FactCheck: Would AV help or hinder the BNP?
The claim
“BNP say no because they know AV will hurt them.”
- Yes to Fairer Votes, 13 April, 2011
The background
The No to AV campaign argues that extremists such as the British National Party, the National Front and the British Union of Fascists would flourish under an Alternative Vote (AV) system.
Baroness Warsi said recently that, under AV, BNP votes would be counted several times – thus “back(ing) a system which rewards extremism and gives oxygen to extremist groups”.
Yet, if AV benefits the BNP so much, the Yes to AV campaign asked today: “Why does Nick Griffin want you to vote no?”
With just four weeks to go until the referendum, both sides are trying to shake off any association with the BNP.
The Yes camp launched a new campaign today arguing that AV won’t help the BNP, it’ll hurt them. Who’s right? FactCheck investigates.
- The new Yes to Fairer Votes campaign poster
The analysis
To clarify how AV works: under the current “First Past the Post” voting system, it doesn’t matter how many people vote against you, if you have more votes than any of your rivals you’re elected. But with AV, the winning candidate has to achieve more than 50 per cent of all the votes.
If no one gets 50 per cent of the votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated.
Then voters who backed the eliminated candidate have their second choice put forward instead. (But it’s worth pointing out that voters whose candidates are still in the race also have their votes counted again – for that same No1 preference). This process carries on until someone gets 50 per cent.
So a BNP supporter might get another go at voting, as could any voter who backed a loser.
But would their second preference vote help swing the seat to a different party?
The 2010 British Election survey (a mock AV election in which 13,356 people took part) found 25 seats where a second preference vote from a BNP supporter could – in theory – push a winning candidate over the 50 per cent mark.
But the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that secondary votes from BNP supporters wouldn’t be “decisive”.
“Even if we assume all BNP preferences go to a single candidate (which they wouldn’t) they would still require more than twice the number of BNP supporters to win under AV,” the IPPR said. “BNP voters cannot therefore single-handedly change a result”.
The BNP’s deputy chairman Simon Darby admitted to FactCheck that “it would be very difficult to get that amount of votes”.
So how would AV have affected the outcome of the last election? The IPPR research shows that BNP voters couldn’t have changed the result of any seat.
Take Barking, the constituency in which the BNP has its highest proportion in vote share.
Barking is a safe Labour seat and so is very unlikely to need second preference votes.
In the last election, Labour had a majority with 54 per cent of the vote, the Conservatives took 17.8 per cent of votes, the Lib Dems 8.2 per cent and BNP 14.6 per cent. Labour would have won on the first ballot.
The verdict
AV is highly unlikely to help the BNP win any seats, and the secondary votes of BNP supporters alone wouldn’t swing a seat for any other party – going on last year’s results.
In fact, in a very divided constituency, the BNP arguably has a better chance of winning a seat under First Past the Post than under AV.
The only way they’d do better would be through a move to PR (proportional representation) – which would give them seats in proportion to the share of the vote they achieve – and that’s not on offer.
“AV is a retrograde step – it’s worse than what we’ve got now,” Mr Darby told FactCheck. “We are never going to get our feet under the table under the AV system.”
By Emma Thelwell
There are 49 comments on this post
Factcheck misses the point: BNP will benefit from more vote — because they’ll benefit from ‘free’ first preference protest votes, and they’ll get a say in elections where they wouldn’t previously have made a difference. BNP votes might not on their own be decisive, but they’ll nonetheless have influence in determining the winner in a way that they simply can’t under FPTP.
And the ‘more likely to win than under FPTP’ point is pure guff — they’ve never won Westminster elections under FPTP so it’s irrelevnat.
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That’s a good thing: it gives a more accurate picture of BNP support, thereby showing what areas are actually strongly supporting them, and which areas have concealed support for them through FPTP tactical voting.
I don’t want the BNP to get any seats, but would love to know what areas are full of extremists so I can avoid them.
Still, AV isn’t about helping a particular party, it’s about making MPs more accountable by forcing them to have a higher proportion of the electorate at least vaguely in favour of them – if you don’t want a particular candidate to win, don’t give them any preference. The equivalent FPTP move is to tactically vote for a big three candidate, and doesn’t show your real feelings towards them.
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The BNP have won council seats in the past under the present First-Past-The-Post voting system, which makes it a dangerous voting system to keep in place, as it makes it easier for them to get in!
