New 'PR' Voting System designed to Exclude BNP

“Alternative Voting” System — What Does It Mean?

MPs have voted to allow a referendum on the Alternative Voting (AV) system next year, telling the public that it will make politics more representative — but the Electoral Reform Society has warned that AV leads to an “even greater distortion” in the political process.

Under the AV system, the same constituency boundaries are used and voters would elect one person to represent them in Parliament, just as we do now, the ERS pointed out.

“However, rather than marking an ‘X’ against their preferred candidate, each voter would rank their candidates in an order of preference, putting ’1′ next to their favourite, a ‘2′ by their second choice and so on.

“If a candidate receives a majority of first place votes, he or she would be elected just as under the present system. However if no single candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the second choices for the candidate at the bottom are redistributed.

The process is repeated until one candidate gets an absolute majority,” the ERS said, adding that the “alternative vote is not actually a proportional system, but a majoritarian system. It looks most similar to the current electoral system.”

The system is used in the Australian House of Representatives and is clearly designed to prevent smaller parties from making any breakthroughs.

This obviously forms part of the Government’s thinking as it faces a loss of its core supporters to the British National Party.

• The ERS pointed out that the AV system does “not give proportionality to parties or other bodies of opinion, in Parliament. Research by Democratic Audit in 1997 showed that the results could actually be even more distorting than under first-past-the-post,” that think tank said.
• “It also does very little to give a voice to those who have been traditionally under-represented in parliament” and as there is “no transfer of powers from party authority to the voters, it does not produce a proportional parliament,” the ERS concluded.
• In other words, the AV system is no improvement upon the existing system and is merely designed to make it more difficult for a party such as the BNP to gain parliamentary representation.

The House of Commons backed the plan to hold an £80 million referendum on the AV system by 365 to 187. A poll has revealed that 70 percent of voters believe Gordon Brown changed his long-standing opposition to electoral reform as a result of “political calculation.”

The AV system is obviously a sleight of hand which is directed against the BNP and is not aimed at improving democracy in Britain.

Rather, Mr Brown’s sudden conversion to AV is an indication that he seeks to undermine the democratic process even further.