I have not had anything to say so far on the Alternative Voting referendum here on 5 May.

Which is fine, since Brendan O’Neill at spiked says what I more or less intuit about the whole business:

Which political party will risk standing a hardcore individual – a deep-blue Tory or a workerist Labourite – when it knows that if its candidate fails to secure 50 per cent of the vote in the first count then the views of other parties’ voters may become key?

Today’s anaemic parties rarely stand risky candidates these days anyway; but with the introduction of AV we would likely see the party leaders exerting even more influence over which individuals are permitted to stand, with the elbowing aside of those with possibly controversial beliefs in favour of more acceptable, politer and blander candidates who might not only pick up lots of No.1s from said party’s traditional voters, but also some No.2s and No.3s from the other parties’ voters, too.

AV would implicitly encourage the homogenisation of political life…

Brendan sums it up:

Politics would become less open, less forged in the public realm, and more an act of elite deciphering of what ‘the people’ seemingly prefer rather than want. We could easily end up with representatives that no one truly, passionately, wants.

In short, AV will both weaken The Vote and strengthen electoral bureaucracy. It will encourage even more candidates not to stand on a platform of ideas or policies that they are prepared to live and die by, but rather to take fewer political risks and always to keep one eye on the lowest common denominator of appealing to as many people as possible.

And AV will strengthen the hand of that expert caste of middle-class negotiators and well-connected, well-educated political players who already dominate much of the modern political sphere. It will be a travesty for democracy.

I think that this is a serious critique. One of the worst aspects of different party-list proportional systems across Europe is that it gets very difficult to eject specific politicians ever from public life.

AV does not have that fatal weakness – an unpopular MP might be more likely than not to get heaved out by this voting method if the whole area is fed up with her/him?

However, anything which tends towards making party politics even blander and more complicated than they are already has to be firmly opposed, and the arguments set out by spiked look pretty convincing to me: no obvious upside for AV apart from a mushy assertion of ‘fairness’ but some clear downside.

Here’s my idea for a reform if anyone wants one. The Crawford Double Whammy Voting System

Halve the number of constituencies and instead give each constituency two MPs – the first and second past the post.

Let each Party nominate two candidates per constituency if they wanted to do so, and give each voter two votes.

That would mean in almost all cases that the majority of voters in any local area had at least one representative in Parliament they supported. It would avoid odious party list systems, and keep a direct link between voters and their own MPs.

Above all, it would give people a chance to express a vote with some subtlety. You might give two votes to your Party’s two candidates, ie one vote each. You might give two votes to one of your Party’s candidates to try to propel him/her to victory.

But you also might give only one vote to one of your Party’s candidates and use the second for eg a popular local Green or UKIP candidate to make a point.

Or you might use just one of your two votes if you want to vote, but show dissatisfaction with most of the choices available.

Oh, and counting would be simple – just add up the Xs for each candidate.  

Just a thought. It’s simple and gives people a lot more choice. Plus more votes by each person will potentially ‘count’ in the final outcome.

Had they tried something like this in Bosnia after the conflict and not brought in the idiotically complex and manipulable election system that was adopted by all those international experts, Bosnia probably would be a lot better off today.

Is it too late to scrap this fatuous AV referendum and set up one with my ingenious idea instead?