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Just like BNP sentiment didn’t effect how Oldham and East Saddleworth was played by Woolas, right…? Let’s get real, BNP voters and BNP style feelings are present among voters that currently either CAN’T vote BNP (as no candidate is standing) or realise that by voting for BNP they aren’t going to change the outcome of their election.
Those people still talk to MPs and activists, and their views still get taken in to account when it comes down to how a candidate markets themselves and where they stand on policy.
AV just gets this out in the open as much as possible, no obfuscation, no muddying of the water…greater transparency and greater knowledge of how large these kind of feelings are so that politicians can better approach the subject of where BNP get their support from and how to change that.
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It is one of the bizarre things about the No2AV campaign that they say AV will be benefit minority parties such as the BNP, even when that minority party doesn’t want AV.
We looked at this a while back and also came to the conclusion that AV is not great for the minority parties.
http://politicsnstuff2011.blogspot.com/2011/03/av-debate-how-did-fptp-do-in-2010.html
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Isn’t the much more relevant point here that the mainstream parties are going to have to do much more to appeal to supporters of the minor parties than at present. So where now the Conservatives can afford to ignore the thousand loons who vote BNP in a constituency, in future they will have to make sure second preference votes come to them… So the dog whistle will come out and sooner or later someone will suggest banning burkas here too.
I think focussing on ‘will the BNP win any seats’ is a smokescreen from the yes camp to distract from this, real problem with a system where you cannot simply support one party and their manifesto promises.
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Again, you say all of the above like it’s not happening right now. “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” “It’s not racist…” and hell, there is a private members bill being put forward about banning burqa’s RIGHT NOW.
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Anybody bigoted enough to want the BNP to win won’t have been tactically voting for anybody else in the first place. Eastlondon’s point in that respect is void.
Addressing the other point: if you actually believe people will protest vote for the BNP… you underestimate the common sense of your average Brit.
Besides – democracy ensures people are governed no better than they deserve. ^_^
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As Andrew Rawnsley pointed out in a recent column, it is not only the losers who get to vote twice (or three or four times). So do the people who voted for the leading candidates, it’s just that their vote remains with the same person.
In some countries elections are held on a weekly basis until someone gets past 50%, but here we can achieve the same without having to keep going to the polls
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Ah, but having two or more rounds of voting allows the voter to assess the situation after the first round and vote tactically in the second – and if this system is good enough for MPs to choose their party leader, why isn’t it good enough for the rest of us?
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Oh Dear Fact Check fails here when it repeats to the old myth of >50% and does not recognise that 50% mark will not necessarily be reached, as acknowledged by the Electoral Commissions own booklet.
Remodelling with narrower margins and more candidates changes the story. After all it must be acknowledged that under AV the candidate that is in 21st place in the first round in a field of 22, can actually win!
Rethink required perhaps!
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There is something philosophically uneasy about choosing an electoral system to help or hinder a specific political party, irrespective of what that party stands for.
However, one of the things I like about AV is that it would allow me to communicate through my ballot both my likes and dislikes. So as I fundamentally oppose the BNP, EDL and their ilk, I would be very happy to have an electoral system which would allow me to vote “anyone but them” – under AV I would be able to do this by ranking all the mainstream candidates and leaving the box next to the BNP blank.
Under FPTP I don’t get this option
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It seems to me that both FactCheck and EastLondon miss the point!
In that under AV a candidate will generally need to have 50+% of the votes cast, whereas under FPTP candidates have sometimes won with barely 30% of the votes (and in theory could win with much less), AV will make it (even) less likely that a BNP candidate could be elected.
On the other hand, in that AV allows people to cast their first-preference vote for a no-hope candidate in the knowledge that, once that candidate is eliminated, their second-preference vote can go to a genuine contender, it may encourage more people to declare that the BNP is their first choice.
Thus, AV could well lead to more votes being cast for the BNP (or Ukip, or other extreme parties) while at the same time making it (even) less likely that any BNP candidate would ever be elected.
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Proportional Representation is what a real democratic system would give the British people. If under a truly proportional system the BNP got an MP or two elected then that is democracy.
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I suppose under AV there’s always a slight chance that lots of people choose BNP as a protest vote, thinking their 2nd preference will actually be the one that counts – and then the BNP end up winning as no-one expected them to do so well. A long shot – but it wouldn’t happen under FPTP.
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Under Alternative Voting (AV) politicians will be required to address their constituents concerns, which can be only a good thing! If they listened to the people, the people wouldn’t feel the need to vote for extremists as a protest vote!
