New voting system could turn into a travesty of logic

MR Buttershaw (Yorkshire Post, April 12), claims that our current voting system is a “travesty of justice” but in his eagerness to advocate the adoption of Mr Clegg’s Alternative Vote he conveniently overlooks the travesty of logic that such a system would entail.

AV would give some voters only a single vote while others would have a varying number of votes determined by the number of candidates on the ballot paper and the order in which they were ranked. The greater the number of candidates, the greater the discount on the value of the votes of those whose first preferences were in first and second place after the initial count. Furthermore, unless every voter adopts a uniform methodology in allocating their second to nth votes and applies it consistently, AV becomes a stochastic system with a random element contributing to the final result. In addition, small errors in counting at an early stage would be multiplied as the later preferences were counted and added to the total.

With our existing system, a recount is simple and can easily determine if errors have occurred but with AV it would be necessary to start again at the beginning with no certainty that further errors would not be introduced.

We all know how the current voting system works but those who wish to change it should explain all the consequences of their preferred option.

Otherwise we might wake up the day after the next election with the hangover brought on by randomly or erroneously selected MPs for the next five years!

From: Bob Heys, Bar Lane, Ripponden, Sowerby Bridge.

THE article by Antony Beevor (Yorkshire Post, April 9) claims that “as any student of Hitler would tell you, PR has a poor record for allowing extremists into parliaments”.

Winston Churchill, as Beevor states, may have opposed AV, but it was he (probably the most knowledgeable of all students of Hitler, and certainly no advocate of weak government) who, as leader of the coalition government at the end of the Second World War, insisted on PR for the defeated Germans, and they show no signs of electing extremists and now have the strongest economy in Europe.

Today’s opponents of AV often cite it as a step towards PR, which as an admirer of Winston I hope would be the case.

From: Mal Rawnsley, Skelmanthorpe, Huddersfield.

AS a subscriber to your excellent newspaper since the demise of the old News Chronicle, I would like to comment on the article by Antony Beevor, described as a distinguished military historian.

I shall not attempt to refute every dubious point made in his litany of half-truths, suspect mathematics and woolly thinking, as I am sure that its effect on your discerning readers will have the opposite result to that intended and will be a total embarrassment to the other 24 of his historians’ clique.

May I suggest to Mr Beevor that he uses his military historian’s expertise to advise the Government to withdraw our gallant servicemen from Afghanistan and other places to which they should never have been sent, or, failing that, to retire to some quiet place in the country to play with his toy soldiers and leave civic matters to other people.

First past the post is for racehorses, greyhounds and the Donkey Derby.