alternative voting

[calimac]

It's a little late in the day, literally, to influence any Brits who are going to the polls for the referendum on establishing the Alternative Vote (which in the US is called "instant runoff") or AV for short (which in the US stands for "audio-visual") for parliamentary elections.

And that's OK, because I'd vote for it - it's better than nothing, if not by much, and a measly referendum for a measly voting reform is a measly price for which Old Nick sold his soul - but though I'm in favor of it, I'm about to criticize some of the arguments defending it.

Myth 2) AV is too confusing. Few people would be confused by this. Voters put a ‘1’ by their first choice, a ‘2’ by their second choice, a ‘3’ by their third choice and so on. The logic’s familiar enough to anyone who’s ever asked a friend to pop down to the shops for a coke and said, “If they’re out of that I’ll have a lemonade.” Some people have a very low estimation of the British public.

You'd think that wouldn't be too confusing, would you? But the World Science Fiction Convention counts the Hugo votes by AV, and I've been the administrator who counts the Hugo votes. Science fiction fans can be pretty smart people. Yet many of them are baffled by this system, despite the explanation I put on the ballots I ran that said, basically, "Put a '1' by your preferred choice. Then pretend it's vanished from the ballot, and put a '2' by your preferred choice of the remaining nominees." People constantly came up and asked me in bafflement how this worked and what they were supposed to do about it. People with Ph.D.s asked me this.

Myth 3) AV helps the BNP. The BNP have already called on their supporters to back a ‘No’ vote. Currently because MPs can get elected with support from less than 1 in 3 voters, there is always a risk that extremist parties can get in. The BNP have learnt this lesson, and have used it to scrape wins in town halls across Britain. With AV, no-one can get elected unless most people back them. Therefore the risk of extremist parties getting in by the back door is eliminated.

This has mis-stated the claim. It's not that candidates of the BNP (the racist nationalist party) will get elected. It's that people who fondly hope that AV will hurt the Conservatives by nullifying the split of moderate and left-wing votes among competing parties may be fooling themselves. Because the first candidates likely to be eliminated in an AV count are the BNP and UKIP, and their voters are likely to pick the Conservatives in second place, giving them a leg up in the count.

Myth 6) AV means more hung parliaments. No. Hung parliaments are no more likely with AV. And as you might have noticed First Past the Post has not given Britain any special immunity to hung parliaments. Britain has experienced hung parliaments in the 1920s, 1970s and in 2010, and had periods in the 1950s, 1960s and 1990s where a single party was unable to effectively govern alone. Canada, which uses First Past the Post, has permanent hung parliaments. Australia uses AV, and has returned its first hung parliament in 38 elections.

This is so mixed up it's a sorry sight. True that Britain has had hung parliaments (the ones in the 1920s were due to a gradual shift from a two-party system to a different two-party system), but that doesn't mean there wouldn't be more hung parliaments under AV, and if you run the numbers retroactively, there probably would have been. And the writer knows nothing about either Canada or Australia. Canada does not have "permanent" hung parliaments. It did experience that condition between 2004 and ... um, the election this week, but previously hadn't had any since 1980. And the extent to which it has is due to local conditions which AV would intensify. As to Australia, on the contrary, of those 38 federal elections, only 18 haven't been hung. The reason it hasn't looked that way is that AV has encouraged near-permanent parliamentary coalitions so regularly that they don't look hung to outsiders who aren't paying attention.

Myth 7) AV means more tactical voting. No. AV simply eliminates the need for it.

Actually, it just makes tactical voting more complicated. Because lower preferences can sway the counting, it can matter much how your choices interact with the question of which candidates have already been eliminated by the time your first choice is eliminated, and taking that into account is tactical voting.

Myth 10) AV means you end up with the least worst candidate. No. First Past the Post just lets in winners that most of voters didn’t want. AV ensures a winning candidate has to work harder and go further to secure support from a majority.

Getting second and third preferences does not necessarily translate as real support. It may well mean you're just the least-bad candidate. For that matter, first preferences also often mean the least-bad candidate. All that AV offers truly disgruntled voters is a chance to get a candidate you hate slightly less than some other candidate. Saying that an AV winner has majority support by definition is truly disingenuous. All that it means is that you've forced your way down to grudging later preferences, after having thrown out all the voters who didn't want to express any lower preferences at all (which the AV supporters tout as a feature, not a bug; see "Myth 9").

I'd also like to know more about "Myth 1", the vote-counting equipment one. The Republic of Ireland elects its parliament by STV, a much more complex counting system than AV, and they've been doing it since before they could possibly have been using computerized vote-counters. How you could practically count a large STV constituency by hand baffles me, yet apparently they do.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Regarding Myth 10, AV does mean

(a) that someone the majority hates won't win

and

(b) the result is similar to that you'd get from a runoff, without the effort of holding the runoff.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

someone the majority hates won't win

... and you wind up with the least worst candidate, which is what the supporters say is "a myth".

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I have to agree that transparency is a good thing in a voting system, and that it's easy to overestimate how transparent a system is. The Libertarian Futurist Society has used ranked choices for years on its awards votes; but I'd still say the system is confusing to some voters—and that's among people who have an above average likelihood of being interested in the technicalities of vote counting. On the other hand, we've looked at systems that are much more confusing. Condorcet systems come to mind. As I recall, we decided not to try that one because most of the people who regularly count votes couldn't keep it straight in their minds how to do it.

And while we send out voting directions that say "please do X on your ballot," we do regularly get responses that look as if voters just didn't read them.