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There’s more than one way to be influential under AV. Many seats will have results that turn on which party is the last to be eliminated, because their lower preference votes will be the ones divided up between the leaders.
Example: York Central is an easy Labour win under FPTP, but under AV because the Lib Dems and Tories are very close for second and third, it becomes a knife edge seat where if the Tory comes third that could propel the Lib Dem to a win – but if the Lib Dem comes third, Labour would coast it. Which party would decide the outcome? BNP, because their second preference votes would decide who came second and who third. In this case Labour would want BNP voters to vote for Conservatives over whom they would win easily in the final elimination, while Lib Dems would want BNP voters to vote for them.
I’d expect lots of tactical campaigning under AV Under FPTP, it’s a simple Labour win – which is probably also the party with the largest overall support. Yet AV could give the win to the Lib Dem. York Central is not unique in being subject to quirks under AV – or to having the result decided by BNP voters.
AV is NOT as simple as it’s made out to be.
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Please stop calling the current system ‘first past the post’. There is no post in the current system–it’s arbitrary, in a five-candidate race you can win with as little as 21% of the voters backing you. But there is a post in AV–it’s set at 50%.
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First-Past-The-Post is just the common name that is used for our current voting system, where the winner takes all the glory.
I personally can’t recall the professional name for First-Past-The-Post at the moment.
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There are problems this article:
The calculation on whether the BNP would swing a seat is based on the assumption that first preferences would be the same as FPTP votes, but this isn’t a valid assumption. One of the benefits of AV is that it lets voters vote for a fringe party first but still vote for a mainstream party as a lower preference.
One of the arguments for AV inceasing the BNP’s influence isn’t that they’ll win seats, but that they’ll be able to bargain with a mainsteam party for concessions in return for advising BNP voters to put that party as their second preference. There’s evidence this happens in Australia, where parties issue voting cards telling supporters the preferences to put down.
AV as it will be implemented in the UK doesn’t require the winner to get 50% of the vote. Only AV where the voter must list (vote for) all candidates guarantees the winner gets 50% of the vote. The Australian system works like this.
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I for one am sick of everything being about the BNP, nearly very labour candidate at the last election and a large percentage of the others were asking people to vote for them to keep out the BNP, I would love to vote for a candidate on their policies but non of them have any its all about stopping the BNP and now the AV vote has been hijacked I could understand if the BNP were knocking on the door to number 10 but its not happening, so how about we hear what the AV will really do to the voting system instead of making it out to be a vote for the AV system will be a vote for the BNP.
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you weirdos – BNP will be eliminated a LOT there may be a protest vote, but then people’s votes will be used seriously I don’t understand how people view that elimination whilst other parties are still in the count is a positive outcome for the BNP. that said, if the BNP do get 50% first preference protest votes in a constituency, then we will have to accept that as a democracy if the consitency is behind the BNP hoever much we might hate that – that is democracy- [ersonally I think its highly unlikely – I don’t know how many constituencies would need to add thier BNP reps votes to be enough to win at 50% i but I bet its quite a lot.
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Alternative Voting (AV) System safeguards against extremists as it makes it even tougher for them to get in, as each vote will stand against them. Instead of the votes being spread out cross number of different candidates as it is at the moment under First-Past-The-Post, which allows minority rule. Whist under AV the barrier is higher, as MPs will have to be elected with highest preference of their voters by gaining over a majority of at least 50%, giving them a stronger legitimacy.
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Saying that AV is better than FPTP because MP’s have to get at least 50%, gaining them stronger legitimacy, is frankly nonsense. If I find myself in a cafe that offers steak, lamb, pork, chicken or nut roast, and I choose the nut roast only to be told ‘sorry, that’s off’, is it really helpful to me to put the remaining dishes in order of preference? And even if I do, can the cafe then claim it gave customer satisfaction because I reluctantly ate the chicken? What if I were vegetarian? If I am a Labour supporter and I had the standard Lab, LD, Tory choice, and I’m in a Southern true blue seat, any further selection beyond number 1 is probably going to be similarly repugnant to me. Likewise for a Tory in a Red Northern inner-city seat.
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Now imagine that 101 people have to decide which dish they are *all* going to have to eat out of steak, lamb, pork, chicken or nut roast. 21 vote for nut roast, and 20 apiece vote for each of the different meats.
Under FPTP, the veggies win fair and square. And they then move to ban all meat-eating for good, because, well, haven’t the people spoken and wasn’t vegetarianism what they demanded?
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Have any of you thick pommies heard of the One Nation Party in Oz ?
