Britain plans to hold a referendum on May 5th next year to decide on a switch to the Alternative Vote system for parliamentary elections, ditching its first-past-the-post model, the government said today.
Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg also announced plans to cut the number of members of parliament to 600 from 650 and equalise the size of constituencies from which lawmakers are drawn.
Mr Clegg said the cut in the size of parliament would save £12 million per year and bring what he said was a bloated legislature down to size.
All the changes, if approved, would be in place in time for the next planned parliamentary election in 2015 to be held under the new system.
However, the changes could expose divisions in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government that took office in May, ending 13 years of Labour rule.
The Conservatives want to maintain the first-past-the-post system and have said they will campaign against it.
However, for the Liberal Democrats, long penalised by the voting system, a move to AV is the minimum reward they want for having entered the coalition.
Analysts said the referendum could be uncomfortable for the partners but would not necessarily bring their alliance to an early end.
"It's not going to be very easy for the Conservatives and the Lib Dems to be in a government where they're fighting on opposing sides of the question of whether there should be a change in the voting system," said Tony Travers of the London School of Economics.
"But they did go into the coalition knowing that this would happen and while it will be a strain it's not likely to be the end of the world," he added.
Under AV, voters would be asked to list candidates by order of preference. If no one scores 50 per cent of the vote, the bottom candidate is eliminated and the second choices listed on the ballots cast for that person are added to the totals obtained by the others.
The process is repeated until one candidate hits 50 per cent.
Reuters