One of my political endeavours for this year is to support the campaign for Alternative Voting (AV) in the referendum scheduled in May this year. What’s being proposed in this referendum is a majoritarian voting system, where instead of just an “X” being placed against a name, voters will list in numbered priority their preferred candidates in order of 1,2,3 etc. This is how voting is already conducted in the London Mayoral contest so it is familar and tried and tested.
Opposition to AV is based in some cases, on misconceptions about the purpose of the referendum. It is not a vote about proportional representation (PR), yet many of the arguments deployed for a “NO” vote are not anti-AV, but are in fact, anti-PR ones. Another misconception about this voting system is that it breaks the constituency link . In fact, this issue is being addressed by the Tory lead coalition in a different bit of legislation, where they propose a change to the boundaries of the present seats by getting rid of 50 parliamentary seats. Also, an AV system is unhelpful to small parties, as it works against extremists like the BNP as moderate parties usually transfer to each other.
Finally AV doesn’t create more coalitions, as it’s a majoritarian voting system from the same family of voting systems as the First Past the Post (FPTP) in the UK.