In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Many apologies that both writing and commenting here remains so light. It's going to be like this until December, when I finally finish and submit my article on Italian urban peripheries. Until then, the combination of that article, the other daily demands of my job and the ongoing fight to secure a viable future for our department just means I have very little spare brain-juice available for LJing. I'm doing my best.

Anyway, on Friday evening I downed tools and headed out of the house, all dressed from top to toe in purple, to help launch the nationwide Yes to Fairer Votes campaign at the Hyde Park bonfire in Leeds. The date of the AV referendum has been confirmed now, and November 5th marked exactly six months until it will take place. So it was time to get out there and start spreading the word.

We had a professional photographer along with us, as the nationwide campaign is asking local groups all over the country to submit photos of their events for a collective gallery. So we started out by doing a few posed photos in front of the bonfire and the fireworks:


That raised quite a lot of interest in itself, as people came up to ask what it was all about, and what we were saying 'Yes' to. And once the fireworks had finished, we dashed down to one of the main exits to the park, and got stuck in to handing out flyers, giving out stickers and signing up new members:


You can see our full photo-set here.

Responses were pretty good on the whole. A few people just weren't interested, but I didn't encounter a single person who wanted to argue the case with us for keeping the existing first-past-the-post system. Rather more depressingly, though, the great majority of the people we talked to either a) had no idea that there was going to be a referendum on the voting system in six months' time or b) had no idea what AV is.

And that's a sad state of affairs, because what's happening next May is a really big deal. It's far bigger than a general election, where you merely vote to elect a government for the next five years. This referendum is about whether or not we should change this country's entire voting system permanently. It matters, and everyone should be thinking about it and talking about it and getting ready to decide how they want to vote in May.

Of course, the whole reason why we were there was to raise awareness about the referendum, and explain to people how AV works and why we believe it is fairer than the current system. And actually people seemed pretty interested once they heard about it. We chatted to as many people as we could and gave out a good couple of hundred flyers between us, with a fair number of people seeming actively pleased to be given them, or even coming up to us of their own volition to find out more. So it felt like a pretty positive start to the campaign. But there is still very definitely lots to be done.

Having said all that, of course, it would now be remiss of me not to finish off this post with a simple explanation of how AV works, and why I think it is an improvement on the current system. I know that a lot of people on my friendslist are already extremely well-informed about it. But I also know from my experience at the bonfire on Friday night that plenty of people won't be. Since everyone (who's over 18 and a UK citizen) will get to vote on this next May, I think it's time we all started talking about it. So this is my simple starter's guide to what on earth it's all about:

• The change proposed is very simple. Under the current FPTP (first-past-the-post) system, you place an 'X' by the candidate you want to vote for, and whoever gets the most Xs wins. Under AV (alternative vote), you get to rank the candidates numerically in your order of preference instead.
• If you want to, you can simply vote as you always have done under the AV system. You just put a '1' next to your favoured candidate, and leave the rest blank.
• But AV also lets you express your preferences in more detail. You can vote '1' for the candidate you like best, but also '2' for the one you like next best, and so on until you run out of candidates or preferences. (See an example here.)
• If no candidate gets more than 50% of the votes on the basis of first preferences, the candidate who got the least votes is eliminated, and the electoral officers look instead at the second preferences expressed by the people who voted for them.
• These second-preference votes are allocated to the relevant candidates, and this keeps happening until one candidate has at least 50% of the total vote. That candidate is then declared the winner.
• This means that in order to win their seats, parliamentary candidates would have to appeal positively to at least 50% of the voters in their constituencies.
• The result would be fewer safe seats, and thus more accountable MPs.
• It also means that if you live in a seat where your favourite candidate usually comes third, you would no longer have to face the choice between wasting your vote and voting tactically. You could express your actual preference by putting your favourite candidate first, but (assuming that that candidate is then eliminated) you would also still get to have a say in which of the remaining candidates wins by using your second (or third, or fourth) preference votes.
• And if everyone in the country was voting on that basis, we might just get a Parliament which represented the views of the voters rather better than it does now - surely a good thing, whatever your personal political preferences are.

There's a lot more to say about it than that, of course. It isn't a simple issue, and there is plenty of debate to be had about how AV would actually play out in practice. But I am well enough convinced that it would be fairer than the current system to consider it worth actively campaigning for a 'Yes' vote. And I am absolutely certain that we should all be thinking about it pretty hard between now and the actual referendum. So consider the above my small, humble contribution to kick-starting the thought-processes. If it's the first kick you've had, then I've done my job.

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