A couple of months ago, there was an article in City AM about the upcoming - and since cancelled - London Mayoral elections, which reminded me that the election uses a Supplementary Vote system (fairly similar to Alternative Vote).
From Wiki:
The election used a supplementary vote system, in which voters express a first and a second preference of candidates.
* If a candidate receives over 50% of the first preference vote the candidate wins.
* If no candidate receives an overall majority, i.e., over 50% of first preference votes, the top two candidates proceed to a second round and all other candidates are eliminated.
* The first preference votes for the remaining two candidates stand in the final count.
* Voters' ballots whose first and second preference candidates are eliminated are discarded.
* Voters whose first preference candidates have been eliminated and whose second preference candidate is in the top two have their second preference votes added to the count.
* This means that the winning candidate has the support of a majority of voters who expressed a preference among the top two.
As it happens, it made no difference to the final outcome, Khan won more votes than Goldsmith in the first round and his winning margin was higher in the second round. In the end, only ten per cent of all votes cast were re-allocated.
Interestingly, only about 15% of voters did not bother giving a second preference vote, meaning that 85% did - but in the 2011 Alternative Vote Referendum (which proposed a very similar system), only 32% voted in favour of it. People really are strange - they are stupid enough to vote against something which in practice, they actually quite like.
It also completely puts paid to the project fear scare story that the AV system would lead to candidates from extremist parties being elected.
A) So what if it does, it's a democracy.
B) Project Fear also claimed that AV would lead to more coalitions, which sort of cancels out the first claim, as coalitions tend to be more moderate.
C) As we see in practice, it makes very little difference. The winning candidate was always going to be from one of the Big Two parties.
IMHO, AV is still a good system. It doesn't change the outcomes of elections very much, if at all - what it does change is what sort of policies the winning candidates actually implement afterwards. The only way to 'send them a message' as to what you actually want is to vote for a smaller party with a clear manifesto or a single-issue party. The AV system clearly encourages people to give their first vote to a smaller party and their second vote to one of the Big Two as a fall back.
Debate Magazine
