UK Holds First National Referendum in Decades on Changing Voting System

Voters in Britain are going to the polls to decide whether they should change the electoral system. It's the fist national referendum the country has had in more than 30 years. CRI London correspondent Tu Yun reports.

Under the current First-Past-The-Post system, voters just vote for one of the candidates in their constituency. The candidate who gets the most votes is elected as the member of the lower house of the Parliament of that constituency. And the leader of the party that has more than half of the MPs will become the prime minister of the country.

Peter Kellner is President of YouGov, an opinion polling organization in the country.

"When I was a young kid growing up, almost everybody voted for Labor or Conservative. Something like 97%. In very many constituencies, you have only Labor or Conservative candidates. So the great majority of members of parliament in the 1950s won more than half the votes in their local area and the issue of the voting system was not a matter of controversy."

But that situation has been changing, with small parties such as the Liberal Democrats and the British National Party growing increasingly popular among some voters.

"In our last election last year, just over a third of all people that voted for a party other than Labor and Conservative. One factual consequence is something like two thirds of MPs won less than half the vote. More people voted for somebody else than for the winner."

So the Liberal Democrats are advocating a referendum on changing the voting system to alternative vote, known as AV, as a condition of forming a coalition government with the Conservative Party.

Under the AV system, voters rank candidates in order of preference. Only first preference votes are counted initially. Any candidate getting more than half votes is elected automatically. If that does not happen, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and his/her votes are distributed to the remaining candidates according to their second choices. This continues until one candidate has 50% or more of the vote.

"It'll make parties think harder about reaching out for voters beyond their own tribe. Because in most parts of the country, Labor, Conservative, or Liberal will need some second-preference votes of people who prefer in their first choice to another party to break down those tribal barriers and for parties to be more outward looking in the way they campaign."

Though admitting there is a need for radical reforms in Britain's politics, Conservative MP Douglas Carswell argues the AV system is not a good choice.

"I fear that instead of talking about AV as the alternative vote, it's a system for aggregating votes. It's a system that allows Tory politicians who're under pressure to talk more about bringing powers back home from Brussels and reducing taxes to totally disregard. It's not something that I think is the answer to the problems we're trying to fix. If we're going to have a referendum on electoral reform, by all means, let's have AV there. Let's also have multimember constituency as an alternative. Let's have STV as an alternative. Let's include a range of choices on the ballot paper that allows my constituents to decide if they don't want First-Past-The-Post, what other systems could we have."

But he says it will help normalize the idea of Britons having referendum in politics.

"Having 60 million or 40 million adults each holding a ballot in their hands and collectively determining an issue of public policy will make it much easier to argue that referendum shouldn't be a once-in-a-generation event. We should have one every year, every two years. We have a system of democracy that evolved in a different age. We need more direct democracy. This referendum opens the floodgates to direct democracy."

The outcome of the referendum will be announced as early as on Friday.

Tu Yun, CRI news, London.