One Nation at it’s height was polling 20% (far more than the BNP can even dream of).
Preferential Voting (or AV as you call it) was used AGAINST them !
That means all mainstream parties preferenced One Nation last, meaning they’d need 50% of the primary vote to win a seat
Now do you understand why the BNP says No2AV ?
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One Nation got 11 seats out of 89 in Queensland (which uses the same optional preference vote version of AV on offer in the UK) on 23% of the vote – which is equivalent to Lib Dems winning 80 seats out of 650 on the same 23% share, instead of the 57 they won in 2010. Thanks for the politics lesson from Australia showing how well an extremist party could do under AV.
P.S. BNP want some version of PR for Parliamentary elections (just like the Lib Dem longer term aim) – it has already given them 2 MEPs. They do not like FPTP for anything other than small council ward elections.
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The BNP are very unlikely to win a seat under FPTP and are even less likely to under AV.
But, their share of first preference votes will increase. Tactical voting by BNP voters is unlikely to be as high as, say, Labour voters in North Dorset, but there will be some people who would have voted BNP but opted to vote for a candidate with a chance of winning. Under AV they will be able to do both.
The argument is whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. You could argue that you can only start dealing with a problem once you know the scale of it, so it is better to know the true level of support for the BNP. But the concern is that the response from mainstream parties will be to pander to the racist views expressed rather than dealing with the underlying problems of poverty, housing, inequality etc.
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Retrospectively No it wouldn’t have made a difference, AV will change the way we vote, tactical voting will be the way forward for extremist groups and corruption will flourish. I don’t like the current government but I prefer this method of voting.
Before ling we will only have rich politicians who can fund complex power games.
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Fact is, nobody really knows what effect AV will have, because we can’t quantify how many people vote tactically – or where – under FPTP.
Also, under FPTP we only know people’s first preferences (subject to said tactical voting). We don’t know anything about voters’ second, third preferences, etc.
For me, I like the idea of a system that eliminates tactical voting, so that everyone can go for the first preference they want, and we can find out the true political make-up of the country.
But this whole argument about helping/hindering extremists misses the point, I feel. Extremism only flourishes when mainstream parties are not meeting people’s needs.
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Phil, FPTP *doesn’t* disclose people’s first preferences necessarily. A lot of people vote tactically, I suspect – that is, they vote for the candidate they dislike least out of the two or three who have any chance of winning in their constituency. Before the last election, I filled in one of those online surveys that match your political preferences with the published policies of the various political parties. Two parties were a closer match for me than the party whose candidate I voted for.
And I think you will find that the only reason we are all discussing whether or not AV would favour extremists is because the No campaign has been scaremongering that it would – in spite of the fact that the BNP is strongly in favour of FPTP.
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Huw, if you read my post again you’ll see that I did actually say that FPTP reveals voters’ first preferences “subject to … tactical voting”, so in fact I did acknowledge your first point before you even made it.
And I don’t care one bit that this extremism argument originated in the No campaign. My point is that guessing at likely outcomes is the exact wrong way to choose an electoral system. Indeed, all this guesswork only feeds the popular opinion that AV is really a politicians’ stitch-up to fix election results, which actually I don’t believe it is.
I just wish the Yes and No campaigns would concentrate on the merits of their favoured system, instead of trying so hard to scare people away from voting for the other side. Both campaigns are just turning people off, and that’s a disgrace.
The way things are going, this AV referendum will end up with a very marginal decision one way or the other, on a very low turnout, and that will raise serious questions about the legitimacy of the decision, whichever way it goes.
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I have to say that a lot of these posts seem to be suggesting that we should favour this system or that so as to prevent certain parties from gaining seats. Surely if a certain party gains representation then that is democracy at work. We shouldn’t be trying to rig the race, we should be making the other competitors more fit. If the public wants a certain party then perhaps the other parties should be looking at the reasons why people are voting for those parties…
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Exactly. We shouldn’t be looking at the AV debate as a way of stopping or helping the BNP. We should be worrying what is happening in this country if we need to discuss the possibility of the BNP getting anywhere near enough votes to be elected.
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BNP will win seats either way. Maybe not now but in the near future.
You just have to look at the political shift in Europe there are many far-right parties that are growing just look at the Netherlands which I believe is heading for a civil war.
People are tired of the left, mass immigration to us feels more like ethnic and cultural genocide.
Do the left not understand this? immigration has always been a big issue and one you forever will ignore. People have no choice but to vote the far-right.
