting system to a fairer one that takes power away from the parties and puts it in the hands of the voters, which is what a change from FPTP to AV would do, and the Labour and Conservative parties, STILL dominate British politics, then that will be good for them for two reasons. First of all they will have irrefutable proof that the British public want them to be there, and Secondly they will be there because they have worked hard to win support (if not first choice votes) from over 50% of their constituents.

And so in the long term, even if you believe in strong single party governments, AV really is the way forward as a single party government is only effective if it's working hard for you. Just look at the difference between Labour from 1997-2003 where they'd the moment of working really hard to overturn the Tory stronghold, and Labour from 2003-2010 where they'd grown complacent relying entirely on the distortion of the FPTP voting system.

A Voting System is for Voters, not Parties!

So my attention was drawn to another No to AV article today. This one written by somebody called Max Tappenden on the Appelby Report site. The article's here: http://www.applebyreport.com/2010/11/30/no-to-the-alternative-vote/

It's symptomatic of the FPTP thinking habits that lead to worrying about gains and losses for particular parties out of a voting system and completely misses the point that a voting system should be for voters, and by giving power to them and making MPs work harder, everyone gains ultimately. Two quotes that I've included here jumped out at me as particularly unsavoury and I just had to respond to them. Below is what I wrote as a comment on the article.

It's difficult to take seriously anyone who at the same time, both belittles the views of those who don't support a major party as their first choice; and doesn't know when to use 'fewest' insetad of 'least'.

". The afterthoughts of those with unpopular views play a very big role in deciding who represents us in Parliament! "

This is a lie and a rather devious one at that. Deliberately using the word unpopular whose literal meaning is simply 'minority' with the intent to confuse readers with the connotations of being objectionable is bad enough to begin with. Not every minority party is viewed to be objectionable.

Nonetheless, the role of this minority in deciding the election is a lot smaller than the statement suggests. What really happens in such a case, is that the none of the parties with the largest minorities have an overall majority of first choices, so the views of those who voted for the smallest minorities are considered to ensure that of the almost-winners, the one who comes closest to being viewed positively by a majority of voters is the eventual winner.

In a democracy all voters' views should be equally valid, and while small minority party can't get elected in either AV or FPTP, what AV does is allows voters to show their preferences without having to employ second guessing or tactics, and without having to deny their first choice candidate their vote.

"the Conservatives would be the losers under the Alternative Vote, with the Liberal Democrats and Labour as the two biggest beneficiaries. "

This is completely missing the point. It's not about benefits or hindrances to particular parties. Any effect on parties is subject to change over years with policies and leaders, views and circumstances coming and going. What we should be looking at are people. Voters, and politicians.

The biggest beneficiaries of AV are the voters. All voters would be free to vote preferentially and the pressure to vote tactically would be all but eliminated. Wasted votes, split votes, minority safe seats and tactical voting, all problems of FPTP would be vastly reduced. The biggest losers would be those MPs who are either unable, unwilling, or unaware that they're required to work hard for the constituents, and ensure that they are meeting the needs of as many of them as they can. The ones who will lose out are the ones who's entire gameplan has been up 'til now to keep their core minority of voters happy knowing that FPTP will ensure that that's all they ever need do, with no need to pay attention to up to 70% of their constituents.

Now it might be that a lot of those MPs currently standing to lose from a fairer system are Conservative. Shame on them if so, but that needn't remain the case. For all we know the Conservatives could be the ones working the hardest under AV and doing the best for their constituents in future. With the right voting system giving power to the voters and making MPs work harder everyone wins ultimately regardless of party allegiance.

Looking at things as they are now and assuming that they will remain the same forever is not at all helpful. Nor is analysing a voting system based on which parties benefit or lose out. The key issue is making sure the voters have their say, that they get to express their full view. FPTP assumes that given a number of options everyone can pick one thing that they like and that they dislike everything else, and to an equal extent. That is simply not true. There's so much more to an individual voter's view than an FPTP ballot allows them to say. AV allows them to express their views much better and that is why AV benefits the voters any any party who can adapt to delivering what the voters need will benefit from AV too. Any that can't break the habits of laziness afforded them by FPTP will lose out, regardless of party name, colours or political views.

First Past the Post: Even its Very Name is a Lie!

