FactCheck: the AV campaign gets dirty
The claim
“Should AV pass, the cost of electronic vote counting necessitated by AV will be £130 million”
No to AV Campaign group
The background
With just a couple of months until the referendum on 5 May, the gloves are off.
And with good reason – an Ipsos Mori poll has found that 13 per cent of those planning to vote, are not sure which way they’ll go.
The Yes to Fair Votes Campaign has the edge so far, with 49 per cent of those planning to vote, supporting the AV system. Meanwhile, 37 per cent are against it.
This week the scrabble for votes moved up a notch, when the No campaign took out a two-page advert in the Birmingham Mail claiming that a sick baby “needs a new cardiac facility NOT an alternative voting system”.
The Yes campaign was outraged, branding the move a “new low” for No to AV.
The analysis
As the Ipsos poll showed, the No to AV campaign clearly has some catching up to do. Cue a headline grabbing press release that claims AV will hit people where it hurts the most: their wallets.
No to AV claims that the combined costs of a referendum, implementing electronic vote counting and educating voters will cost Britain a cool £250 million. And just over half of this will be splashed out on shiny new electronic vote counting machines, the campaigners say.
They produced 12-pages of calculations supporting their claims – but are they right?
Electronic voting machines would more than double the present cost of British elections, but not improve the way elections are run, No to AV said.
In fact, there was a 50 per cent failure rate when the Electoral Commission ran e-counting pilots in 2007.
The estimated cost of the 2010 general election is around £82m, justice minister Michael Wills told then-Shadow Housing Minister Grant Shapps last year.
The Government has done no cost analysis of how much it would cost to run an AV system, but No to AV estimates that the lion’s share of the bill will come in the form of electronic voting machines – costing between £90m and £130m.
That’s an estimated figure, based on looking at Scotland’s use of electronic voting systems in 2007, and pilot schemes in England during the same year – all adjusted for inflation.
The problem is however, that there are no current plans to implement electronic voting machines in the event AV passes.
The Electoral Commission, the independent elections watchdog, told FactCheck: “The Commission hasn’t considered whether electric machines are necessary or value for money.”
Despite pointing out the high failure rate of electronic machines, No to AV maintains that counting AV votes is far too time consuming for manual vote counters to do it.
“Yes we know there are no official plans (to bring in electronic machines) but it’s almost a given. The Yes campaigners are getting off on a technicality,” a spokesman for No to AV told FactCheck.
Manual counts would take up to four times longer, he said, pointing to evidence in Scotland and the USA that shows you couldn’t do without machines.
For example, the Electoral Commission’s independent review into the Scottish elections in 2007, led by Ron Gould, concluded: “…the traditional manual counting of the ballot papers would not be effective for the 2007 elections and electronic counting technology would be required…if the STV electoral system is here to stay, the electronic count cannot be reasonably abandoned.”
But the Electoral Commission told FactCheck today: “Cost benefit analysis hasn’t been done yet, but we have called on the Government to do it.”
Claiming that £130m would be spent on voting machines is “totally bogus”, Liberal Democrat Peer Lord Oakeshott told FactCheck.
“There’s not a shred of evidence to support it,” he added. “Anyone can work out costings, but the plan to bring in machines doesn’t exist.”
He brushed off No to AV’s examples of voting systems in Scotland and America.
“Have they heard of Northern Ireland, do they know what STV is? It’s a rather more complicated system than AV but they don’t have voting machines,” Lord Oakeshott pointed out.
Meanwhile, Anthony Green – the election specialist for Australian broadcaster ABC – has written reams debunking the myths surrounding Australia’s AV system “for those readers in the United Kingdom” who he says have got it all wrong.
“We’ve used AV for 90 years at all levels of government. And Australia has never used voting machines to conduct its elections,” he said.
“They need to get their facts right about Australia and AV. The point is you get better representation. That’s what AV is all about.”
The verdict
Take another look at the Electoral Commission’s comment; at this stage it hasn’t even considered if electronic voting machines are necessary – let alone looked at the potential cost.
