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In a deeply uninspiring and depressing AV referendum campaign, your paper has perhaps made the only genuinely original contribution. David Broomhead's mathematical gloss (A formula for fair voting, 23 April) offers the key insight as to why the electorate will have none of an ill-explained move to a more complex system. As he notes, any system which selects one victor from three or more candidates can be gamed.
After 40 years of psephology, swingometers and tactical voting, the electorate has over the past four or five general elections shown that it has at last worked out how to impose its will on the politicians, even, as last year, in a quite sophisticated way, under the current flawed dispensation. Governments get a clear majority when the electorate is ready for a particular change of direction, get kicked out when they lose that trust, and receive a weak mandate when the electorate is in two minds.
Remember how little the electorate trusts or respects the political class. Why should it accept the replacement of a system it has finally learned how to game, with one that may take several decades to master? The present system is imperfect, but the electorate has learned how to make it work.
Clive Stitt
London
• David Broomhead revives the chestnut about tactical voting under AV, whereby voters vote for their opponents in order to ensure that the centre candidate fails to reach the final stage. All very well in theory; however, such a voter must accurately estimate not only the first choice votes (hard) but also the second preferences (much harder) of the rest of the electorate. Voters also need to be confident that enough but not too many of their own side will reason the same way as they do; otherwise a seat that should be won will be thrown away.
Thus those voting tactically under AV will in practice number approximately zero, compared with the millions of voters faced with the choice between a tactical vote and a wasted one under FPTP.
Mike Wright
Professor of operational research, Lancaster University
• The politics of the referendum (No to AV campaign neutrality under spotlight over Tory party funding, 3 May) has successfully blotted out the psephology. What is the choice on Thursday? The New Economics Foundation's analysis shows that if a totally fair vote was 1, then an average vote under first-past-the-post scores 0.285. The alternative vote pushes that up to 0.352. Under AV the likely number of marginal constituencies would be increased from 81 to 125 and the number of very safe seats reduced from 331 to 271. These changes dilute the most enduring sources of electoral injustice (apart from the House of Lords), a modest but significant step in the right direction.
Dr Sebastian Kraemer
London