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How would haveing the AV system let the British Union of Fascists flourish when they haven’t fought an election since 1940? The NF are a non-entity and to fear any BNP success is to fear democracy itself because the balot box is their only means of any success.
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I agree with @guildbass, but the NoToAV campaign kicked this off by claiming that AV would “let in extremists”, to which the Yes campaign had to respond. And although this part of the debate focuses on the fortunes of one party over another, at least it has spread understanding of the point that a candidate would need broad support to get in, whereas under FPTP the vote can be split and a candidate can get in with only 25 to 30% of the votes cast, in certain circumstances. If you think that’s right in principle, this should encourage you to vote Yes, irrespective of which party you think will lose out and which you think will benefit.
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Has anyone asked David Cameron why he supports the FPTP system which if it had been in use by the tories would have made David Davis leader of the party?
Presumably he believes it right that the leader of the tories should have at least 50% of the vote but it doesn’t matter out in the constituencies. After they only take notice of them every five years.
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Saltaire — Amusing, because the Conservatives don’t use AV for their leadership elections. They use exhausted ballot run-offs, which involve separate elections between the top two — meaning that everyone can make a side-by-side decision, and the third placed candidate can’t unexpectedly win. You might as well claim that France uses AV for Presidential Elections
Derek — If you actually read Sayeeda’s speech, you’ll see that she was careful to explicitly say that she wasn’t saying BNP would get more seats. The point is that they’ll get more votes (benefiting from ‘free’ first-preference protest votes) and more influence (since they will be the first big block of votes redistributed.
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@Eastlondon, Sayeeda Warsi has repeatedly claimed that the BNP will do better under AV compared with FPTP. The trouble is, the BNP don’t believe it, and are fiercely hostile to the change. And I’m much more inclined to believe that the BNP understand better what will benefit and what will hinder them than a Conservative peeress is.
The evidence from all the elections we have already run in Britain using multiple preferences (London mayor, London assembly, and Scottish and Northern Irish local government by-elections) is that the BNP have come no closer to winning seats, and (since this is your contention) have also come no closer to gaining influence. As the IPPR note today, “extremist parties like the BNP will be penalised by AV and their recycled votes will not influence election outcomes.”
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A fine distinction. The point is that the tory system is closer to AV than to FPTP. Under the latter, Davis would have been leader of the party and there is no way Cameron can deny that.
There appears to be a myth that if a candidate doesn’t get 50% then only the votes of the least favoured candidate are counted again whereas in reality ALL are, but the rest are for their first choice rather than their second.
The logic of the argument that say the BNP have greater influence because their second choice votes will be reallocated if they come last, suggests that someone voting say for the a tory coming second would now switch his or her first preference, which seems unlikely.
I can imagine a situation where it might happen if a tight election were re-run the following week just to stop a rival candidate but is that what we want from our voting system? At least under AV (which of course is not perfect) you are voting FOR candidates in order of preference
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You repeat the common misconception that the winner will necessarily have gained at least 50% of the vote – this is not the case. You don to have to assign all your potential preferences, so when your vote is carried forward to the next round, if you have not assigned a preference to be used in that round, your vote will be counted as ‘no preference’ At the end of the counting, if, say, 10% of the votes have been so assigned, the remaining 90% could be split 46% to 44% – so in this case, the winner will have gained only 46% of the vote.
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I am confused. The letter i received states
“Ranking candidates means if your favourite doesn’t win you can still have a say. The only people shut out are the extremists like the BNP”
How exactly are they shut out? Surely they cannot exclude them form the subsequent rounds?
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Under AV if most voters want a candidate in they win.
Under AV if most voters want a candidate out they lose.
Under FPTP if most voters want a candidate out they very well may win – and often do.
That fundamentally is not called “democracy”.
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Let everyone have true and fair democracy with a PLPR voting system. This gives everyone a voice but of course, our government don’t want people to have a voice, they like their own too much.
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Choice of Electoral system is not about whether it will let in nice people – but the people who were voted for.
FPTP is not deficient because it let Thatcher in, but because it clearly let Thatcher stay in when most people wanted her out, and would have voted so, if not cheated of the right.
If most people want a BNP candidate to lose, under AV he will – under FPTP you can’t be sure.
If most people want him to win we have a big – quite different – problem, that an electoral system won’t help.
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The best is PR ,because if 1% of people in the UK vote for it, then you get 1 member in Whitehall, no playing, clever cunning, sly games, this is a good idea and is used in Germany.
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