Today, the Tories lined up a string of new spokespeople to join No to AV patrons William Hague, Ken Clarke and Sayeeda Warsi. Of the seven MPs and two party activists joining, one of the latter – Maggie Throup – said: “Our country just cannot afford the millions it would cost to implement any new system.”
With George Osborne’s spending cuts only just beginning to bite, and with the Office for National Statistics revising its GDP estimate down again today, the public don’t need any more scares. No to AV needs to keep the fight for voters clean.
There are 62 comments on this post
Ireland toyed with electronic voting machine briefly but rejected it. STV is a complicated system for the counters but it’s done by hand and people don’t have many issues with it.
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Even if anyone was considering buying electronic coutning kit for this referendum and/or any future AV votes (and it’s pretty clear from the above that NOBODY IS!), any cost couldn’t be laid at the door of this one single count – such kit would obviously be deployed over and over again over various elections over several years, so the cost PER DEPLOYMENT wouldn’t be anywhere near what the scaremongers are suggesting. Obvious innit?
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What about the £1.05 million pound donation to Yes to AV from Electoral Reform Services, Ltd. — the central point of the Spectator reportage you’re apparently responding to (without actually mentioning it).
Is the Spectator right to suggest that these are businessmen hoping for a multi-million-quid return from electronic voting machines…?
… or is that a misconception? If so, then the idea needs rebutted! Ignoring it makes it look like you’re hiding something!!
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I have no idea about the facts of said donation, however:
Businesses can make whatever decisions they want. They might make a decision assuming that it would lead to the use of voting machines, and they’d have a good chance at the contract; neither assumption is certain.
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A conflict of interest can only occur where an individual or organisation is expected to be impartial. The fact that an organisation for electoral reform is using it’s own money (albeit from the dividends of being a shareholder for ERSL) to promote electoral reform in a campaign that is wholly partial to securing a yes vote….means this isn’t a conflict of interest and nothing to worry about.
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I don’t think it’s a misconception, more a shameless misrepresentation.
I believe that Electoral Reform Services Ltd is a trading arm of the campaigning body, The Electoral Reform Society. They bid for and win contracts for impartially conducting all sorts of elections and make a profit on this (which is the sort of free market activity that I am sure the Spectator and the No2AV campaign would support) and then, as you would expect, they re-invest those profits in the cause for which they were founded.
I wish we could argue about the in and outs of the competing systems – but I don’t see many people defending FPTP on it’s merits. No surprise really.
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You are aware that Electoral Reform Services Ltd is the trading arm of the (not for profit) Electoral Reform Society which is, err, set up to campaign for fairer voting, right?
Electoral Reform Services ltd is not a private sector company hoping for a big contract; but a social enterprise that has been operating and raising money PRECISELY to support electoral reform campaigning.
I have to say, the clue is in the name.
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Yes, I’m broadly aware that ERSL is the for-profit commercial arm of ERS.
But I think it’s still fair to ask whether ERSL have commercial ambitions to profit massively from AV.
I’m also aware that they were one half of the Labour-connected consortium responsible for the e-voting experiment in Scotland’s 2007 local elections – professionally described by the independent monitors as a “fiasco”.
I’m also aware that they have a renewed business alliance with e-voting-machine-makers DRS, their partners in that payday.
(… and the merits of FPTP over AV are clear enough – simplicity, complete invulnerability to electronic fraud, and a clearer democratic mandate rather than relying on a small margin of third-preference or fourth-preference votes…
I’m not against a regional list system alongside constituency MPs based on pure-PR results, though!)
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We now know the backers of the YES people…BUT WHO IS BANKROLLING THE NO2AV campaign?
Why are they keeping this information hidden?
The NO camp say they will publish at some time but not now. WHY? Are they ashamed?
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Only two political parties are against AV the Conservatives and the BNP – tells us pretty much what we need to know about the NO campaign.
What about the conflict of interest in having Andrew Lansley bankrolled by private health companies and all the other business sponsors the Tories have? Are you posting online about those too?
The Electoral Reform Society and ERBS are at arms length – but even as you say they have an interest in raising more money – it doesn’t detract from their main point of existance – fair votes.
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Including the cost of running the referendum in the scare figure for the cost of the referendum resulting in a yes vote is a little naughty.
Or do we get the referendum for free if we all vote no in the referendum?
