AV or not AV?- that is the question in Yorkshire

The Mayor of Doncaster, Peter Davies, says he owes his surprise 2009 election victory to a form of AV called the "Supplementary Vote" system.

He came second in the poll but the system gave the South Yorkshire town's electorate a second vote.

The then little known English Democrat found more people gave him their second preference so he overhauled his opponent and took the Mayor's office.

Up to six Yorkshire MPs might also find their closest rivals sitting in their seats if the Alternative Vote system had been used at last year's General Election.

In each case the Liberal Democrats, would be the beneficiaries.

Who says so? Well the UK's Political Studies Association in a briefing paper on AV prepared by a dozen or so of the country's leading academics.

In fact it does not take much number crunching expertise or tortuous political analysis to work out which seats would be most likely be producing a different result under AV.

Here is the Tingle guide to spotting them.

Firstly, was there a nail-biting finish? In which case it would not take many more second and third preference votes to overtake the leader.

Secondly, look at all the also-rans who finished further down the field. Are most of their voters supporters of parties who would rather die than give even a second or third choice to the winner?

Labour's Sheffield Central and Chesterfield seats are good examples where both of those boxes are ticked.

Sheffield Central's Paul Blomfield and Chesterfield's Toby Perkins, had Liberal Democrat candidates breathing down their necks right up until the final declaration.

549 votes saw Toby Perkins home with Paul Blomfield just 165 ahead.

In both seats either right wing or centre-right parties took the bulk of the rest of the votes. None of those were likely to put Perkins or Blomfield high on their list of alternate preferences.

Ironically, Paul Blomfield is the only Sheffield Labour MP backing the "Yes to fairer voting" campaign.

Three, possibly four, Conservative MPs also look vulnerable under similar analysis.

In West Yorkshire's Colne Valley Jason McCartney has what looks like a healthy majority of almost 5,000. But there was a three way split at the top of the poll. Liberal Democrats, in second place, and Labour, in third, took just over fifty per cent of the rest of the votes between them.

Remember, in those pre-Coalition days, Liberal Democrats were not known for giving much support to the Conservatives at election time.

In York Outer, Julian Sturdy went first-past-the-post with a majority of 3,688 for the Conservatives.

Again it was a three way split with Labour and Liberal Democrats closely behind taking most of the rest of the vote.

The right of centre parties that would probably have sent "Alternate Votes" Julian study's way performed so badly that they could muster only 4% of the vote.

The Conservatives took Harrogate and Knaresborough from the Liberal Democrats by taking 45.7% of the votes and a winning margin of 1,039 votes. But would new Tory MP Andrew Jones have been able to do that under AV?

His Liberal Democrat opponent in the seat Clare Kelly took 43.8% of the vote. That meant that if second preference votes had come into play she needed another 6.2% of the total vote to be the first with a full majority.

Take a look at how Labour performed in Harrogate and Knaresborough. Its share of the vote was 6.4%. How many of those would have put a Conservative as their second choice?

It was a similar story in Keighley.

Kris Hopkins 20,003 votes was an impressive 41.9% of the vote but Labour and Liberal Democrats took 50.6% of the rest.

His right-of-centre natural supporters only polled 7.5% of the vote between them.

The Professor of politics at Sheffield University, Matt Flinders, says a switch to AV would hardly lead to a "radical" shake-up of the party mix at Westminster.

He estimates the five vulnerable seats forecast by the academics would make Yorkshire one of the areas where the most changes would be made.

In the country as a whole no more than a couple of dozen seats would change hands.

Well, all this analysis will not make any of these five MPs lose any sleep unless we decide to bring in the AV voting system. So maybe we should come back to this after May 5th's referendum.

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