AV just gives one vote to each person but that vote is transferable. It means all electors have the chance to have their say about who is ultimately elected by being able to express a preference about who is chosen from candidates in later rounds even if their initial first (or second) choice is eliminated.

The funny thing is that the Conservative Party understands this as well. Given their blanket statements about how preferential systems give “more than one vote” they actually use a preferential system to elect their own leaders.  Well fancy that.

The rules are that there are a number of rounds in which all Conservative MPs can vote and after each round the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. This continues until there are just two candidates left and these then go forward to a ballot of the party membership in the country.

It is not identical to AV but it shares the concept of transferring votes and is therefore far closer to AV than to the current Westminster First Past The Post system.  By definition the Conservative leadership election rules give the voters in the initial rounds “more than one vote” – exactly what they are attacking in AV.

In the 2005 Conservative leadership election there were two rounds of MP voting before the candidates were whittled down to two to go to the country. In the first round the results were:

David Davis: 31.3%
David Cameron: 28.3%
Liam Fox: 21.2%
Ken Clarke: 19.2%

So Ken Clarke was eliminated and the MPs got to vote all over again.

But hang on a minute! That means that all the MPs who voted for Ken Clarke who was eliminated got “more than one vote”. They were able to go on to vote for one of the candidates who still remained in the contest.  That is precisely what the Conservatives are claiming is anti-democratic now – a bit weird really.

Some people will say that the systems are different and also claim that it is invalid to compare electing a party leader to electing an MP.  But the Conservatives and the No2AV campaign have made it very clear that it is fundamental point of principle that in an election no voter should have “more than one vote”.  There is no difference between electing a leader and electing an MP when it comes to fundamental points of principle.  Indeed it would be very worying if a leading political party was deliberately unprincipled in how it elected its leader.

The fact that the Conservatives have made no moves at all to change their leadership election rules in the light of what they must surely understand is a serious anomaly I think tells you all you need to know about how much they really believe that preferential voting breaches some fundamental democratic principle.

Anne Main is also very good at coming up with hypothetical examples of how a third place candidate in first preferences can come through to win.  Well yes, that could be possible.  But rather than a hypothetical case which might or might not happen, we know as a matter of recorded fact that someone can be elected now under our current system with nearly three quarters of the electorate voting against them because it happened in Inverness in 1992 when voters woke up after the election to find they had an MP elected with 26 percent of the vote!

PS If you want a beautifully presented explanation of AV, let the children of Conisborough College be your guide -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/school_report/student_reports/9434842.stm

We were married to this organ – Vierne’s First Symphony played by the then Master of Music Colin Walsh.