I woke up this morning thinking about the name First Past the Post and the image it actually conjours up. It sounds like a racing analogy, with a post being a fixed point at the end of a race course with all the runners (candidates) trying to be the first one to get there, until eventually one of them does. Hang on, that sounds like AV, doesn't it? A fixed point, say, a 50% +1 majority with iterations of elimination and redistribution of votes until ultimately one candidate reaches that post and is the first to do so.

The current system, the one actually known as FPTP doesn't do that at all. I think a better name for it would be something like "Early Front Runner", where the winner is actually a racer who gets off to a good start ,pulls ahead early on in the race, say at about the 30% mark, regardless of whether or not they're able to go the distance. At that point the race is over and awarded to them and then the racer doesn't even HAVE to finish the race.

And if you want an example of how wrong this is, look no further than the most famous race-orientated story ever, the Hare and the Tortoise. Under the current system, the Hare would have won, despite getting incredibly arrogant and lazy and falling asleep instead of even bothering to finish the job. The Tortoise, in this analogy represents a candidate who takes as many voters' views into consideration as possible and slowly but surely makes sure that his constituents are fairly represented rather than taking the quick and easy route to election victory.

The truth is that FPTP was designed for situations where there are only two candidates. It works perfectly when that is the case. There is a post, and it's the 50% that one or the other candidate passes to win the seat. What AV is is a modification of FPTP to ensure that there's still a 50% mark post to pass when there are more than two candidates.

Politics is VERY much about going the distance. It's not about getting your nose in front early on and then relaxing knowing that you're safely home and dry before you've even bothered to get near "the post". To use my favourite football malapropism, it's a marathon, not a snickers.

What about the BNP?

Already a massive fan of the excellent isupportav.co.uk today I read another great article on the BNP and how each side of the referendum is trying to associate them with the opposing side.

I've seen and heard many times an objection to PR and by extension to AV that it would allow the BNP a taste of power and that we're better off with a system that keeps out the minorities of extremists.

I've got a short answer, a medium answer and a long answer to this.

The short answer, not a very satisfying one, but an immediate killer to the argument, is that the BNP are against AV.

Via the aforementioned article, we have clear evidence of that. http://isupportav.co.uk/2010/11/the-bnp-are-campaigning-against-av/ . The article even gives a sound hypothesis as to why, something that has escaped me up 'til now. My own idea was that they were blinkered traditionalists not aware of what's good for them, but it seems I may have been some way off the mark.

The medium answer, which may be another contributing factor to why the BNP are against AV is that they actually do themselves more harm when they're in power. Take the Barking Council as an example. In desperation, not feeling that Labour or any of the other big parties could be trusted, voters turned to the BNP hoping for something a little bit different. The BNP had their platform, and they aired their views and suddenly no-one was in any doubt as to what they were really about. All BNP councillors were voted out at the first opportunity. So I don't see the BNP actually getting a seat as a massive problem.

The long answer (by which I mean the most important really), is that having a voting system to keep out any party, however objectionable they may be, or to give an advantage to any party, however good they may be, is undemocratic and wrong. The way to keep a party out is to ensure that people don't want to vote for them, not to make it so that voting for them is futile. Bearing in mind that it's possible the mechanics of FPTP suit the BNP better than AV this at first glance looks like a contradiction, but in truth I'm looking at the bigger picture here. I'm not looking at which system gives the BNP the best chance, or even which system gives the smallest parties as similar a chances as possible to the biggest ones. I'm looking at which system gives the VOTERS a chance to have their say regardless of which party they want to vote for.

A voting system is for voters, not parties, and looking at it from the point of view of any particular party, large or small, good or bad, is never going to lead you to a conclusion about which system is the most democratic, fairest or best for the UK. So I'm afraid if you're thinking "which voting system gives my party the best chance of winning?"or "which voting system will help keep out that party I really really don't like?" I'm afraid you're looking at things from the wrong angle. Party leaders come and go, policies change. New Labour is an excellent example of this. And of course not every Conservative Leader is Margaret Thatcher either. The same party isn't necessarily always going to be right for you. But being able to vote for what you want IS always going to be right for you. Who knows, one day, decades from now the BNP may be a breath of fresh air. Or far more likely, another minority party could come along who really IS what we've been looking for. Do you want to risk shutting them out now just because of a load of racists spoiling things for everyone else? I certainly don't.

