So what then is the best argument for the Alternative Vote?

Something like “Vote with your heart and your head” is about the best I can do.

Let me explain a little. With First Past the Post you always just vote with your head. If you’re a Green and your seat is a Tory-Labour fight, of course you’re going to vote Labour. If you back UKIP and your seat is a Tory-Labour fight, then chances are you’re going to vote Tory. More often than not with FPTP you know a vote essentially won’t count if you vote for a small party.

With AV it’s different. With your first preference you can vote for what your heart thinks is right – Green, UKIP, Liberal Democrat (hmm, Lib Dem and right, maybe not, but you get the idea) – safe in the knowledge that if this candidate does not win your vote will be redistributed to your second choice. It’s the antidote to Polly Toynbee’s peg on the nose when voting for Labour under FPTP.

Please note that I say all of this as a democrat first, and a Labour party member and voter second. Our democracy and election systems are more important than party politics alone, so you will not find me advocating AV because it’s the best way to keep the Tories out in the future.

There are indeed downsides to AV – it might actually make things less proportional and indeed the chances the result is more proportional is slim to none. But the system we have at the moment is really broken, and some change – even this incremental step – must be welcomed and is worth fighting for.

Polls show more than a 10% lead for the No side at present, so there’s plenty of work to do for the Yes side, not least because Labour is not going to be campaigning for AV – a decision rightly derided by Will Straw at Left Foot Forward here.

But what about the Yes campaign itself?

Well, is there a single campaign? Because at the moment I’m confused – and I’m a YES person.

There’s Yes to fairer votes – a smart Blue State Digital website, and it’s backed by the Electoral Reform Society, Take Back Parliament, Compass and Unlock Democracy and has John Sharkey from the Liberal Democrats on its board. Then there’s Vote for a Change, that has a bunch of high profile backers, and also claims to be supported by the Electoral Reform Society. Then there’s also Take Back Parliament, which is linked from Unlock Democracy’s website (while Yes to fairer votes is not).

Then there’s the issue of what discourse to use to make the case. This is a selection of the quotes used on the various campaign websites:
“MPs will have to work harder to earn – and keep – our support. Doing just enough won’t be enough any more” (Yes to fairer votes)
“You can make sure your vote always counts” (Yes to fairer votes)
“Too many MPs have jobs for life. Lets shake those politicians out of their complacency.” (Yes to fairer votes)
“AV is a small change which will make a big difference” (Yes to fairer votes)
“Support a hung parliament” (Vote for a Change)
“Politicians have let us down. It’s time for a change.” (Vote for a Change)
“This Parliament does not represent us. We demand fair votes now. There must never again be an election under this broken system.” (Take Back Parliament)

I fear that none of this hits the mark. For me the advantage of Alternative Vote / AV is that it allows a voter to first of all – in safety – vote with their heart. It’s possible to vote Green without the fear that it might allow the Tories to sneak in. It’s possible to vote UKIP without fear that Labour will sneak in. The second preference is where the ‘least worst’ vote comes in. How do you manage to articulate that in discourse? For none of the main quotes above get close to that, and indeed strike an anti-politics rhetoric that’s not handy, or promise things that AV cannot deliver. I think some Yes campaigners need to start reading Lakoff – soon!

Lastly I need to personally work out how to engage with all of this. My main skill is web communications, blogging and social networks – how can I be active in that regard with these campaigns? Yes to fairer votes looks to be very e-mail based – do we need to convene ‘Bloggers for Yes’ or something like that, an ad-hoc team of web activists who can do their best to promote the case for Yes online?

Anyway, it’s going to be a long, hard slog, but at least things are starting to get interesting now!

Gordon Brown - CC / Flickr

Two striking phrases appear in Tony Blair’s 2002 Labour Conference speech – the famous “We have been at our best when at our boldest” and a lesser known line “Thanks to the brilliance and vision of Gordon Brown we have succeeded beyond any Labour government“.

Fast forward a little over 7 years, and more than 12 years after Labour’s historic 1997 election victory, and the same Gordon Brown has penned a column in The Guardian where he makes his case for holding a referendum after the election on voting system reform for Westminster. The problem is that the option on the table is the Alternative Vote system – keeping the one MP / one constituency system, but allowing voters to rank candidates. The Electoral Reform Society gives the idea a lukewarm welcome and I’m inclined to agree, but bold this definitely is not – it is at best a compromise. Mark Reckons has more on the issue from a Lib Dem perspective.

Brown is not right when he says “This is about giving the people a choice, and it can unite those who believe in electoral reform with those who want to maintain a strong constituency link” – I do not believe in election reform, I believe in democracy and a parliament where the percentage of seats reflects accurately the percentage of votes case for a party. And that means a proportional election system, not AV. Plus if Brown says he wants to give a choice, why not give a menu of options? AV, and some proportional system as well in a referendum?

Interestingly Brown’s piece also makes some statements about the need for the UK to have a written constitution, and to have this in place by 2015. He even talks about the need for party political compromise on the issue. I somehow suspect this idea is not going to get far, especially now just prior to an election, and the series of issues that needs to be sorted would make the negotiations very lengthy and protracted… still I hope this idea gains ground faster than the AV idea does!