Are Eurosceptics prepared to lose?

Another question to which there isn't a clear answer. Because far too many are assuming that if they can secure a referendum on EU membership, the vote itself will be a formality.

It's rather similar to the optimism of the pro AV camp about two and a half years ago. And we know how that turned out.

I suspect that whilst a "Stay" vote would be a severe shock, it would not lead to the disappearance of UKIP and the like. Some would refuse to accept the result as valid, arguing it had been tainted by unwelcome interests financing the stay campaign, or declare their own leadership traitors to the cause. Others would find it difficult to accept that the country could have made such a choice.

But it's a very real possibility. Polls that drill down into the detail show that voters do not prioritise the EU as a top issue. When the third option of reclaiming powers and a free trade agreement is offered in polls, the majority to leave evaporates. That suggests a potentially strong swing vote that could go either way depending on the effectiveness of the actual campaign. And anyone can stick up a post saying "Vote My Way or the baby gets it".

The result would be that whilst the referendum itself had been won by one side - and I strongly suspect that would be the Stay side - the other would be back at the first opportunity. There would be few wider political benefits beyond a Stay vote giving the EU more drive for federalism.

The idea that a referendum will make UKIP go away is fanciful, even before we get onto the less EU focused side of their support.

Referendum lessons

The Alternative Vote referendum ended this week in spectacular style. After a lengthy campaign, and no end of debate in certain circles (especially Twitter!), the result is through and the message is clear - voting system change (let's stop pretending it's "electoral reform") is dead for a generation.

But there are other clear lessons from this exercise and some of them aren't so comforting.

Much of the country's recent experiences of referendums has, up to now, been limited. Some of the votes have been near invisible local ones. Others have had weakened or non-existent opposition. There are some exceptions, but by and large this vote has been the first time many have experienced a strongly contested vote, with all the campaign tactics and mud slinging that goes with it.

Many can be disappointed by the way both campaigns went about things, but at the end of the day this wasn't a politics lecture. It was a vote to decide an aspect of how the country is run. The tasks for both campaigns were to win the vote, nothing else. They set about that task using methods they believe work. But one campaign made some serious miscalculations about the public attitude.

The Yes campaign by and large pitched itself at something it believes exists called the "progressive majority" - the idea that Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and Nationalist voters all belong to some grand tribe and that only splits between them have kept the Conservatives in power. But the harsh reality is that few voters identify with this concept - maybe a handful of the Guardian reading metropolitan liberals & intelligentsia (just look at the handful of areas that did return a Yes vote) but that's about it. It was also a dangerous strategy because it ignored the right and gave them no reason to vote for AV - simply having Nigel Farage on the list of AV supporters wasn't enough.

Furthermore a lot in the Yes campaign had for years believed the public wanted a change to the voting system and would flock to vote for one if only those wicked self-interested politicians would let them. Complacency ruled early on. They forget that whilst opinion polls had indicated there was a lot of support, most voters really don't have strong opinions on what voting system should be used and can be swayed by a campaign. Furthermore it really isn't a political priority for most voters beyond a certain set of chattering classes.

Now just for a moment change a few words in this. Imagine it wasn't an AV referendum but an EU one. Imagine the withdrawal campaign is pitching just for the right Conservative/UKIP voters. Imagine that many withdrawalists look to the opinion polls and take a vote for withdrawal as a foregone conclusion. And instead the stay in campaign mobilises well and secures a thumping victory.

It's not inconceivable. After all the right has its own kind of chattering class and obsessive, who don't always accept that their cause is not the public's priority, who don't realise more ground work is needed. To listen to some Eurosceptics you'd believe that all that's needed is to simply get a referendum called and everything else is a formality.

That kind of complacency is dangerous, but it's present behind most of the calls for an immediate referendum on withdrawal. More must be done before that happens.

Papua New Guinea doesn't use the Alternative Vote

We keep hearing the mantra repeated that only three countries in the world use the Alternative Vote - Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Invariably the focus has been on the first of these three, where data, studies and commentary is most readily available. Of the other two, Fiji has its problems that are rather more deep seated than the voting system, and Papua New Guinea appears misreported.

