George Osborne doesn't do logic either

Or facts. From The Daily Mail:

Mr Osborne said: ‘What really stinks is actually one of the ways the Yes campaign is funded. The Electoral Reform Society, which is actually running some of the referendum ballots, and is being paid to do that by the taxpayer, stands to benefit if AV comes in... that organisation, the Electoral Reform Society – part of it is a company that makes money – is funding the Yes campaign.

'That stinks frankly and is exactly the sort of dodgy, behind the scenes shenanigans that people don’t like about politics. The No campaign has asked for it to be investigated by the Electoral Commission and certainly I think there are some very, very serious questions that have to be answered.’

So what?

The ERS has been campaigning for PR (and by default AV over FPTP) for ages, and it has a subsidiary which prints ballot slips. There's no law says that contracts for printing ballot slips in future have to go to their subsidiary, and the idea that AV needs 'expensive counting machines' is nonsense.

You can do the numbers yourself, but by and large the number of ballot papers which have to be shuffled from one pile to another is about one-fifth of the votes cast, so that's the difference between counting a two-thirds turn-out and counting an eighty per cent turn-out. I've had run-ins with El Comm, what they really hate is donations from undisclosed parties; the Yes2AV have never made a secret about who gives them money... unlike the No2AV people, of course.

He claimed AV could have distorted key election results over previous decades as people’s second, third and subsequent preferences altered the outcome and allowed parties to stitch up coalition deals behind closed doors.

Yes, AV might have led to slightly different results than FPTP; that's the whole point. We could equally argue that FPTP produced a 'distorted' result compared to what the result under AV would have been.

As to 'stitch ups behind closed doors', good grief, try looking in the mirror, Georgie! And we will be able to see the electoral price that the Lib Dems have to pay for this in a few weeks' time - these 'stitch ups' are not a no-risk strategy.

Georgie then keeps on digging:

'For many people in this country their vote won’t count as much as voters who vote for extremist parties. If you want a fair voting system – if you want your voice heard in this country and want a say over how your community is governed, you would want your vote to count at least as much, if not more, than a BNP voter.'

Under FPTP votes are far from equal; the vote of a swing voter in a marginal constituency is worth infinitely more than a vote in a safe seat. Be that as it may; the idea that a ballot slip saying e.g. "BNP -1; Labour 2" has more influence on the outcome than one just saying "Labour - 1" is palpable nonsense; by and large they both have the same impact.

In this example, if the Labour candidate wins on the first round, the BNP/Labour ballot slip has no weight at all; if Labour wins after the BNP/Labour ballot slips are redistributed then the Labour and BNP/Labour ballot slips have the same weight; and if the Labour candidate doesn't win anyway, then neither the Labour nor the BNP/Labour ballot slip has any weight at all.

As ever, let me point out that the Tories are daft buggers: the single-member FPTP system is biased against them (for obscure mathematical reasons); what they should have proposed a referendum on is 'Multi-Member Constituencies' which is even better than AV, so there is no way the Lib Dems could have turned this down at the coalition negotiations.