Fluff from the naval of my mind

Occasionally something drops through my door that immediately makes me mad—strangely it tends to be some tripe from a political group. Today was one such day.

This afternoon a leaflet dropped through (well, was shoved through) my door and a few seconds scanning it were enough to push my blood pressure up a few notches. So much so that I felt compelled to write this, somewhat lengthy, post.

The UK will, on May 5th 2011, have a referendum that may change our voting system in general elections (for those unfamiliar with UK voting, general elections are those where we vote in, or out, our representatives in the House of Commons, essentially voting for our government). The proposal is a simple choice; maintain the existing system (usually referred to as ‘first past the post’), or replace this will a more proportional system called Alternative Voting (AV).

Now, I’m no fan of AV. It is possibly the worst of the proportional voting systems available (which is precisely why the government is allowing it though). That said, I’m even less of a fan of the current first past the post system. This referendum is a choice between two poor choices and the government is hoping that most people will simple stay with the devil they know rather than change.

Quite apart from the political flag waving and vested interest in the status quo, one of the problems with the referendum is trying to explain the differences in the two systems such that voters can make an informed decision. This leaflet does much flag waving and scaremongering and very little actual explanation.

I will ignore the cover page as it is simply a call to arms for the No vote.

The first page states as fact that the cost of AV is £250million. It then goes on to use some dubious figures to scare the unthinking reader.

Let’s take a look at these statements.

First, the referendum is costing £91 million. This is probably true (more or less, although it does not make clear whether this is £91 million in total, or £91 million of tax payer’s money—given the tone and nature of this document I’m guessing the former). Two responses spring to mind; if you simply changed to AV without the referendum this cost would be zero, and secondly I ask ‘what price democracy?’

If the decision to change voting method were simply voted on in the House of Commons then there would be no need for a referendum. One might say, ‘outrageous, you can’t make that decision on a house vote’. And I respond, ‘why not? Bigger, and more costly, issues than this are decided all the time on a House vote’.

This same fatuous argument could be levelled at any referendum or election. We live in a democracy and part of that is being able to vote on large issues. This costs money. The £91 million cost of the referendum is bogus.

Next they claim that a change to AV requires £130 million for new electronic voting machines. Again, bogus. AV can be administered manually, just as the current voting system is. Sure, the votes may take a little longer to tally, but so what? And this costs assumes that they are not inflating the cost (which given that they want to convince you this is a bad thing they almost certainly have). No doubt this cost is, at best, based on the most expensive machines available and adjusted up for all sorts of guesstimates such a inflation etc. So, this cost is probably at best inflated or totally irrelevant. It certainly tells us nothing about the relative merit of AV compared to the first past the post system.

Then they claim an additional £26 million to explain the new system. Really? A simple notice, possibly with a person on hand, in each polling station should be sufficient. The AV system is extremely simple (as I shall explain below, at no cost to the government). Besides, we’re having a referendum. Surely there’s enough bloody explaining going on now. Every leaflet, news bulletin, newspaper article, and on, explains the AV system in full colour animated graphics. If people have not got it by now then spending more money is not going to help matters. And if you don’t think the £91 million being claimed as the cost of the referendum is sufficient to educate people enough that they can vote whether to adopt the system of not (I mean, surely they need to understand it to vote on it) then another £26 million is not going to help much.

Finally on this page, they pull out the emotive card and explain all of the things this inflated cost figure could be used for. Lots of doctors, nurses, teachers, hip replacement or school places. No doubt each categories numbers would only pay for these placements for one year and in total. So, 2,503 doctors (for one year) OR 6,297 nurses (for one year). Doesn’t seem such a great deal when viewed this way, but that’s the point they want you to think ‘AND’ not ‘OR’ and they want you to think this means ‘forever’ not just one year.

And down the bottom of the page, the leading question ‘At a time when people are losing their jobs or having their pay frozen, should we really be spending this money on a politician’s fix?’ Than answer is obviously no, but this is rather contingent on accepting the premise that this is ‘a politician’s fix’ rather than a move to more democratic elections (which the ‘yes’ camp would have us believe).

Page two is no better.

This is reasonably clear summary of the AV system, but it tries to paint a picture of unfairness. The emphasis is that ‘Under AV the votes for the least popular candidate can decide who wins the election’. This statement falls somewhere between disingenuous and complete bollocks.

Under the AV system (for all its many flaws) the candidate who wins is the most popular candidate, albeit not necessarily everyone’s first choice. (Other proportional representation schemes establish the most popular candidate much more effectively, but we’re not being offered those options. We must choose between first past the post and AV.)

