Most of the discussion of the AV referendum assumes that if UK voters endorse changing the voting system, they will be eager to vote 1, 2 3, 4 etc to express support for several or multiple parties. But Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher have their doubts. Reviewing the evidence from Queensland, which uses the same system as the proposed UK alternative vote, they believe that many voters will treat an AV election as just like ‘first past the post’, and not cast (or perhaps over time stop casting) multiple preferences.
When pollsters ask their respondents how they might distribute their party preferences if faced with the proposed Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system, the vast majority comply with the request and diligently complete a mock ballot paper. The results are then used, as by the British Election Study team at the University of Essex, to simulate how a general election fought under this new system might differ from what went before.
The BES team calculated that the Liberal Democrats would have won 32 more seats in 2010 than they did (89 compared with 57), with the Conservatives and Labour winning 22 and 10 fewer respectively. The political significance of their findings was that such a result would have given Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined a parliamentary majority and made a coalition between them much more feasible, even likely.
But evidence from real elections fought using AV or other preference systems suggests that many voters simply vote for their most preferred party and do not bother to rank any of the other competitors.
In general elections in Australia not only is voting compulsory, but so is marking a full list of preferences on the AV ballot paper. Electors who fail to rank order every candidate in their constituency have their votes rejected. In the UK, however, it will up to the voters to decide how many preferences they mark if next year’s referendum is passed.
Exactly this optional preference AV system already applies in some elections in Australia. In Queensland the move from obligatory to optional preference ordering was made in 1992. Initially only about 20 per cent of voters marked a first preference only. And the parties themselves continued to issue ‘how to vote’ cards to voters indicating how to cast a full list of preferences.
<a href=”http://www.laucala.eu/index.php/the-photographer/”However since 2001, and the Australian Labor Party’s first ‘Just One vote’ campaign, the level of people supporting only one party (called ‘plumping’) in Queensland has been about 60 per cent. In 2009 63 per cent of those who turned out at the state elections voted for just one candidate. In individual constituencies the proportion so doing ranged from a low of 53 per cent to a high of 73 per cent.
This behaviour was endorsed by the major political parties who increasingly advised their supporters to vote for them alone. Where parties took a different view (as the Greens did for instance), they were often ignored by voters. For instance, no fewer than 46 per cent of those who gave their first preference to the Greens made no other choice, despite the party advising that second preferences should be given to Labor. Similar behaviour can be found elsewhere in Australia also. Mayoral contests in South Australia in 2003 saw an average 50 per cent of voters mark only a single preference.
On a smaller scale, somewhat similar pattern of behaviour can be spotted in Britain amongst a minority of voters on those occasions where electors have had the opportunity to cast more than one ballot at the same contest. In multi-member contests in local elections some 10 to 15 per cent of voters do not use their full allocation of votes. At the three London mayoral elections in 2000, 2004 and 2008 using the two-vote, instant run-off Supplementary Vote (SV) system about one in five voters either voted just once or cast both their available votes for a single party candidate.
It also may be that casting just one vote becomes even more common when voters are asked to rank preferences rather than to cast more two discrete votes. At the 2007 local elections in Scotland, conducted using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, one in three Conservative, Labour and SNP supporters and more than 20 per cent of Liberal Democrats decided to vote only once in those wards where their preferred party had a single candidate. That election also demonstrated that even when voters do express a number of preferences, few of them cast more than three preferences, however many candidates are contesting a particular ward.
Nor is this just a grass roots problem, but it also has elite correlates . For instance, in the recent Labour leadership election one in four MPs and MEPs cast just one vote, rather than making an ordered choice between all five candidates as the party’s AV system encouraged them to do.
The more such behaviour is replicated in any future UK general election using AV, the more the result will resemble one fought under the current first past the post system and nullify much of the point of any reform.
In the first table below, we have used the same pattern of vote transfers between parties as reported by the Essex BES team. But here we have made prior assumptions about the proportion of voters likely to support a single party and use no more of their preferences. If this proportion is set at 35 per cent for Tory and Labour supporters, and lower at 25 per cent for Liberal Democrats and all other smaller parties, the increment in Liberal Democat seats falls from 32 to 19. The Tories seats are down by 16 and Labour by three.
| Projection of seats won under AV | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Existing seats 2010 | CON | LAB | Lib Dem | NAT | OTH | Total |
| Conservative (306) | 290 | 7 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 306 |
| Labour (258) | 0 | 248 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 258 |
| Lib Dem | 0 | 0 | 57 | 0 | 0 | 57 |
| Nationalist (9) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| Other | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| Total seats | 290 | 255 | 76 | 9 | 2 | 632 |
| Gains/losses | -16 | -3 | 19 | |||
| MPs elected with less than majority support = 244 | ||||||
Suppose we now set the proportion of voters who support just one party under AV at 50 per cent for Tory and Labour supporters, and at 35 per cent for Liberal Democrats and all the other smaller parties. These numbers are not unrealistic given the Queensland experience. Now the result is shown in our second Table below. The Lib Dems win only an extra 15 seats, at the expense of the Tories (-11) and Labour (-4). Such an outcome in 2010 would have given a potential Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition an overall majority of just two, not enough to proceed. By contrast, the current partners, Tories and Liberal Democrats would together have enjoyed an advantage of 84 over all other parties.
