‘I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour Party’ said Nick Clegg about the Alternative Voting system in April 2010. So why are we having a referendum on changing a voting system which only 3 countries in the world have. It is not proportional representation, which would make more sense to have a referendum for. There is a cross party alliance of people backing the No2AV campaign including Labour and Conservative politicians, and there are mixed messages coming out from the leaders of the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems think it is the first step to proportional representation, why didn’t they push for that then, in fact I have never understood why they pushed for AV during their negotiations after the General Election last year rather than getting rid of tuition fees or their many other uncosted policies in their manifesto.

The one person one vote means that every person has an equal vote regardless of wealth, gender, race or creed. AV breaks that by giving one person’s casting vote greater weight than another – one citizen’s vote might be worth 6 times that of another as it is counted repeatedly if one candidate has not got over 50% of the vote. It may mean that an MP might be elected even if they do not win the majority of the constituents’ first preference votes.

So why should we vote no on May 5th. Here are 3 clear reasons from the No2AV campaign:

AV makes elections unfair – at the moment we all have one vote and the person who gets the most votes wins. Under AV, supporters of fringe parties can have their vote counted several times and the candidate who comes third can steal the election.

AV is a politicians’ fix – leading to more hung parliaments and more broken promises, like the Lib Dems tuition fees U-turn. Instead of the voters choosing the government, the politicians will decide who governs in shady backroom deals.

AV is complicated and expensive – it requires councils to dump our traditional ballot boxes in favour of costly electronic voting machines – in the last General election the voting in Portsmouth finished at 6am, with endless sorting under the AV system we could be there for days. That is why it is used by just three countries in the world – Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Australia has compulsory voting to make sure people turn up.

You can find out more at www.no2av.org