You're AVin a laugh

Referendum time. Uncertainty, ignorance and divisive opinion stalk the land as giant billboards loom over us. It's time to decide how we elect our members of parliament.

Or, at least, it's time to decide on the formal voting system for the election of members of parliament. The actual decision making process is far more complicated than the anti-AV camp would have you believe AV is (and that is very complicated indeed, they want you to think that the AV system is as complicated as a maths problem your eleven year old child is asking you for help with, as frightening as the question 'what do you think?' is when asked of any man in the vicinity of a partner and a changing room and, worst of all, that it's foreign, and not funny foreign like 'Allo 'Allo or friendly foreign like a Greek taverna selling chips, no, proper frightening foreign, like a bearded backpacker with a grudge and a burka), consisting as it does of one part what scandal your MP has been implicated in, one part how shifty and sweaty they look on television and one part politics. Next to that, the mechanics of election is an absolute breeze.

The alternatives are the current system of first past the post, and the proposed system of an alternative vote. Previously of course everyone thought that the alternative vote was one for the attention seeking transvestite candidate, but it turns out to mean an alternative to first part the post.

So, with first past the post you essentially vote for the candidate that you think is least likely to screw up the constituency or the country, while cheerfully ignoring the many dull but worthy candidates on the ballot paper.

AV is a much more sophisticated proposition, giving as it does a chance to list the dull but worthy types as your second or third candidate in a show of condescension unparalleled since Victorian industrialists patted small children on the head prior to tossing them under a loom.

We are being told that the danger of AV is that if enough people try to spread their democratic munificence, we'll end up with some bonkers party getting a seat in Parliament. That this is coming from some conservatives is an irony that has not gone unnoticed.

The real challenge of AV is that instead of voting for the single candidate that you find the least repulsive, you have to choke back the gagging reflex and come to terms that you're expected to give your approval to three folk who are actively seeking election.

The media were ready to make much of the pro-AV camp not being able to make the thick British public understand AV? However, the British public have been soaking up the Eurovision song contest for decades now and are quite at home with sophisticated voting systems thank you very much. Moreover, the BBC did a fabulous job of explaining how AV works using biscuits, and showing how the nation's favourite biscuit can be determined using preferences. ITV used crisp flavours as an example and that is all you ever really needed to know about those two broadcasters.

With that angle to the story dead on it's arse, they have dusted off the cliché that politics makes strange bedfellows and show pictures of really quite gruesome types smiling through gritted teeth and explaining that although they are in different parties, they agree that such and such a voting system is the best way forward.

What it actually comes down to is which politician you want to annoy the most and in this case it's not so much first past the post as a dead heat that not even a photo finish will determine. The big political fear is that there will be a very poor turn out and that this will be held up as evidence that the new system, if chosen, does not have a mandate. The reality is that just like AV the public needs more choices, because we're all familiar with different types of voting systems; we want to express a preference for a dance off, a bush tucker challenge or, my favourite, a swimwear round.