Opinion
johncurtice@holyrood.com
“Scotland could teach England a lesson or two about AV – and it seems her near neighbour is in need of a good tutor”
Matter of opinion John Curtice
At Westminster it is the incessant talk of the tea room. What sense
can possibly be made of the contradictory opinion polls? How many people will bother to vote? What impact will the eventual outcome have on the future of the UK coalition? For many a Holyrood politician, however, it is simply an irksome
irritation. Tey resent the fact that it is muscling in on their moment in the electoral sun. Tey hope that voters north of the border will not be unduly distracted by it. After all, Scotland has a far more important decision to take – who is to run the country’s devolved affairs for the next five years. I am referring, of course, to the referendum on introducing the
Alternative Vote (AV) for future elections to the House of Commons. It may have been the major prize secured by the Liberal Democrats in last year’s coalition negotiations with the Conservatives, but in deciding to hold it on the same day as the Scottish Parliament election there is danger that north of the border it will be ignored. Yet there is an irony here. Te AV debate may seem peripheral to
Scotland, but Scotland itself should be centre stage in that debate. For following the introduction in 2007 of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) in Scottish local elections, every local by-election held north of the border in the last four years has been conducted under AV. As a result, Scotland is the one part of the UK mainland that actually has some contemporary experience of AV. (OK, I can see I have lost you already, so here is a quick reminder.
Te only difference between AV and STV is that under AV there is only one seat to be won – as is the case in a by-election – whereas under STV more than one person is being elected at the same time – in regular Scottish local elections, three or four. Te task presented to voters under the two systems is exactly the same – to place candidates in rank order 1,2,3, etc. Te counting process is exactly the same too – votes cast for candidates at the bottom of the poll are redistributed in accordance with their second and subsequent preferences until someone reaches the ‘quota’. Under AV that quota proved to be 50 per cent of the vote plus one – that is a majority of all votes cast.) Scotland is of course not the same
as England, not least in having four major political players rather than three. Nevertheless, its politics are much closer to the rest of Great Britain than are politics in Australia, let alone in the other two countries that currently use AV, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. So we might have expected both sides in the referendum debate to have taken careful note of Scotland’s experience of AV. Yet there is little sign they have done so. Consider, for example, one of the key arguments put forward by the ‘Yes’ side. At the moment, they remind us, around two-thirds of MPs are elected on less than
72 Holyrood 28 March 2011
half the vote. Tere is no guarantee they are the most popular choice locally. But under AV, its advocates point out, a candidate has to win 50 per cent of the vote to get elected – and thus prove they really do have the backing of a majority of voters. However, this argument fails to take into account the fact that under
the version of AV proposed for the Commons (unlike that used in Australia) voters are not obliged to rank all of the candidates – only so many as they want to. And Scotland’s experience suggests few people do so. In six by-elections, where full details of all of the preferences cast have been published, only just over half of the voters actually bothered to cast even a second preference, while less than two in five managed a third. A voter who fails to cast a second or third preference runs the risk
that their vote does not count. If their first preference candidate is eliminated, their vote cannot be transferred to another candidate. If that happens to many voters, it can prove impossible for any one candidate to secure over half the vote even after second and subsequent preferences have been added to their tally of first preference votes. Tat is precisely what happened in no less than twelve of the 31 local
by-elections that have been held under AV. AV does not guarantee the winner has half the votes after all. Te No campaign is little better. Tey have made much play of the
cost of introducing AV, not least because the system would allegedly require the use of electronic counting machines. Some local authorities in Scotland have opted to use counting machines to count their AV by-elections, just as they did to conduct the (more complex) STV count in 2007. But equally, many an AV Scottish by-election has been happily counted by hand. Opponents of AV have also trumpeted Churchill’s claim that the outcome of AV elections gives priority to ‘the most worthless votes cast for the most worthless candidates’. Te winner, it is argued, is determined by the second and even lower preferences of those who have opted to give their first preference to fringe and extremist candidates. But this argument only has force if the
process of transferring votes typically changes who wins. Of the 31 by-elections held to date in Scotland, only in four cases has the eventual winner been someone other than the candidate who won most first preferences. And in each case, the eventual winner was only narrowly behind on first preferences. Te widespread irritation in Scotland
about the decision to hold the AV referendum on 5 May should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Scotland could teach England a lesson or two about AV – and it seems her near neighbour is in need of a good tutor.
John Curtice is Professor of Politics, Strathclyde University
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