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This is exactly why people are turned off by politics. Misleading information, half truths & wild exaggerations. I cannot understand why politicians haven’t got it into their thick skulls that most people hate these attempts to manipulate them by misleading them. So far, as the balance of lies seem to have come from the against AV campaign, I’ll vote for the AV system. What I’d really like is a referendum on (a) banning politicians from standing for more than 2 terms and (b) an Electoral Commission with teeth that could deal with this sort of dishonesty – both by the different campaigns & the media with requirements to publicly apologise for them & state what the true picture is.
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I appreciate that you might be “maintaining balance” with your comments but you imply that some lies have come from the Yes campaign (by referring to the “balance of lies”).
I have kept a reasonably close eye on it and haven’t seen any, not one. Can you provide any examples? If not, then it isn’t a “balance of lies” but an honest Yes campaign against the dishonest No campaign.
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Silversmith – I think the yes campaign have swept the fact that there will be additional costs under the carpet, but I think you may be misinterpreting what i wrote. When i said balance, i was thinking about something like the scales of justice. With that in my mind, I had the scales tipping heavily against the No campaign because of the dishonesty of their campaign – it was a balance which measured lies & one side balanced heavily on the scale of their dishonesty. And I hope my later comemnt backs that up.
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For those wondering why politicians haven’t learned that people hate being manipulated by lies: they have. They do it because it still works.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/14/AR2008091402375.html
If you lie to someone to tell them what they want to believe, then whatever anyone tells them to correct the misinformation merely makes them more sure of their own position. The more rigid your view (and beliefs in the status quo being right tend to be more rigid) the more this will happen. So these lies will most likely stick, and influence people against the YesToAV campaign.
Depressing, isn’t it?
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I see that the anti-AV people have been at it when the leader of the Green Party said she supported moving to the AV system. The immediate response was that it would cost £250m. This is the well known Goebbels “big lie” tactic – keep on saying it as loudly and long as possible & people will believe it, even though you know it’s a fabrication. And then politicians get sorry for themselves when they discover people don’t like or trust them! They just don’t get it – at all!
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AV good! eVoting Bad!
Have you not read about the fiasco of eVoting fraud in the 2004 Presidential election? Just look up “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
by Steven F. Freeman” and Bush’s IT Guru, Michael Connell (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxtm5RF_6Ow)
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possibly you are right Andy but the article above is about how there are NO plans to have e-voting which Australia and others have proved unnecessary.
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Moving to AV will have some costs, if only in as much as the initial counting of votes will take longer than it does in the first past the post voting system we have in place right now. To say it MUST be done electronically is completely false and certainly we should all reject any idea of electronic voting for the forseeable future. They had everything in place in Ireland for electronic voting not so long ago but had to abandon it all in favour of a paper ballot when someone proved the machines were hackable.
My stance: Yes to AV No to first past the post and a massive NO to any form of electronic voting system.
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“No to AV” claim in their adverts that it will cost £250m extra to run the general election on an AV basis.
However, they include the £80m cost of the referendum in the £250m and of course this is not the cost of running AV but the cost of deciding whether to have First Past the Post or AV.
Hence the No to AV campaign is just lying blatantly.
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given the people who are running the NO2AV campaign, why is anyone surprised at how they are going about it?
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Ireland uses STV for general elections, but the system used for by-elections is the same variant of AV that we would have here.
The counts are manual.
The detailed tabulated results for a 2009 by-election are here:
http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007B&cons=85&ref
Nine candidates, and adding up the number of ballot papers dealt with in each of the eight counting rounds the tellers had 59% more sorting and counting operations under AV than they would have had under FPTP (when they would have stopped after the first round).
Apparently 50,000 tellers were employed across the UK for the 2010 general election counts:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/06/general-election-tellers-electoral-administrators
At the very most a couple of hours would be added to the average count under AV, or more tellers could be employed; so how much would say 100,000 extra teller-hours cost?
Not a huge amount, a small addition to the total cost of holding a general election.
The whole of the NO2AV cost argument is complete nonsense, a myth they’ve invented without any regard for the truth.
