Vote Yes on 5th May

Alternative Vote (AV) is a fairer system of voting than the current ‘1st past the post’ model.
MPACUK is saying Yes to AV – here’s why…

1) Fairer Votes

Under the current ‘1st past the post’ system, MPs often get in through the back-door, with as little as 30% support if the vote is split. This means we lose out as voters. For instance Islamophobic Zionist MPs can get into power, when the opposing vote is split between two good candidates. And too often after the Iraq war pro-war MPs got elected despite, the majority of voters supporting anti-war candidates! (see examples below *)

With Alternative Vote (AV), voters get to rank the candidates in order of preference, so there’s no more need for complicated ‘tactical voting’ to try to keep out the worst candidate. Ranking candidates gives us more say and puts a stop to this problem of unpopular MPs getting into power because of a split vote.

2) No more ‘Jobs for Life’ for MPs

Currently hundreds of MPs have ‘safe seats’, where the chances of any other party winning are so small that they’re not at all worried about getting voted out at the next election – and so they don’t care what the voters think. A lot of Muslim areas have MPs with ‘safe seats’ who feel they have a job for life and can totally ignore their voters.

With AV there would be fewer ‘safe seats’, so our MPs would have to start caring about what their voters want and work a lot harder to win our support.

3) Make MPs work for us

Muslim voters are often marginalised and overlooked because the Labour Party takes their votes for granted and the other parties ignore them, just assuming they are loyal Labour voters. Muslim voters have also sometimes been side-lined by wasting their votes on candidates that have little support and can’t win.

Under AV no vote is wasted, because even if your favourite doesn’t win, you still get your say with your second preference. AV also forces parties to reach out beyond their core supporters - if parties are also competing for our 2nd and 3rd preference votes this gives us more power to make our voices heard.

4) Keep the racists out

The Alternative Vote raises the bar to make it very unlikely that the BNP or other racist extremists could ever get elected as MPs. With AV the winning candidate has to get over 50% of the vote and the BNP has never come anywhere near this. However, under the current ‘1st past the post’ system we could see a BNP candidate elected with less than 30% of the vote! That’s why the BNP are campaigning for a No vote in the referendum on AV.

*Example:

Only 34% voted for the Islamophobic Zionist, but the other 66% of the votes were split equally between 2 good candidates = 33% each, so the Zionist wins. (See Birmingham Hodge Hill 2004 by-election for a real example where the anti-war vote was split between Lib Dems and Respect – allowing the pro-war Labour candidate in.