North Cornwall Conservatives at a recent meeting showed their support for the No Campaign.
It has become clear that AV is the wrong voting system for Britain. AV is an unfair, expensive and discredited voting system, that allows the candidate who comes third to win elections.
Reasons to vote No to AV
- AV is unfair. With First Past the Post, everybody gets one vote. But under AV, supporters of extreme parties like the BNP would get their vote counted many times, while people who vote for one of the mainstream candidates would only get their vote counted once.
- AV doesn’t work. Rather than the candidate who receives the most votes winning the election, the person who finishes third could be declared the winner.
- AV is expensive. Calculating the results is a long, complicated process, which would cost the taxpayer millions. It can take days to figure out exactly who has won.
- AV is discredited. Whereas First Past the Post is the most widely used system in the world, only 3 countries actually use AV – Fiji, Australia and Papua New Guinea. And in Australia, six out of ten people want to get rid of it.
- No-one wants it. Even the “Yes” campaigners don’t actually want AV – they see it as a convenient stepping stone to even more reforms. Many of the Yes campaigners have previously criticised AV.
- AV is not a proportional system. The independent commission chaired by the senior Liberal Democrat Roy Jenkins in 1998 concluded that AV was “even less proportional” than our existing system, and warned that it was “disturbingly unpredictable”
- AV won’t fix broken politics. Changing our voting system to AV won’t fix our broken politics. It won’t get rid of safe seats or negative campaigning, and it won’t make MPs more accountable.