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The interesting thing is that the cost is only per the hour, so it doesn’t matter how many extra people you employ, as the only thing that will change is how quick it takes to get done, not how much it costs! But tellers cost something like £12.50 an hour. My old constituency was a tight result, and would have needed 20000 ballots recounting (some recounting more than once) under AV, this still only accounts to 133 teller hours, or at most 3 hours by reasonable estimates.
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The election and count was very illuminating. But most interesting is that the winning candidate did not get 50% of the vote. The supporters of AV have said that this will ensure that the winner is supported by over 50% of those who voted. Not in this case, studying the link http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007B&cons=85&ref
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AV guarantees that the winner in a constituency will have the support of over 50% of voters in their constituency, excluding anyone whose vote was to be redistributed and they had no further preferences (some versions of AV make that an implicit RON or similar, though). Those are the votes that are ‘non-transferable papers’. In a system where you’re not required to rank all candidates, there will always be some votes that are just discarded eventually, as people won’t put any rank on some candidates. The semantic of giving your first, second, third preferences and nothing after is that you “don’t care” who it is if it’s not one of those, so you don’t participate in the virtual run-offs.
All of those listed as ‘non-transferable’ in the final column had declined to indicate any preference for O’Sullivan or Donohoe. if all 4.5k of them had put their final preference as Donohoe, the result would have changed, but we can’t count them as either, as they’ve indicated that they ‘don’t care’.
It’s far more valid electorally if you have a RON option as well, so people have an option to say “if it’s not anyone I ranked better than this, I’d rather they re-opened…
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barry laughton –
Correct, that simple “more than 50% of the votes cast” claim would not always apply here because according to Section 9 of the Act we would have the Irish by-election variant of AV where each elector is free to rank just one candidate or more as he pleases, rather than the Australian federal election variant where the elector must rank all the candidates. That means that in each round after the first there are some ballot papers where the elector has chosen to express no further preference, and they leave the process as “Non-transferable papers not effective”. In the end out of the 28,412 valid ballot papers 4,475 had been taken out of the process for that reason. So the winner ended up with 57% of the ballot papers which were still in the process at the end, but only 48% of the ballot papers at the start.
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This is true – but STV would be far quicker and cheaper than “First Three past the post” used for most UK council elections. Under the current “First Three Past the Post” system used for council elections votes have to be manually transferred from the ballot papers to tally sheets – because each ballot paper contains 3 votes. This is why council elections go on all through the night.
It also makes the count far less transparent and introduces clerical errors to the result where the vote get incorrectly transferred from ballot papers to tally sheets.
By comparison an STV election involves sorting the ballots by 1st preference then eliminating the bottom candidate and resorting. At no point is the voters voter transferred by the counting staff from one piece of paper to another.
This makes a manual STV count both quicker and safer than a “First Three Past the Post” election.
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Well, Ireland is at currently voting using a sophisticated PR system and considerably more complicated than AV. No voting machines, (a story in itself). Three million possible voters. Counting starts tomorrow. Anyone care for a sweep on when the last seat will be declared? Anyway a study of today’s vote will give one an idea of manual counts and time with PR.
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Whether any of that is accurate or not, whether the Irish count is slow or not, doesn’t really tell us anything about how things will be under AV – as they’re not using AV. On the other hand, they use something very close to AV for their by-elections, so stats on those would be more relevant.
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As far as I can see the Irish by-election system is identical to the AV system we would have here, in terms of both how electors vote and how the votes are counted.
We’d simply use the same system in each of the 600 parliamentary constituencies for a general election, rather than in just one constituency for a by-election to replace a single MP.
Link to a real-life example given above.
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i wouldn’t care if the counting took another week as long as it resulted in people being more fairly represented.
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Do we need to have the results immediately? No we don’t as even under FPTP some constituencies staret the count the next day (certainly in English local elections). So what if it takes a couple of days before we know the result. Elections are about representation of the will of the voters and anything short of a system that allows that is totally wrong.
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The No2AV campaigners have to lie and try to discredit AV because they simply have no positive points to campaign Yes2FPTP on.
Ultimately, AV gives voters more say and is therefore more democratic. It is not perfect but tips the balance of power more towards the people instead of the vested interests who want to retain FPTP rather than give up their power and privilege. Lying to the electorate to maintain that is second nature to them and shows yet again how out of touch with 21st century reality they are.
