Yes or no

[altariel]

OK, f'listers, let rip. In 100 words or less, and without reference to the other case, tell me why I should vote either 'yes' or 'no' to the following question:

"Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the 'alternative vote' system instead of the current 'first past the post' system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?"

Non-UK perspectives welcome.

Comments

[nwhyte]

Vote 'Yes'. The Alternative Vote is much more fun for the voter, and also removes the need to calculate tactically whether to use your entire vote to endorse a candidate who may not be your first choice.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The experience in the ballot box is actually another one that troubles me. I'm worried about making the voting process more complex, and the effect that has on people's sense of having fairly represented their own views.

I've looked around pro-AV websites, but the chief response to this question seems to be: "Are you calling people stupid?" Which I'm not. But I've seen people get very anxious faced with a FPTP ballot - how much more anxious would an AV ballot paper make them? I guess I'll have to find whether any research has been done on this.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

We used STV in Scottish local elections for the first time back in 2007. The experience of that election was that few voters had difficulty with ranking candidates, and the number of spoiled ballots was in line with previous FPTP elections. The method of voting in AV is identical to that in STV.

[There were of course well-publicised problems with the Scottish parliamentary vote on the same day, which uses a cumbersome and unintuitive Additional Member System that no-one sane is proposing for Westminster.]

So yes, it's been done, and it's not a problem. Unless Scottish people are intrinsically brighter than the English...

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

Anecdata: Having participated in voting in the election that iainjcoleman mentions, then yes, it was very anxiety inducing, particularly since for the voting slip that containined an exceedingly lengthy list of names, it wasn't immediately clear that you didn't have to give a ranking to all the candidates.

And I am not a stupid person and I am not particularly afraid of forms and am good at dealing with the written word. I was still anxious about it. Pro-AV sites that suggest that to be concerned about people's anxiety means that you are calling people stupid really annoy me.

But I don't know what the best option for dealing with this is. Dummy forms that people can take you through, but without bias? Telling people what is the minimum they can do (e.g. putting a '1' by their preferred candidate and nothing else), but then explaining what else they can do, but would that lead to people just putting the '1' and not making the full use of the system? Having people who can be approached to explain the form, but again, can you do this without bias?

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Pro-AV sites that suggest that to be concerned about people's anxiety means that you are calling people stupid really annoy me.

Quite. It's one of the main concerns of designing research tools in the social sciences: Is this accessible? Does this exclude people in any way? How manageable is it for someone with dyslexia, for example, or someone with limited mobility? (Those huge ballots for the EU elections are astonishing!)

There's a clarity to the process of FPTP: "Put an X next to the name or the symbol of your choice". If we're serious about enfranchising the disenfranchised, then complicating the process doesn't seem to help.

And, yes, this is nothing to do with stupidity! It's to do with disempowerment, or one's relationship to institutional power, or any one of all manner of things!

So I haven't really ever been given an answer to this that satisfies me. Even a case study of a small number of voters talking about voting in FPTP and AV elections and comparing the experience would be somewhere for me to start.

I guess that if AV gets through then there's money set aside to do TV adverts and educational leaflets, and so on.