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Conservative Home has published a thorough blog post dealing with points arising out of the No2AV case.

Part of it deals why some of the more extravagant claims in favour for AV don’t stack up. I can accept some of that. AV appears to me to be an improvement on FPTP in terms of fairness and representation but I am under no illusion that it is going to usher in a new era of perfect democracy.

It’s the bits about why AV is actually a step in the wrong direction and should be resisted with which I struggle. First, the idea that the 50% threshold is arbitrary. I have already written below about what happens if 50% of the original number of voters is not achieved, because of the way in which preferences are expressed (or not expressed) as voters get further down their order of preference. But I would not accept that 50% is wholly arbitrary as an aspiration. I can entirely see the sense in a principle that, ideally, a candidate should not be returned who more people voted “against” than voted for.

Actually, the threshold ought to be 50% plus 1 vote, to remove a potential unfairness that the second preferences of voters who preferred a candidate who was still in the running going into the final count (i.e. the count after which a candidate will be returned), but does not win, could, if taken into account, have swayed the result in favour of a candidate other than the one who did win. With a threshold of less than an absolute majority, fairness might be said to require a post-final round count, to see whether the second preferences of all the candidates who did not win would have changed the result if added together. This issue is avoided at 50% plus one vote and there is no need to go any further to 65%, or whatever.

Second, the idea that it is not fair that one person’s 6th preference “counts for the same” as another person’s 1st preference. I disagree. As I understand it, the idea behind AV is to enable voters for whom a popular candidate would not have been their ideal choice nevertheless to participate in the selection of which popular candidate will be returned to represent them. With that in mind, it would be giving greater weight to 1st preference votes that would actually be unfair. This would be to favour for no good reason the preferences of the “mainstream” – whose views are middle-of-the-road enough to lead them to support in the first place a popular candidate who has gathered enough votes to remain in the running – when it comes to selecting which candidate should go forward to represent the constituency as a whole.

So what AV seeks to achieve is to allow non-mainstream voters better participation in the process of selecting a mainstream candidate to represent them, while also freeing them to express their absolute preferences to start with, rather than engaging in tactical voting. You can argue about whether that aim is more democratic, or desirable, but I disagree with Conservative Home’s suggestion that only in a “benighted worldview can that possibly be described as ‘fair’”, on the oversimplistic (and incorrect) basis that it involves things that are intrinsically of different values being counted as being worth the same.

I have been trying to get up to speed with what ‘AV’ is in order to consider how I would vote in the May 2011 referendum regarding whether we should change the way in which Members of Parliament are elected in the UK.

The current system, described as ‘first past the post’, is simple. The country is split into constituencies each of which has the right to return one Member to Parliament. All valid votes in the constituency are counted and the candidate with the most votes is returned.

A perceived problem with this system is that where there are many candidates contesting a seat, it is possible for a candidate to be returned who enjoys the support of significantly fewer than half of those voting in the constituency. Given that only a certain percentage of eligible voters even turn out to vote in a given election, the candidate’s support among eligible voters will be even less. So the constituency’s ‘representative’ in Parliament may only be supported by, say, under 30% of eligible voters and actively opposed by more than half.

As I understand it from a few google searches, the point of AV appears to be that in order to win, a candidate ought to be supported, to some extent at least, by an overall majority of those voting in the election. To seek to achieve this, the AV vote comprises a synthetic series of run-off elections.

A run-off election is where if no candidate has an overall majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is ‘knocked out’ and another round of voting takes place. This process is repeated until someone does get an overall majority.

The idea is that the candidate eventually returned must at least have appealed to the voters enough such that more than half of them have been prepared to express a preference for him or her as the ‘best of a bad lot’ in circumstances where the candidate that they really wanted has been cut for lack of support.

With AV, rather than actually having multiple rounds, the run-offs are compressed into one ballot paper, on which voters rank candidates in order of preference. The list of preferences enables it to be ascertained on a count (which is therefore more complicated than a ‘first past the post count’) who voters would have voted for next, once a more preferred candidate was ‘knocked out’.

What I am not yet clear about is what happens in AV if no-one gets to 50% of voters after all other preferences have been taken into account. This scenario could arise if everyone voted for a preferred minority candidate, followed by one of the main parties of Liberal Democrats, Conservatives or Labour as a second preference, but could not stomach putting either of the other two main parties as a preference on any basis.

So in the penultimate round, all of the small parties have dropped out and you might end up with 35% Labour, 33% Conservatives and 32% LibDems. The LibDem is accordingly eliminated as the weakest candidate, but there are no further preferences to assign to Labour or Conservatives.

I would have thought that there are two options:

1. Declare the vote void and start again.

2. Calculate the 50% out of the number of positive votes in the final round, rather than out of number of voters who filled out a ballot paper in the first place. Accordingly, on the above example, Labour win, with their 35% of the total original voters amounting to 51.5% of the positive voters counted in the final round.

Option 1. would seem to be highly inconvenient. However, assuming that 2. were to be what happens, that would appear to remove the legitimacy intended to be conferred by being able to say that the returned candidate was supported by at least 50% of those who troubled to vote in the election. We would be back to the same problem said to exist with the ‘first past the post’ system.