http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/av-referendum/8454938/There-is-an-alternative-to-the-fudge-that-is-AV.html

If the Telegraph really wants to improve our democracy then it could start by refusing to uncritically propagate whatever rubbish is emitted by the Tories and NO2AV.

First we had the lie that it would cost £250 million to switch to AV, a completely fabricated figure which included the cost of the referendum itself, and the cost of voting or vote counting machines which would not be needed and would not be purchased, plus a sum for educating voters when the Electoral Commission is doing that now and the cost is part of the cost of the referendum.

Now we have the lie that each general election would cost nearly £200 million more under AV than under FPTP, based on a meaningless extrapolation from the costs of continent-wide elections held in Australia.

If the Tories really wanted to work out a genuine estimate of the extra cost of running AV elections they wouldn’t be looking as far afield as Australia, but instead only to Ireland where parliamentary by-elections are held under exactly the same variant of AV that we would have here.

Here are the tabulated results of such an Irish by-election, and note that it’s ballot paper and pencil, followed by a transparent manual count:

http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007B&cons=85&ref

It’s easy to get an idea of how much extra work was involved in the eight counting rounds needed under AV, compared to just the single round which would be needed under FPTP, and it’s easy to work out order of magnitude estimates of how much that extra work needed for AV counts might add to the cost of a general election here.

And the answer is not an extra £200 million but maybe an extra £2 million, about a 2% increase in the total cost.

Correctly or incorrectly the Tories fear losing seats under AV, and they’re so desperate to block it that they’ll resort to any misrepresentation, any lie, any smear, anything that they think might help fool people into voting against it.