| Projection of seats won under AV | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Existing seats 2010 | CON | LAB | Lib Dem | NAT | OTH | Total |
| Conservative (306) | 294 | 5 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 306 |
| Labour (258) | 1 | 249 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 258 |
| Lib Dem | 0 | 0 | 57 | 0 | 0 | 57 |
| Nationalist (9) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| Other | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| Total seats | 295 | 254 | 72 | 9 | 2 | 632 |
| Gains/losses | -11 | -4 | 15 | |||
| MPs elected with less than majority support = 276 | ||||||
Proponents of AV often claim that the need for successful candidates to be able to show local majority support is one of the system’s main attractions. Yet our Table above would also mean, given the limited vote transfers between parties, that more than 4 out of every 10 MPs would still be elected with the endorsement of less than 50 per cent of the voters in their constituency.
The claims that AV will guarantee local majority support can only be validated if every voter is compelled or chooses to cast a full range of preferences. There seems little prospect of that happening in a general election conducted under AV in the UK. And whichever assumption is used about the proportion of voters expressing only one preference, the overall outcome remains disproportional. It does little to address biases present under FPTP, due to abstention effects (pro-Labour) or geographical effects (anti-Liberal Democrat).
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We have had preference voting in Australia for a long time …. my advice to the Uk … DONT DO THIS … this system gives power to minor parties and independents that is disproportionate to the vote they receive … many Australians have been very surpised at where their vote has been allocated when the person they voted for is not elected …. first past the post voting makes voters think more about the total policies of who they vote for rather than voting for a party who have very narrowly focussed policies … i SO wish we had first past the post voting in Australia.
If I might offer an opinion as someone who lives in Australia. I might point out that AV in Australia has been historically shown to massively benefit minority parties. In NSW in 2007 for example, 6 of the 93 seats were won by independent candidates. Four of these failed to gain a majority of first preference votes and 3 failed to get a plurality of first preference votes. In the UK 2010 election, one of the 650 seats was won by an independent. Tactical voting under FPTP strangles third parties and prevents voters from being able to voice their opposition to major parties without throwing their votes away. Perhaps that’s why only 3 UK parties ever get above 5% of the national vote. Australia by contrast has had success by a variety of minor parties in recent years including the DLP, the ONP, the Democrats and the Greens. All four exerted a significant influence over Australian politics and were able to muster support for important policy changes. Under FPTP in the UK, even to the extent that minor parties do exist, they exert hardly any influence.
ALTERNATIVE VOTE
Much is made by the political parties spokespersons of the need to cut down ‘top down’ government and promote ‘democracy‘. A start could be made by political parties accepting AV and using it in their procedures for selecting parliamentary candidates.
The ‘first past the post’ system is preferred by the bulk of major party elites because it gives them power, through party committees local and national, to select which of ‘their men’ the citizen will be allowed to vote for – no choice for the voter because fielding more than one candidate would be electoral suicide under ‘first past the post‘.
AV would give those members of society who are motivated to join political parties an opportunity to be directly involved in the selection of constituency candidates.
The central and local committees of the respective parties could nominate their preferred candidate to stand in any constituency alongside the candidate selected by the local constituency party members, all using AV to ensure that the candidates had at least 50% support.
If a constituency candidate takes 50% of the vote on the first count he is elected. This is only likely in constituencies with a very popular candidate. The majority of constituencies would see the successive elimination of the weakest candidate and the redistribution of that candidates votes. This would encourage a political party to put up the 3 candidates they would be entitled to.
One would expect that a partisan voter would always vote for a candidate of the party that person supports, the order of their choice would reflect their predilections and give an insight into which shade of opinion in the party the voters prefer without fatally splitting the party‘s vote.
AV offers the party selection committees, the party activist and the citizen a choice in the process of selection because the necessity of a party putting forward just one candidate into the election process is removed without prejudicing the party‘s share of the vote.
G Toase
Most parties have their candidates selected by local parties, not “party elites” and party activists do get a say. Under AV parties are very unlikely to follow this strategy – in the New South Wales election just gone with optional AV no party offered more than one candidate and no constituency had both Liberal and National candidates. A similar limitation can be seen in Irish STV elections were parties generally nominate cautiously.
For parties the problems are a ) seats can be lost by voters either plumping or transferring out of the party, and b ) local party unity can be weakened if competing candidates can only be elected at their running mates’ expense and have to make themselves distinct. Voters frequently respond to such disunity with a plague on all the candidates’ houses. For parties the attainment of power to implement policy is a greater concern than allowing voters diverse choice. The Irish solution is to have candidates from geographically different parts of the constituency but that only works under the multi member system. In Queensland the Liberal-National coalition found the plumping to be such a problem that the two parties have now merged. (Australian voters are also offered choice in STV mutli-member upper house elections but overwhelmingly they decline to decide between the merits of parties’ different candidates and just vote for the party line.)
