Old & Sad, AV and the view from the ERS

I sent the same question to the Electoral Reform Society and got this reply:

Dear Graham,

Thanks for your email.

The Phil Woolas case was rather unusual, and seems to me to be more a legal matter than a voting systems issue. I can't see that the choice of voting system affects the way we deal legally with political campaigning. The scenario you envisage certainly hasn't materialised in Australia, where the alternative vote has been used for over a century.

If it were the case that a third-placed candidate was found to have campaigned illegally, then I expect the judge would make a decision about the extent to which this invalidated the result of the count. If it did, then of course a re-run of the election would be the obvious solution, but this could equally happen under the present system - the prevalence of tactical voting and 'vote splitting' in FPTP elections means that third- and fourth- place candidates already have 'spoiler' effects as it is. The US Presidential election of 2000, where Ralph Nader split the left-leaning vote is a perfect example of the phenomenon.

Overall, then, I very much doubt that the introduction of AV would bring with it such a blatantly underhand style of campaigning - and decent campaign legislation ought to prevent it from emerging.

Kind regards,

Andy White
Senior Research Analyst
Electoral Reform Society