As for any small additional costs they would be more than covered if the No campaigners all paid all their taxes instead of using loopholes to line their already deep pockets.
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Interesting that the NO2AV campaign are highlighting the increased cost of counting as the reason for a no vote.
Aren’t these broadly the same people that are shifting half the work done in this country to unpaid volunteers?
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It’s a plot! It’s all a plot! The Tories make monstrous cuts so we can’t afford to improve the voting system, then they make for cuts so we can’t afford to run elections at all!
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There you are – time for medication
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CCouldn’t have put it better myself, sue_m. If the Cabinet had a whip round they could really help the country out.
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THE REFERENDUM IS ABOUT A VARIANT OF PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION not voting machines.
P.R. or A.V. or what you will is a crass system and only fools would vote for it.
A.V. will just entrench the existing ‘Political Class’ and consensus politics, whatever the general public wants.
A.V. will in the end increase voter disgust with politicians even further.
A.V. decreases the option for serious change. The political class knows this. good luck with this attempt to further rot the system
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Could you possibly explain how you reach this conclusion? And why AV should be worse than FPTP? Please?
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fine then but how do you sugest we get the governt to give us a refrendum on PR?
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AV is not proportional representation. It just means you put a preference for candidates instead of choosing just one.
I don’t see how it could entrench the political class considering that it will help to remove safe seats by ensuring candidates need greater support to get elected.
You will no longer be wasting your vote if you choose a small party. Currently, in almost all constituencies if you vote for a small party, you throw your vote away because once it’s counted it has no impact. AV goes some way to ensuring that those who support the minority parties can have an impact upon the outcome of the election. How else other than voting for minority parties and independent candidates are you going to remove the entrenchment of the political class?
The Conservatives and Labour dinosaurs like John Prescott and Margaret Beckett are against AV, which suggests your view of the political class favouring AV is not correct.
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Edmund, what factual evidence do you base all your statements on?
And as you appear to favour keeping FPTP which has allowed the political system to rot to the degree it already has, can you explain why it is a better system for obtaining fairer and more democratic representation for the majority of the electorate?
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The crazy thing about all this is I was somewhat on the fence about AV.. then the ‘No’ campaign started up, sealing my ‘Yes’ vote.
They’re working against their own campaign by just showing themselves to be lying toads.
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Proud to be a fool, Edmund.
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It’s a mistake to think that the only reason to stop listing preferences is when you “don’t care” which of the remaining candidates wins, or even that you think they are all equally awful. Certainly that’s one reason, but far more usually you will simply not want to vote for any of them.
For example, if forced to choose between UKIP and BNP, I’d choose UKIP. But with AV I am not forced to choose, so I won’t vote for either.
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[...] You can read the full FactCheck piece on the AV referendum campaign here. [...]
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[...] it up. The Death Of Bill Hicks – Seventeen years since Bill Hicks died. Man, I feel old now. FactCheck: the AV campaign gets dirty – I’m shocked – shocked! – to discover that a propaganda campaign being run [...]
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[...] machines in the event AV passes…No to AV needs to keep the fight for voters clean.You can read the full FactCheck piece on the AV referendum campaign here.Of course, this isn’t exactly the first time the No campaign has been attacked over the [...]
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Maybe the Irish should use more tellers for the counts, because after being stored overnight (a bad thing) ballot boxes were opened from 09:00 on and yet it took until 14:47 to get the first result.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0226/election_count_live_saturday.html
That was Joan Burton in Dublin West, who was elected on the first count – meaning that it took nearly six hours to get to the point of having completed a count which is equivalent to the single count for FPTP, except the tellers have to look for the number 1 on the ballot paper rather than the letter X.
According to a Commons Library note, the earliest declaration for our 2005 election was Sunderland South just 44 minutes after the polls closed, while Harlow managed to drag it out until 11:31 on May 7th; in Northern Ireland with counting postponed to the next day and with STV completion ranged from 14:18 to 21:41 on May 6th.
I suppose there’s less sense of urgency if the start of the count is delayed to the next day, plus there’s the knowledge that with STV it could become a long haul.
