British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is proposing an electoral “reform” that just happens to give his party more advantage and would likely create “more distorted outcomes than first-past-the-post”, according to projections presented in The New Statesman.

If his Labour government is re-elected, Gordon Brown promises a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV), sometimes called Instant Run-off Voting.

With the AV system, voters still elect just one MP per riding, but are able to rank candidates on the ballot. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the least popular candidate is dropped and those ballots are assigned to the voters’ second preferences, and so on, until one candidate has a majority of votes.

The Alternative Vote generally benefits the large centrist parties, who will tend to get the largest portion of second choice votes from those who support smaller parties.

For example, in the 2005 British parliamentary election, the Labour Party won just 35% of the popular vote, but gained a whopping 55% of the seats - probably the most illegitimate "majority" government ever - thanks to the current first-past-the-post system. The projection in The New Statesman indicated that if the Alternative Vote had been used in the 2005 election, Labour would have won even more seats with the same level of voter support. In contrast, had various proportional voting systems been used, Labour would not have won a majority of seats, because they failed to gain a majority of votes.

“Electoral change is not necessarily electoral reform,” said Larry Gordon, Executive Director of Fair Vote Canada. “Both Canada and Britain need voting systems that provide equal votes for all voters, fair election outcomes and legitimate majority rule. Replacing one voting system that fails to address those democratic principles with another system that does likewise is not reform. In fact, the Alternative Vote – particularly in parliamentary elections in Canada – would be a step backwards.”

For more information, see Fair Vote Canada’s “The Alternative Vote: It’s No Solution for the Democratic Deficit”.