Why I won't be voting for AV

Because I'm 15 and don't have a vote yet.

Seriously now, even if I did have a vote, I'd abstain or vote to keep FPTP. It sounds like a very weird thing to say - after all, AV is proportional representation, which is, like, democracy, right? So by that logic, wouldn't a vote against AV be a vote against "true" democracy? And by that logic, wouldn't I be one of those horrible, deadly conservatives? *gasp*

To which I say: calm down and do some research instead of blindly following the media. (Also, as I have stated multiple times, I'm a flaming liberal.) The non-rabidly-conservative media like to portray AV as "the face of democracy" or some other such overblown epithet. I have no idea what the rabidly conservative media are doing, because I don't read The Telegraph or The Times. My "centrist" example is The Economist, which is pretty much in the centre, if only because it swings wildly from left to right and anything in between...I read it because it's the most intelligent out of all the papers, and I can disagree with it heartily on civil issues. Said newspaper opposes AV - but it's not on the grounds of encouraging weak government or somesuch (incidentally, it favours a mixed system which would be mostly FPTP and partly proportional over a fully proportional system - I have to disagree with it); rather, it's because AV would be too similar to FPTP.

"But how?" you cry. "AV, is like, true democracy, and FPTP is soooooo bad and evil and wrong!" (Apologies for the strawman, but there are people like this - and sometimes I do feel like people think I'm supporting evil when I tell them I wouldn't vote for AV.) If you are in fact crying this, in your head or out loud, do not worry, for all shall be explained.

Firstly, AV is only one form of proportional representation, and it's not exactly the most radical form - it was described as a "miserable little compromise" by Nick Clegg because other, more radical forms (i.e. they're closer to achieving true proportionality) were rejected by the Conservatives because they feared not getting an outright majority. Under AV, very few formerly safe seats will become marginal, and the version of AV we'd be getting would allow voters to give their favourite a "1" and stop there - so essentially it'd be a messier version of FPTP. This is why I wouldn't vote for it: I'm not going to vote for a system which is almost exactly the same as the one I've already got.

While I'm on the subject of "picking holes in AV", here's something which bugs the hell out of me:

It bugs me on a number of different levels, actually. The caption says "70% want to go down the pub", but the image says that the aforementioned 70% are split between four different pubs. This means that if you swapped the pubs and coffee shop for political parties, you'd have 70% of people voting against the FPTP winner, but they themselves would be more-or-less equally split between the four losers, as opposed to what the caption is implying: that FPTP picks the minority against a majority. Granted, this also shows up the problems with FPTP - that even if 70% vote against A, if their vote is split between B, C, D, E, F and G, A will win (yeah, that system makes no sense) - but it's also implying that AV will magically solve the problem. It won't. In the drinking example above, the "The Green Man" vote would be discarded and the second choice added to either one of the "pub" votes or the "Coffee Shop" vote, which still won't solve things as there still won't be any candidate with over 50%...now repeat ad nauseam. In the end, you might still end up going to the coffee shop because enough people picked it as their 2nd/3rd/whatever choice, despite the fact that over half the people wanted to go to the pub in the first place - again, that's not particularly fair. Finally, even in the miraculous case that everyone decides to go down the pub (after bickering over which one - remember, there are four), what about the people who wanted the completely different choice? They won't be represented at all. For a system which says "Yes to fairer votes", that's not particularly fair; even minorities should have some kind of representation.

This poster, which I've also seen more-or-less every day on my journey back from school, also bugs the hell out of me:

OK, so it's kind of small, and I saw a different version (the one with the police officer) but the point still stands. No matter what you do, elections cost money. We'll still be spending £250 million on FPTP at an election, and no, our country can't afford that either. What are you going to do? Institute an autocracy on the basis that it's cheaper? Call me a flaming idealist, but I don't believe that the rightness of an electoral system should be judged by its price. The two are quite different things and measured in different ways.

Secondly, it's just a cheap attention-getting tactic and a logical fallacy. Bulletproof vests have NOTHING to do with AV, so the association between them is false. Chances are AV wouldn't have stopped Iraq - if anything, that would have only been stopped by massive electoral reform in the form of direct democracy and getting rid of whips (or at least severely curbing their powers).

So, on one side you've got people saying that messy FPTP equates to "fairer votes" and on the other side you have people saying that messy FPTP makes babies die and soldiers get killed. I'm assuming that normal FPTP is all fine and good for them, instead of landing them with inept governments which they didn't even vote for.

The thing is, this referendum is already big enough anyway. AV may be a very small step towards a fairer voting system (a very small step) but ultimately I think it's better to wait and push for bigger changes all at once; too many referenda (yes, that is the plural) will be messy to organise, cause voting fatigue and give the government and any party initiatives trying to sway the public a massive headache. Moreover, since our AV system would be just like FPTP, only messier, it would be change for change's sake instead of changing our massively flawed electoral system for something better. I for one am willing to wait until that "something better" comes along - or take it by force if necessary - rather than accept token reform which won't really make a difference. And that's why I'd vote no to AV.