You have to TRUST everyone to vote for what they want. Under a fair voting system if we end up with a government we don't like we only have ourselves to blame. We'll have got what we deserve. Until then we're governed by people whom only a minority of us have shown any support and we're certainly not getting what we asked for and probably not what we deserve either.

Don't just decide that the general public and most voters are stupid. Don't dumb down for them. Don't assume you know better than them and you have to hold their hands in the polling station and tell them how to vote. Several No2AV campaigners are doing just that with some of the ludicrous statements their coming out with, but we are better than that. Say Yes to Fairer Votes. Say Yes to AV.

AV tactics are too complicated to worry about. Rank based on your preferences and let democracy do the rest

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/?p=3825

I've just had my attention drawn to a very interesting article (linked above) about Tactical Voting and how it might work under AV. This blog entry is based on my response to it.

The article is a good one, in that it makes mathematical sense and is interesting to read. However the scenarios described are making a crucial assumption, that plenty of voters have a very good idea of what everyone else is going to do.

Even under FPTP where tactical voting is simply a matter of looking at the two most likely winners and choosing between them, denying your first choice any vote from you at all (which is what makes FPTP such a terrible system for more than two parties), some second guessing of how your fellow constituents are likely to vote is required.

But with the complexity of the AV situation there are far too many variables for most voters to consider and I think it would be too much for most voters, especially with AV being a new and unfamiliar system to most, to take the counter-intuitive action of putting the most disliked candidate first.

Most importantly, this situation can only really happen in a tight battle between 3 parties, and for this to be of use to aiding anyone to make a choice between FPTP and AV you have to take this type of scenario and examine it fully from the perspective of both systems.

With the uncertainty brought about by the complexities of AV and the variations from constituency to constituency, let's say there's approximately a 1/3 chance that putting your own party 1st instead of 2nd will lead to them losing when they might otherwise have won. But consider that under FPTP you don't even have that choice. You either put your party 1st, or not at all. If you put them 1st, in a tight 3-way marginal you're averaging a 1/3 chance of your party winning.

So to summarise that, 1/3 chance of losing under AV or 1/3 chance of winning under FPTP. It rather points to AV as a better option I think.

But if you really want to keep a party out under AV, then all you have to do is put them last. If everyone who wants to keep a party out puts that party last, then the remaining support for that party will either be 50% or it won't. If it is, then they've won fairly, and if it isn't then they won't win, and that's all there is to it.

OK, guilty as charged, that last paragraph is also built on an assumption. But my assumption is that most people will vote based on their preferences, which has to rank higher in likelihood than the assumption that plenty of voters will have an excellent idea of how everyone else is likely to vote.

I must admit it is fascinating to look at the voting mechanics and how you can tweak situations to show various surprising outcomes. But the reality is that everyone votes without the information required about everyone else's vote. I think the sensible option really is to stop umming and ahhing about what other people might do and just go with your preferences. Most people will do that anyway. It's really too much to expect voters to stop and think about the various permutations, even if they did have an idea somehow of how everyone else would be ranking everyone.

And at least AV lets you do that if you want to. FPTP often gives you a miserable choice between a tactical vote and a wasted vote. For people to have to deny their preferred candidate their vote just to be able to feel that they're using their vote wisely is undemocratic and has no place in our politics.

Tactical voting in FPTP is so prevalent because it's one of the simplest concepts to grasp even for the least politically minded of voters. The more complicated the tactics are in a voting system the fewer people will vote tactically. It's easy enough for a party to tell the would-be voters of another party to vote for them instead because of the way FPTP tactics work. At a push a party could hand out "how to vote" cards, outlining how to assign all the preferences from 2nd onwards under AV, not that they'd be that likely to succeed. However, even with the best research and the finest mathematicians in the land combined with world class marketing strategists and on-the-ground campaigners, I couldn't see any party successfully persuading just the right proportion of their voters to put the opposing party first and their own party second, if any at all.

And even if they could, if all parties were doing that then they'd cancel each other out with second guessing, third guessing, fourth guessing, and beyond. It would turn into a complete lottery with politicians and voters alike saying "Forget it, just go with your preferences, it's too complicated for tactical voting to leave us anything other than a random outcome".

And this I believe is a real strength for AV. Instead of being afraid of complex tactics leading to unpredictable results, I see it as complex tactics discouraging voters from straying from their true preferences leading to more democratic results. With AV you can keep it simple, put your first choice first, put the most disliked candidate last, rank everyone else in between based on your preference and let democracy do the rest.