With not long to go until the AV referendum, the waters are muddier than ever. It's confusing. One minute the anti-camp claims a vote for AV would benefit the BNP. Then the pro-camp counters by pointing out the BNP are against AV. Therefore no matter what the outcome, Nick Griffin will both win and lose simultaneously. He'll exist in an uncertain quantum state. Like Schrödinger's cat. I say "cat". I originally used another word starting with c and ending with t, but the Guardian asked me to change it. Suffice to say, Griffin is a massive cat.

It's depressing to see the campaigns on both sides treating the public with such outright contempt. Political ads have rarely been subtle in the past, but this current slew could insult the intelligence of a silverfish. It's not so much that they think we're stupid, but that their attempts to appeal to that perceived stupidity are so stupid in themselves; they've created a sort of self-perpetuating stupidity whirlpool capable of engulfing any loose molecules of logic within a six-mile radius. They might as well replace every billboard with the words VOTE LIKE THIS, DUMMY in four-foot high Helvetica.

The "No" campaigners are the worst offenders. It started with the adverts that pitched the purported cost of a new voting system against the needs of imperilled newborns. A photo of a delicate, salmon-pink baby was accompanied by the words "She needs a new cardiac facility – not an alternative vote system. Say NO to spending £250million on AV. Our country can't afford it." Apart from the dodgy arithmetic involved in coming up with that figure (the sort of magic maths which involves closing your eyes and repeatedly banging the calculator against your forehead), the idea that we can only have one thing or the other – AV or healthy babies – is such a preposterous argument, even the baby could see through it. And its eyes were covered with placenta. That poster made me resolve, early on, that I would definitely vote Yes to AV, if only as a protest vote against the evil dunderheads who dreamt up the baby campaign.

Having made my mind up, I figured I could then ignore the rest of the campaigning – although in practice it got so noisily stupid, I couldn't. Recently, they've hit on the wheeze of using sport as a metaphor for elections, the idea presumably being that sport has clear winners and losers, and is simple enough for Andy Gray to understand. Different forms of sport show up in most of their recent efforts. There was a TV ad depicting a Grand National style event in which, thanks to AV, the horse in third place magically finished first. This was unrealistic on two counts: partly because the example they used was impossible, but mainly because all the horses survived.

This was followed by a billboard showing two boxers. One is lying battered and unconscious on the floor – and yet the ref is inexplicably declaring this comatose man the winner. Why? Because, according to the slogan, "Under AV the loser can win". Since boxing matches only involve two people, this doesn't even work as a wildly strained metaphor. It's just a lie.

Then some well-known former cricketers popped up on YouTube to moan that AV just isn't cricket. David Gower said, "I'm used to a system in sport – in cricket specifically – where if you win, you win, and it's as simple as that." Cricket? Simple? Any sport in which the commentator routinely says things like, "England are currently 120 for 3 and chasing 257 – so with 7 wickets in hand and 17 overs remaining, they need to hit a run rate of 8.1 an over" is far from bloody simple. Sometimes matches are called off prematurely thanks to rain, at which point the outcome is decided by the Duckworth-Lewis method – which means the teams' performance thus far is run through an equation which looks like this:

[at this point, if you are viewing this column on a mobile platform you will have to imagine an equation involving lambdas, sorry – production ed]

If Gower thinks that's simpler than AV, he's a genius. Certainly smarter than, say, Professor Brian Cox. (To see him attempting to grasp the Duckworth-Lewis method, visit this URL: bit.ly/gowerisagenius – I'm not joking.)

Interestingly, if you imagine the political parties are cricket teams and run polling data from the last election through the Duckworth-Lewis equation, Nick Griffin wins the Ashes.

Anyway, just when you thought the No camp had a monopoly on absurd campaigning, the Yes campaign go and upload a video on an absurdly emotive par with the No camp's baby billboard. In it, a kindly-looking second world war naval veteran, slathered with hard-earned medals, explains, in a heartbreakingly fragile voice, that he fought the Nazis in the name of democracy – yet, thanks to our current electoral system, despite voting in every general election for the past 64 years, his vote has always been "confiscated by the system".

As the camera pans over his medals and heart-rending personal memorabilia, backed with a moody piano soundtrack, he explains that "for all the say I've had, I might as well have died in the Russian convoys, or on the D-Day beaches, or in the Pacific after that".

Might as well have died? Thankfully he didn't, despite having his sense of perspective shot off at Dunkirk. No one's doubting his sacrifice, or his right to speak his mind, but the Yes campaign should realise that kind of OTT hyperbole is probably best saved for more cartoonish concerns. Like, say, the No campaign. Or newspaper columns by arseholes such as Richard Littlejohn. Or me.