Invalid Votes: FPTP vs AV
Alternative Vote Ballot in the UK
Out of interest I examined the issue of confusion with AV voting. I have decided to use the issue of invalid votes rather then turn out, because of the compulsory voting in Australia and Fiji compared to the optional vote in UK.
So confusion or complexity is raised as a problem with the Alternative Vote by the NO2AV campaign, it is no.8 on their list of 10 reasons to vote NO. On the other hand it is used as a reason to vote Yes by the twitter users of the #Yes2AV, many say that NO2AV is insulting the intelligence of the electorate by suggesting so.
Invalid Votes
I have therefore collected a sample of the countries using FPTP from Europe, North America, Africa, The Middle East and Asia, and the three countries which use AV; Australia, Fiji and Papa New Guinea. On top of this I have also decided to include the literacy rate for each country as it is an excellent indicator of the education of its populace.
The invalid votes data was gathered from International IDEA; The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and the education rate was obtained from the CIA World Factbook.
Here is the results:
Invalid Votes Chart
So as we can see education is vital but that can only go so far, as countries with extremely low literacy rates such as Bangladesh and Gambia managed to create less invalid votes then Papa New Guinea. Furthermore we can see in western developed nations the United States, Canada and UK manage to create less wasted votes combined then Australia.
Australia appreciates this problem and its Government in 2003 wrote a research paper on the problems of AV and voting. They analysed 146 countries and the average informal vote was calculated over the last 4 years. Australia finished 46th whereas the United Kingdom finished bottom of the list with 0.2%, compared to Australia’s 3.2%.
Furthermore it is also very pleasing to see that India, the worlds largest democracy uses First Past the Post for its elections to its lower house; the Lok Sabha. 714 million people are eligable to vote over 3 days using FPTP, that is larger then the European Union and United States combined. And out of 387,453,223 only 0.10% of votes were invalidated.
Not only will AV inevitably lead to more invalidated votes but also the first elections under a new system, combined with a different election under a different system on the same day will double the possibility. This can be seen in the Scottish 2007 Parliamentary elections where 142,000 votes were invalidated (7% of all votes cast) leading BBC Scotland political editor Brain Taylor to describe the event a ‘disgrace’.
Conclusions
Now of course not all votes cast are valid, some people spoil their ballot yet it is clear to me (and the Australian Research paper) that the Alternative Vote creates more invalid votes when compared to the First Past the Post system.
But thats not all it is also clear that proportional systems create higher proportions of spoilt ballots and this must be attributed to the preferential system of voting. As can be seen by the chart below:
Invalid votes by country
Argentina, Colombia and Croatia all use the D’hondt method of PR. It should be celebrated that First Past the Post has the advantage over PR and AV (as well as AMS – Italy) that it creates much less invalidated votes, regardless of the education of its electorate.
*DISCLAIMER: I’m sure that you can find examples of countries that use FPTP that have high invalid votes as a % of the total cast, I choose the ones listed above because I thought they would be an interesting mix. If you have no life and wish to list every single country that uses FPTP for a lower house election be my guest, I’ll even link to your blog. I’m sure that some countries listed above in the chart had a write in candidate (like Honduras) or a domestic political movement that called for the spoiling of ballots and that explains the high number of invalid votes. None the less from the academic work I have read on Journals, (lots not linked to as you either need a University account or pay £20 a pop) from the data provided and the Australian research paper I have concluded that FPTP is better.
Vote NO To AV 
I suspect Australia’s high invalid vote must be down to:-
1) compulsory voting (N/A to UK)
2) Compulsory full-preference voting (also N/A to UK)
I’d say it’s because you’re obliged to vote for ALL candidates in the lower house ballot paper, and the federal upper(Senate) chamber if you vote below the line. If you only want to vote for 1 or 2 candidates, well, you’re screwed. So yes, EVEN IN PR there IS the WASTED VOTE factor. It’s a lie that PR eliminates it.
Proportional and preferential are not the same thing. E.g., is the D’Hondt method preferential? I’m not certain, but I think it is non-preferential (and therefore closer to FPTP than to AV).
The difference is noted and I was not implying that they were the same, I was merely showing a benefit of FPTP or Preferential and Proportional systems.
Rather than looking to Argentina and Croatia for figures on the d’Hondt system, we can look at the UK, where we also use it.
http://www.europarl.org.uk/section/european-elections/results-2009-european-elections-uk
Figures from our last EU elections show 0.82% spoiled ballots.
As Gavin said, Australia has a very different electoral system.
But again our PR closed List system doesn’t require ranking it requires a single cross next to the party that you wish to vote for. It’s almost FPTP with lots of candidates instead of the usual one. I can hardly say thats shows the UK will understand how to vote under AV.
I don’t understand how on the one hand you can recognise that compulsory voting in some countries and not others will distort the statistics, and on the other you don’t recognise that invalid votes are a compulsory-voting equivalent of low turnouts over here.
In the UK the main reason for not voting is that a voter doesn’t see the point. A lot of that is down to the way first past the post takes away the value of a lot of people’s votes. In Australia and in other countries where voting is compulsory the only way not to vote is to submit an invalid ballot.
Now from this you’d expect the percentage of spoilt ballots in Australia to be close to the percentage of non voting electorate members in the UK, but it isn’t, which suggests that AV is a fairer system that does not discourage voting as much as FPTP does.
This is a very good question, turnout on the one hand I discounted as I felt that Fiji and Australia with complusory voting would distrort the result. I do in my disclaimer understand that complusory voting will lead to spoilt ballots but the research paper by the Australia Parliament discounted this as a major reason for the invalid votes.
There is also likely to be a correlation between people with lower literacy and people who don’t bother voting in non-compulsory voting countries, that would be a correlation between lower literacy and invalid votes in countries with compulsory voting. This may well account for a lot of the difference in invalid votes between Australia and the UK
Thank you for your valuable information.
As you are using countries with compulsory voting in your AV sample its important to use some FPTP countries with compulsory voting too in order to have a comparable sample. 10 minutes on wikipedia tells me that these include Singapore, Greece, India and Mexico but not any of the countries in your selection.
Note that Scotland uses AV+ a different system to AV which is being proposed for the UK as a whole.
Scotland uses the STV, no country uses AV+ as the Jenkins Commission was never utilized
I don’t think the Scottish system is either AV+ or STV. More like FPTP+.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Parliament#Members.2C_constituencies_and_voting_systems
The Scottish Parliament is elected using the Additional Member system (AMS) while Local Council elections 2007 onwards have been conducted under the Single Transferable Vote (STV).
3% of population who can’t even write out half a dozen numbers aren’t likely to be voting intelligently/deliberately anyway.
Defacing the ballot paper is a pretty common form of protest here in the face of compulsory voting. In Queensland there was a campaign to draw in a box for a popular TV show puppet and “Vote Agro” instead.