Neither of those considerations would apply to single-member constituency elections held under AV here.
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Let’s move closer to home: Scotland has AV in local elections, a move pushed by the same Brownistas and Lib Dems who’re pushing the UK-wide “Yes to AV” campaign, and the 2007 counting machines were supplied by the corporate backers of the UK-wide “Yes to AV” campaign.
Offical conclusion: “a fiasco”. :p
Nine million quid to a business with Kinnock on the board, though.
And saying that an AV candidate has the backing of 50% of the constituents is absurd – that’s only automatically true if you legislate for every constituent to cast a preference for every candidate, and in that case, it’s hardly “backing”.
It also inherently penalizes the additional prefs for the candidate who loses in the final round.
To be truly democratic, you then need an ADDITIONAL round in which the second prefs of the defeated candidate (possibly as much as 30% of the vote) are reassessed – those could easily go to the candidate who came *third* in the AV run-off…
All of which means that the claim that AV ensures the preferred candidate of more than 50% of the electorate is rubbish.
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I confess to not having checked the 50% claim – only because whether it’s 40%, 50% or 60% is irrelevant to my mind.
What i do know is that with the current system it can be far lower than that and AV will increase the percentage therefore meaning more voters are represented by someone they have chosen.
And i think you start your point by saying the AV candidate has the backing of 50% of constituents which of course could be rubbish because not every constituent will chose to vote – but that is their choice and they then have no right to complain about the result.
You end your argument by saying it is rubbish that the preferred candidate has 50% support of the ELECTORATE. Of course this isnt rubbish as the electorate are the ones that have chosen to vote.
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ERSL does not supply voting machines, even if voting machines were needed which they clearly wouldn’t be.
As sue_m says, even though AV is far from perfect it would still be significantly better than FPTP and without introducing any of the major disadvantages which come with PR systems such as STV.
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[...] 4 FactCheck has branded the No campaign’s claim as “fiction“, [...]
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[...] You can read the full FactCheck piece on the AV referendum campaign here. [...]
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[...] other stories: Factcheck has a good post examining the truths and untruths in the AV campaign, while over on Liberal Conspiracy it has been pointed out just how difficult it is to report [...]
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@ Tartan Tory
But that situation only arises when voters *choose* to express no further preferences. In a model where you can rank as many or as few candidates as you like, choosing not to express a preference is tantamount to saying either you’re neutral between two candidates or that you hate them both so much you won’t give either a preference.
In practice, I’m not sure how often this will happen. No one is. But I do know that AV will mean that, in every constituency, the winner will have a majority of the votes from those who have expressed a view on them versus all remaining candidates.
I suspect that will be over 50% of voters in the vast majority of cases: but where it isn’t, it will only be because voters have actively chosen not to endorse any remaining candidate – more or less equivalent, I suppose, to choosing not to vote in an FPTP election. Which is, of course, an incentive for MPs to reach out to more voters and get over the 50% threshold next time!
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[...] of No2AV feels free to make things up and continually repeat figures that he must know have been proven to be entirely imaginary and unreliable, I feel it’s time to fight nonsense with nonsense.) [...]
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The “One Person One Vote” leaflet just received is rather similar to past UKIP election material in both colour and design not to mention size.
As you would expect UKIP is backing the “Yes” campaign. Please make this clear to your friends etc
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We have heard so many times that only Australia, Fiji and Papua use Av. We have not heard that only Britain in Western Europe uses “First Past The Post”.
The French system is far better and Mr Cameron Knows this. He has selected one of the worst possible alternatives. Originally it was suggested that we also selected our preferred system. What happened to that ?
It may not be the best system but adopting AV will break the mould of undemocratic elections. It will have to do for now. Vote YES
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[...] regardless of the referendum result. Channel 4’s FactCheck has a good debunk of this here, which helpfully points out that the largest country using AV, Australia, has never used electronic [...]
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[...] Electronic vote counting machines will cost £130 million – Electronic vote counting machines are not required for AV, not used in Australia and there are no plans to use them here. [...]
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[...] You can read the full FactCheck piece on the AV referendum campaign here. [...]
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