ON May 5 we shall be holding a National Referendum to determine the voting system for future General Elections: the First Past the Post (FP) system or the Alternative Vote (AV) system. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to introduce democracy into the voting system will be lost if we vote FP, because if we do, the referendum will never be offered again.

FP falls short of democracy because it enables a candidate who has not received the endorsement of the majority to be elected. It is OK in the constituencies where there are only two candidates because the winning candidate receives the majority of the votes. It also works fine in constituencies like Antrim North where Rev Ian Paisley would receive 70,000 votes and the remaining 10 candidates lucky if they got 100 votes between them.

But compare that with the General Election of about 40 years ago in which Sir Harmer Nocholls was elected MP for Peterborough with a majority of three after seven recounts. What kind of majority was that?

The votes cast for whoever came second, plus the votes cast for the remaining candidates totalled in excess of the votes cast for the one who was elected, with the result he was elected contrary to the wishes of the majority.

Wherever there is a marginal constituency, the MP is elected not by popular demand but by faults in the system. Wherever there is a stronghold constituency, although the MP is elected by popular demand, that MP is able to take the electorate for granted because the electorate have no second choice. Whenever there is a General Election he just sits back and waits for the votes to come tumbling in. With FP as a voting system, many electorate have resorted to "tactical voting" a scheme by which the vote, not for the candidate of their choice because the media have told them he stands no chance of winning, so they vote elsewhere, not because they wanted them elected, but to keep someone else out. That is also a fault of the FP voting system. You should vote for the one you want.

AV may not be perfect either. It is no different from FP where there are only two candidates. Nor would it make any difference to Rev Ian Paisley. But in the majority of constituencies the voters would be free to vote, not tactically, but according to genuine choice. Every voter would be important because every vote would count. It is not right for political parties to take the electorate for granted, as they do at present. Nor is it right for the media to invent "opinion polls" by taking figures out of thin air and pretending that what they want is what the people want. AV puts a stop to all that. With AV if the first choice of some was not the first choice of others, but the second choice was the second choice of the majority, the candidate elected would have been one of the choices of the majority. And you can't be fairer than that.

– Anthony Reeve, Littledean.