If no one has 50% and the candidates are removed accordingly, surely the final scenario is that two parties remain, in which case one must have 50% regardless if they have second preferences or not.
Please explain how you came to your conclusion where the winner has less that 50%
I get it, the pool has reduced and the 50% is no longer the 50% we started with. This is a good argument, but whilst this is an unfortunate spanner that can be thrown in by those that want to keep the status quo, a little bit better is still better and what are the alternatives.
Michael and Colin’s conclusion about voters not using their right to state and rank their preferences also holds for party list multi-preference voting systems.
For instance,in Italy under the old preference voting system in multi-member constituencies (which was reduced to a single-preference vote after a referendum in June 1991) many voters, especially in the South, did not mark candidates on party lists. They simply cast a party vote and by doing so exaggerated the support of the candidate at the head of the list. As in Queensland under AV, this practice enabled instrumental control of preference voting by political parties (especially the dominant centrist Christian Democrats who were the main beneficiaries of ‘plumping’).
So, what to do to avoid repeating the biases of single-member plurality rule (misnamed first-past-the-post) under alternative voting systems? Unless a thorough and un-biased public information campaign was to take place, voter compulsion seems the only solution.
I am very happy for those who think it will make no difference to express that belief by abstaining from the referendum and leave to voting to those who can see benefits from one system or the others.
Some advantages of AV have been proposed – but I have yet to see any advantage of FPTP being suggested.
I outline some advantages of AV here:
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2010/9/say-yes-to-alternative-vote-a-reply-to-matthew-elliott
If anyone knows of any advantages of FPTP (other than it already being in place), I would be pleased to hear about them…
The first advantage of FPTP over AV for minority voices is clear: it gives them a hope of election, which a fully majoritarian model denies them. The obvious example in the UK is Naomi Long, elected from East Belfast with 37.2%, while three candidates of different shades of unionism split 59.4% of the vote among them. Some brutalists in Northern Ireland cried “Protestant Unity” to try to prevent her election. AV would hand them victory.
Similarly, the Scottish nationalists would be squeezed out, since in none of their six seats won in 2010 did they gain more than 50%. They scored over 40% in only two seats.
The second advantage is that it has more hope of a hung parliament. If AV results in Lib Dem voters mostly transferring to their coalition partner, it will hand the Conservatives the majority FPTP just denied them.
Wilf, there’s no evidence that AV would disadvantage the SNP. Indeed, with the collapse of the Lib Dem vote in Scotland, one would expect the SNP to benefit from AV.
Wilf, the BES study has shown that all 6 SNP, and the 3 PC MP’s would have retained their seats under AV, in 2010. Although Northern Ireland wasn’t included, Naomi Long also stood a very good chance of being returned under AV, as that constituency election was a personal “anti Peter Robinson” vote rather than a pro Alliance vote.
The subject of this study (the 2010 election) may be very irrelevant come the next election. For example, how many Lib Dem voters will be labelling Labour as their second choice after years of co-operation with the Tories and relentless attacks from Labour. If we have the centre parties’ second preferences cleaving very asymmetrically AV is likely to produce very different results (pro-coalition) than FPTP.
While I wouldn’t dispute anything in this article, it fails to ask *why* single-preference votes might be prevalent in Queensland or the Labour leadership election.
In the Labour leadership election, the vast majority of MPs who only used a single preference were those who supported either David or Ed Miliband. They knew that the final two candidates in the race would be the Miliband brothers, so they didn’t need to cast extra preferences.
Moving over to Queensland, the reason Labor ran a ‘Just One Vote’ campaign was that they wanted to split the Liberal/National vote. That was an easy sell in a state which has been run by Labor since 1989.
But the British party system is very different from Australia’s two-bloc system. Our right isn’t split like Australia’s, we have a centrist party, and we have nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. We also have extra cleavages, like the EU, which fragment the party system and increase shared stances across party lines – so voters with a passion for a particular issue will often find multiple parties sharing that stance.
The incentives to use transfers are thus much stronger in the British political context, although of course many voters will choose to “plump”. Surely it is better to give them the option?
Andy White
Electoral Reform Society
Your suggesting that the fractured right..listened to labor..when told to sabotage their own chances of winning.
Hmm well, that is one suggestion..or it could be that they did it because that is what they wanted to do.
The fact that this is a common occurrence where optional preferencing is allowed , makes it very relevant to the UK.. which as you pointed out have parties that are more likely to benefit from not second preferencing (not being a two party system).
Isn’t there a strong likelihood that if AV were brought in then either as a result of the problem you mention or as a drive to greater PR, the number of seats would be increased per constituency?