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HOME NEWS POLITICS AV REFERENDUM

David Cameron: why keeping first past the post is vital for
democracy

The Telegraph
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Prime Minister David Cameron issues a final rallying cry to vote "no" in the
referendum on bringing in the electoral vote.

AV Referendum

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In AV Referendum

The Prime Minister has taken on a high-profile role in the No to AV

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AV Referendum
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By David Cameron, Prime Minister

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9:00PM BST 30 Apr 2011

Comments
In four days, Britain votes in a referendum that is critical to our
democracy and our future.

Clegg: we have to
'move on' after AV
rejection

Normally, when we vote, those votes have a use-by-date. We elect

Councillors, Mayors, MPs and governments for four or five years.
But the referendum on AV is about voting in a change that is
permanent.
Unless enough people turn out to vote on Thursday, Britain is in real
danger of exchanging an electoral system that works for one we would
come to regret profoundly.

More From The Web

All Auctions In One Place

Cameron has seen off

AV but now he must
see off Salmond

To me there are four important reasons to save the First-Past-the-Post

system we use today.
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The British favour evolutionary adaptation 30 Apr 2011

The first is its simplicity. Its so simple it can be summed up in one

sentence: the candidate who gets the most votes wins.
Just compare that to AV: a confusing mess of preferences, probabilities
and permutations.
Leaving aside the clear danger that this complexity could encourage
negative campaigning as in Australia, where voters are greeted at

SEARCH ALL AUCTIONS

AV referendum and
local elections
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polling stations by party apparatchiks with 'How to Vote cards, telling

people the exact order in which to rank each candidate it would also
throw up some patently unfair results.
Under AV, the person who comes third in peoples first preferences can
end up coming first in the race.
It makes winners of losers and losers of winners.
The result could be a Parliament full of second-choices who no one
really wanted but didnt really object to either.
The second major strength of First-Past-the-Post is its effectiveness.
Throughout history, it has risen to the demands of the time, often with a
brutal decisiveness.
Thats what happened when it brought in the Thatcher government in
1979.
The British people recognised it was time for change and the electoral
system didnt let them down.
On other occasions, when the public has felt that none of the major
parties have all of the answers, it has led to a hung Parliament as it did
last year.
Under AV, such decisiveness is much less likely. It will make hung
Parliaments more commonplace and make it more difficult to kick out
tired governments.
Indeed, if it had been in place at the election last year, Gordon Brown
could still be Prime Minister today.
I cant imagine anything much worse than a voting system that leaves
half-dead governments living on life support.
The third reason to save First-Past-the-Post is its efficiency.
Everyone knows this country needs to cut spending and get back to
living within its means.
At this time, we need to protect those things that provide our country with
real value for money.
Our current voting system does that its cheap to administer and comes
with little bureaucracy.
There is a real danger that AV could come with additional costs, from
public information campaigns explaining the complexities of AV to the
extra expense of counting votes at election time.
At this time I think our money is better spent on public services than on
our political system.
The fourth reason to save First-Past-the-Post is to do with our history.
Each democracy in the world has its own story, shaped by its own chain
of events.
The American system, with its strong checks and balances, was born of
revolution designed to avoid the possibility of over-mighty government.
In Europe, both after the Second World War and the fall of Communism,
many countries adopted other more plural voting systems, again
constructed to avoid the experience of being dominated by over-mighty
governments.
Britains democracy has its own story. Two centuries ago, voting was
limited to a privileged few.
Generations of campaigners fought and died to change that. Their
struggle gave us the principle that sits at the heart of our democracy
today: we are all equal, therefore we all have an equal say at the polls.
One person, one vote.
So First-Past-the-Post isnt just one way of counting votes it is an
expression of our fairness as a country.
It is enshrined in our constitution and integral to our history and AV flies
in the face of all that because it destroys one person, one vote.
If you vote for a mainstream candidate who comes top in the first round,
your other preferences will never be counted.
But if you vote for a fringe candidate who gets knocked out early, your

other votes will be counted.

That means the second, third, even fourth votes of someone who
supports the Monster Raving Looney Party can count as much as the
first vote of someone who supports a mainstream party. That is unfair
and undemocratic.
Dont take all this from me. You can judge the relative merits of FirstPast-the-Post and AV by how popular they are overseas.
Our current system is one of Britains most successful exports used by
almost half the electors on the planet, embraced and understood by 2.4
billion people from India to America.
So in the next few days ask yourself a few questions: do you want to
switch to a voting system that is hopelessly unclear, unfair and
indecisive?
Do you want elections that are as Churchill put it determined by the
most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates?
And do you want to rip up a valuable part of our constitution and
centuries of British history for a system that is unpopular the world over?
If the answer is no, make sure you get out to the polling station on 5th
May and vote no to AV.

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