Papua New Guinea adopted the Alternative Vote in the past but switched to First Past The Post in the mid 1970s. In 2003 they changed the system again, but contrary to much casual reporting they didn't adopt the Alternative Vote.

Instead they adopted the Limited Preferential Vote - see Papua New Guinea Electoral Commission - Limited Preferential Voting for the official description on it.

Now I'm sure many of you are wondering what the difference is. Well under LPV a voter can only indicate preferences for a limited number of candidates. Rounds of transfers follow. A version of this system is actually used in the UK for Mayoral elections, albeit with voters allowed only two choices and the second round involves only the candidates with the two highest first preference totals.

The Limited Preferential Vote displays many of the same issues as the Supplementary Vote and neither of them really qualify as the Alternative Vote. Hardly any AV campaigners in the UK hold up the Supplementary Vote as an example of AV, and the Limited Preferential Vote isn't one either.

So that's two countries that use AV then...

Full confidence in politics achieved!

Douglas Carswell puts it best:

Holding a referendum on changing the voting system is set to restore public faith in everything, official data shows. News comes the day after the House of Commons voted to allow a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) system for Parliamentary elections.

“Until folk knew that they’d be able to vote on electoral reform next May, they sometimes doubted the integrity and judgement of politicians. But all those decades of incompetent public policy-making have been put to one side according to our data survey” revealed Whitehall sources.

Tinkering with the ballot system means that decades of growing contempt for the political system has been replaced by a glowing sense of admiration for our law-makers. “Those MPs might still ignore the things that really matter to us – but at least they’ll be doing it with AV!” gushed one citizen.

Officials at the Department of Progress are keen to emphasise that a referendum on AV is not the only reform ministers are planning. “Obviously AV was a top priority on the doorstep during the election. Especially in the posh parts of Islington. So we had to deliver that with breakneck speed. But change doesn’t stop there.”

“Not holding a referendum on the EU, like we promised, is just as important, too, so that we can build trust in the new politics”.

Officials are also drawing up plans to modernise democracy by replacing traditional elections with a citizen’s jury. “Having a citizen’s jury making decisions will cut the cost of politics. We can all just sit down together on a few sofas in Downing Street and decide things”.

AV vote restores faith in everything

Geographic political divides

One of the myths frequently bandied about the British voting system is the claim that it somehow creates an artificial North-South divide in politics. The argument runs that under a different voting system the country would be politically more mixed. It's an interesting argument, if based in some misassumptions (the divide is really metropolitan vs the rest - in the last election northern market towns and rural areas swung on a similar scale to their southern counterparts), and no doubt we'll be hearing people make it in the forthcoming AV referendum. But it ignores the fact that such divides are rooted in social & historical factors that are the backdrop to people's political outlooks, and can occur under all manner of voting systems.

Such divides exist in other countries, even when using proportional representation or holding a direct election. Yesterday was the second & final round of the Polish presidential election and the election map shows some interesting features. Here is the map of the first round results with Bronisław Komorowski of the Civic Platform in orange and Jarosław Kaczyński of Law and Justice in blue:

It's an interesting map of support and people may have recognised the historic boundaries it roughly follows. But the first round was not a isolated case - here's the second round:

Exactly the same pattern. It was also seen in the last parliamentary election as well:

The parliament is elected by party lists in multiple constituencies (the system most of the UK uses for the European Parliament).

For those still wondering, the map of party support almost exactly matches the pre First World War boundaries between Germany and Russia (when Poland was still partitioned between them). Regardless of whether the nature of the political divide can trace itself back to that time, despite several movements of boundaries and populations since, it is a stark divide. The use of either proportional representation or a single nation wide election hasn't shifted it, and I doubt any voting system change in the UK would have a effect on our geographic political divide.

See also Strange Maps: 348 – An Imperial Palimpsest on Poland’s Electoral Map which has independently noted this phenomenon.