The graphic shows ‘Your Choice’ as candidate A and then shows the process by which candidate B wins the election. Damn! That’s unfair! Candidate A got the most votes in the first round, surely they should win even though most people did not vote for them. Let me say that again, under first past the post, which is essentially the outcome of round 1 of the vote: Most. People. Did. Not. Vote. For. The. Winner!

Of course they emphasis ‘your vote’ in the illustration, just to help your indignation a little.

Think of AV like this. Suppose your have a family of five people and they are voting on which of three holidays they would like to go on. They decide to use AV to decide and the vote looks like this.

The options (candidates, or in this case holidays) are:

1. Fiji
2. China
3. Australia

Consider what this says. Bill would like to go to Fiji, but if Fiji is not voted in he prefer that China were the destination over Australia. Similarly, Mary would like to go to China, but failing that she prefers Fiji to Australia. And so on.

Under first past the post we would need to re-run the election because both Fiji and China have two votes and we must have only one winner.

Under AV we simply drop Australia (it got only one vote in the first round) and add Simon’s second choice to the pile for China. Now China is the clear winner with three votes.

While it is true that Bill, Sarah and Simon failed to get their first choice you can see that Bill, Mary, Simon and Leslie get either their first or second choice.

AV is about trying to establish which candidate is most popular overall.

And, under AV you have the right to not rank candidates. So if you really don’t want your vote to count for candidate X, don’t rank them. Simple.

The third page is just feeble minded.

It first tries to equate politics with a race, which is only true if you’re a politician with a vested interest in the current first past the post system. It then goes on to state, as if fact, that ‘There is a very simple principle in politics and governments — whoever gets the most votes wins’. This is just plain wrong in almost every syllable.

Many vote require a certain majority, for example, when electing the speaker of the House at least 51% of politicians sitting in the House must approve them (in a procedure the results of which are not unlike AV). Now, true that this is ‘most votes wins’ and if first past the post required the same ’51% of people must approve their MP’ I’d have no problems with it. But politicians are very rarely voted in with a 51% of people who vote, let alone 51% of the people in their constituency.

Most sitting MPs were not approved by anything like ‘most’ of their constituents.

Yay! They pulled the BNP card. This is the UK politics equivalent of ‘Hilter was <insert the thing you’re opposed to>’. It’s pathetic.

Look, votes for the ‘extreme parties like the BNP’ do NOT get counted over and over again. The suggestion is that BNP candidates will get in under AV when they would not otherwise. What a load of arse.

I, for one, am extremely unlikely to ever rank a BNP candidate, so my vote would never contribute (no matter how AV votes stacked up) towards voting them in. It’s true that someone voting BNP as their first choice may well get a ‘second vote’ (their second choice, had they chosen to exercise that right), but this is far from voting for the BNP. It is possible that the BNP could make it through the first round and that enough people vote in their second choice into the second round to push them over 50%, but that’s democracy for you.

Then ‘The AV system will mean an end to equal votes’. Another steaming pile. As for the ‘That’s a principle that people in Britain have fought for over many generations’, well true, if many means four or five, but realistically up to the late 18th century not much was done about voting for 97% of the population (ironically, the struggle for voting right—for men at least—was fired in part by the French Revolution). But I digress.

Then the leaflet presents the first past the post argument.

Evidently no need to make an effort here as it’s what we have now.

What this page singularly fails to highlight is that Candidate A may have more votes then the other candidates individually, but they hardly have the most votes. Add up the other candidates’ votes and it quickly becomes obvious that most people voted for someone other than the ‘winner’. In other words most people are unhappy with the outcome of this election and, under first past the post, they have no other say in the matter. They have no way of saying, ‘look I like candidate C, but if they don’t get in I’d rather have candidate B than that worthless asshole candidate A who’s sitting in a safe seat because the last lot gerrymandered the constituency boundary’.

And now the icing on the ‘bad arguments’ cake.

Appeal to popularity. Look, you could do this with almost anything. ‘Being English is unpopular’ I mean, look at all the land that ‘isn’t English’. Or, ‘eating a healthy diet is not popular’, guess that makes it okay to live on junk food. Or, ‘parliamentary democracy is unpopular’, guess we should stop that too.

Just because something is not popular does not make it wrong!

The last page is a rather good summary of AV, noteworthy if only because it talks about votes in piles, not an electronic voting machine in sight. So, they agree at least that we don’t need to spend £130 million on voting machines.

Oh, and they repeat the falsehood ‘The candidate with the most votes wins’. My arse.

On the reverse of the folded leaflet is this little beauty.

I’m having difficulty finding the case for first past the post here. And as an argument against AV it’s a complete red herring with a little ad hominem, a side order of bogeyman all smothered in a heavy irrelevant dressing. After all, Clegg got in under first past the post. And ‘the only vote that would count under AV would be Nick Clegg’s’. Really? I don’t recall reading that in the description of the AV voting system.