Here in the UK we are about to have a referendum on whether or not to change the way that we elect our M.P.s and so the Government. Traditionally we have used a first past the post system where the candidate who polls the most votes is declared the winner. This means that if there are nine candidates, one polls 20% of the vote and the others get 10% each then the candidate with 20% of the vote is declared the winner. With the proposed Alternative Vote system you would vote for the candidates in order of preference, if no candidate has an overall majority then the one with the least number of votes will have their second choices counted. This will continue until somebody gets a majority.

I have no intention of trying to use my Blog to exert any form of influence one way or the other, after all who would pay any attention to my political thoughts? I have been interested in how the referendum is playing out in the social sphere and on the web.
I started out by doing a search on Google for “Alternative vote referendum”. There is a sponsored link from The Electoral Commission to the site www.aboutmyvote.co.uk. I found this site to be very informative and has a great little video which explains how both systems work. There is also an option to share the video via Facebook, but no option to share the video via Twitter.

Out of the organic search results on Google all but one of the first page of results are from various news organisations explaining how the two systems work. The only link that was from either the Yes or No camps was for www.yestofairvotes.org. They seem to be using a variety of media within their site. There are links to both videos and photos. The videos are on YouTube but the photos are hosted on their own site. This surprised me as I would have thought a Flickr stream may have been beneficial both from a search engine optimisation perspective and also from the fact that it would be another way of engaging with people. There is also a link to the Yes To Fair Votes Facebook page (www.facebook.com/YestoFairerVotes) that at the time of writing had 15 755 likes. There is also a Twitter stream with the username @YesInMay that currently has 7978 followers.

The first site that I came across for the No campaign was at the bottom of page 2 of the Google search results with www.no2av.org/04/referendum-broadcast/. This is a YouTube hosted video that comments on the reasons why the AV system would not be beneficial. As with the Yes vote they also have a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/NO2AV) that at the time of writing had 10 785 likes. They have also utilised Twitter, unlike the Yes camp, with @NO2AV and 5404 followers. They also have a YouTube channel. Again they are hosting their own photos rather than using something like Flickr. There is also a blog on the site but this does not seem to have been updated that much, which is a pity as this would have helped them with their Search Engine Optimisation efforts. One really great feature of the site is the advocates page (www.no2av.org/advocates/), this has a Google map and as the seconds tick by photos of people who have pledged to vote “no” are dropped onto it. You can zoom into the map which is interesting in itself as it possibly shows where the most support is for the No campaign. Of course this would be a far from scientific way of predicting where the No campaign will do well as there is nothing comparable on the Yes campaign’s site.

From this cursory glance at what is happening on the web you might be tempted to think that the Yes campaign will win the referendum, based on the fact that they have both more support on both Facebook and Twitter. However, it is worth noting that there is more support for the No campaign among the older generation. These people are less likely to be engaging in social media but are more likely to vote. We will know the result in the next couple of days but it has certainly been an interesting campaign, online at least.

I am already celebrating the referendum, it has given me a subject for my 100th blog post!