AV DOES NOT EQUATE TO FAIR VOTING

A line in Tom Stoppard’s 1972 'Jumpers' says: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”

The same could be said for AV. It has been claimed that AV would allow voters to “vote for who they really want to win and still have a vote that counts.” Indeed, Nick Clegg, in his evidence to the Select Committee, claimed that AV “...stops people voting tactically”.

However, the Lib Dems have never worried about the facts getting in the way of their misleading brand of politics. Clegg was wrong when he made this assertion to the Select Committee It’s not surprising therefore that the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute’s Guide to the Alternative Vote says: “This is DEMONSTRABLY NOT TRUE (their emphasis). In fact there is complex mathematical proof, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, that no meaningful electoral system can eliminate the possibility of tactical voting.” http://tinyurl.com/5soxulc

Indeed, the guide goes onto say: “...the situation is very easy to demonstrate in the case of AV...there is a real incentive for tactical voting, because the order in which candidates are eliminated affects the results.” The guide reinforces the point saying: “...there are extra tactical voting possibilities under AV that mean it is possible that ‘honest’ voting is sometimes directly counter-productive.”
So, while it is true that, under AV, voters are unlikely to cast their first choice tactically, the evidence from Australia is that voting in AV elections is highly tactical since it is necessary to place candidates in a very specific order of preference to maximise the chances of any particular favoured candidate. This is explained in the Constitution Society’s AV briefing paper.

This is pretty powerful proof that tactical voting will not cease under AV, it will simply shift to the voter’s second choice. So to those who say AV represents fair votes, I say – don’t make me laugh.