Dan Poulter on AV

From Dan Poulter’s Evening Star Column

“ON Thursday, May 5, the people of Suffolk will take part in an historic vote on whether to change the voting system used to elect MPs from the current system called First Past the Post to the Alternative Vote (AV) system.
In Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, I received over 50 per cent of the popular vote, and a change in the voting system would make no difference to the outcome here.
As a result, I have little personal interest at stake in the outcome of the referendum, but have been stirred to write about it as a result of the unpleasant and unnecessary political mudslinging that occurred over the weekend.
Politicians often wonder why people have such a low opinion of them, but when they avoid the issues that matter to the man or woman in the street in Ipswich, Bramford or Wickham Market, and instead descend into the realms of personal attack, it turns people off from participating in the process of how our country is run.
The AV Referendum is critically important because it will decide how we elect members of Parliament, and I believe that everyone should have an equal say in who represents them based on that British democratic principle of one person, one vote.
If you vote NO in the Referendum, you will be voting for the current system of electing our MPs which is called First Past the Post – each voter gets one vote, and the candidate with the most votes is declared the winner. It is a simple and transparent system of electing MPs which is used in over half of the world.
If you vote YES, you will be voting for a change to the AV system, where voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate commands more than 50pc of the votes
ing our MPs in which the candidate who finishes third may be allowed to claim overall victory on the basis of second, third, fourth and even fifth preference votes? Under the AV, the person who came third could become your MP.
Of greatest concern to me is that under the AV, some people’s votes would carry greater weight than others. Under the candidate preference system of AV, one person’s vote may be counted once and another person’s vote may be counted three, four or five times – which I believe is very undemocratic.
It is because of this that many people in the Conservative and Labour parties believe that AV is an unfair system that would undermine the principle underpinning British democracy – that each person has an equal vote.
There has also been much talk about whether a change to the AV system would benefit extremist parties like the British National Party. Logic suggests that this is certainly the case. In parts of Britain like Stoke-on-Trent, the BNP received around 8pc (that’s eight people out of every one hundred) of the vote.
Under the AV system, second, third or fourth preferences of BNP voters, or voters of other extremist parties, may hold the balance of power and decide who becomes an MP. So, in some parts of Britain, in order to win on second, third, or fourth preference votes under AV, a candidate of one of the mainstream parties would need to tailor his or her message to the extremes.
So the AV system reverses the logic of what we hold most dear about British democracy, that under our current First Past the Post electoral system, our political parties need to appeal to the broad centre ground to be”