Political

Channel 4’s Factcheck slates No2AV campaign’s claims

The FactCheck blog has been running its eyes over the claims made by No2AV about how much introducing the alternative vote would cost (the subject too of my letter published in yesterday’s Independent).

Here’s what they conclude:

No to AV claims that the combined costs of a referendum, implementing electronic vote counting and educating voters will cost Britain a cool £250 million. And just over half of this will be splashed out on shiny new electronic vote counting machines, the campaigners say…

The problem is however, that there are no current plans to implement electronic voting machines in the event AV passes…

No to AV needs to keep the fight for voters clean.

Of course, this isn’t exactly the first time the No campaign has been attacked over the honesty of its claims. The Director of the No Campaign, Matthew Elliott has come under fire from American electoral reform campaigner Rob Richie, who has said, “Matthew Elliott utterly distorts what I said in my talk in London last month about the rise of the Alternative Vote in the United States.”

Another example of their deliberately misleading claims is Matthew Elliott’s statement, in the post which Rob Richie made the above comment on, that:

When we’ve introduced preferential voting in recent years – STV in Scotland; SV in London – the change was accompanied by the introduction of electronic vote counting.

Why did I say misleading? Because we’ve introduced preferential voting in recent years in several other elections too (Mayoral elections in several places around the country) without any electronic vote counting.

Why did I say “deliberately misleading”? Because when I pointed out the misleading nature of the statement to Matthew Elliott (and asked whether, for example, it was a case of poor sub-editing) he stuck by it.

(And that’s without even getting into the much longer history of preferential voting in Northern Ireland, with even the more complicated STV counts conducted without voting machines.)

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