A Bold Announcement
In his Labour Party Conference speech, Andy Burnham announced that he was going to open the door to a change in our voting system.
“In past years, you have voted twice to support electoral reform. I hear you, I agree with you, and today I am announcing a new national commission on electoral reform,” he said.
“We will contest the next election with a manifesto commitment to change the electoral system so that everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s voice is heard.”
First Past the Post
Why would he do this? Well, our current voting system is seen by many as unfair. It’s name, “first past the post” gives the impression of a fair race, but in reality, it often elects a candidate that a relatively small proportion of voters have chosen.
And when that gets scaled up to a whole parliament, it can result in outcomes that seem very unfair to many. A party that won a decent share of the vote overall might find themselves with no representatives at all. Meanwhile, the winning party might seem to have a very outsized share of places.
Why? Because first-past-the-post has the overall effect of amplifying the vote share.
Some people love this feature! It means that you usually get a government with an overall majority in Parliament – which means they have a decent amount of power to get things done. In other democracies, coalitions (where multiple parties share the work of governing) are much more common. These coalitions require a lot of give-and-take, and can be less able to pursue bold visions, getting bogged down in details.
But that Parliamentary majority (where over half the members belong to the governing party) comes at a cost. It’s made up of many MPs who did not win a majority in their own elections. And that Parliament is missing some minority voices, as well as disempowering parties that won a decent share of the actual vote.
So what would be better? How might we make Parliament represent the parties in a way that better reflects the votes cast?
Proportional Representation
Wherever you see Andy’s announcement being reported, the discussion quickly jumps to Proportional Representation, or PR. This is where a parliament is appointed based on the share of votes cast. The way it actually gets accomplished can have some variation – you need to create bigger geographical “chunks” that have more than one representative to make it work – but the concept is that you share out seats by party based on party votes.
It’s important to notice a key feature here: Voters are electing a political party more than they are any specific candidate. Many might argue that we effectively do that already. I’m under no illusion that I was elected because people thought that Tom Collins, a local dad, engineer and coffee drinker was a pretty decent bloke. Most voted for me because I represented a mainstream political party. The way they voted was probably actually influenced by our voting system! In first-past-the-post, if you vote for someone who has a small chance of winning, your vote is unlikely to make a difference. But my point is this – they voted for a specific human being, not a political party, and I think that is precious and important. I am accountable to Worcester; people can look me in the eye. You can’t look a political party in the eye, and to me, that matters.
Is there a way of getting the best of all worlds? Can we generate Parliaments that better represent minority views, but are also likely to deliver a majority party to govern? Can we better reflect actual votes cast while still electing real people to represent local areas? Might it be possible to make every single person’s vote count, without it being wasted if they pick a back-runner?
Single Transferrable Vote
There are lots of ways that ballots can be designed. Politics nerds can go very deep into the pseudo-maths of all these different systems. But there’s one that often rises to the top; Single Transferrable Vote (STV).
In STV, voters don’t just have the option to pick one candidate. They can vote for as many (or as few) candidates as they like! And they rank them using numbers, with a 1 for their first choice, a 2 for their second and so on. When the votes are counted, they get sorted into piles for each candidate based on the voter’s first choice. In each round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Their votes then shared out amongst the remaining candidates, based on whichever one has the highest rank on the voter’s ballot. As soon as any candidate has over half of the vote in their pile, they win.
That means that the winner has genuinely been voted for by over half of the people voting (even if it was as a second, third or lower choice). And it means that voters can choose someone who has a low chance of winning, without losing their chance to pick between the leaders. It gives minority parties and independent candidates a better chance of being elected, and to build support over time. But it also means that mainstream parties are chosen by more of the electorate – even those supporting minority parties get to shape the choice where they don’t win a seat.
So Which Will it Be?
There’s a clue in Andy Burnham’s speech – where he talks about change “so that everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s voice is heard.” That sounds a lot like STV. And there are other clues. STV is the method used to elect regional mayors. In fact, it’s the system that political parties use themselves to select election candidates!!
There’s a sense that this is the system that gets picked when people really want to trust the result. So why haven’t we thrown out first-past-the-post and introduced STV already?
Well, any governing political party has got there by winning an election under first-past-the-post. So they are very likely to think that it’s worked quite well!! Parties are nervous about changing to a system that might mean that someone else (or indeed nobody else) wins a parliamentary majority. Remember, many politicians might well feel that their opponent winning a parliamentary majority is still preferable (in terms of stable government) to there being no party with an overall majority and either a minority government (that could well struggle to get things done) or a coalition (that could struggle to agree on what to do in the first place).
Also, change is scary, right? And this has in fact been tried before, surprisingly recently. Only a short while before the Brexit referendum, we had a referendum on changing from first-past-the-post to STV. In that referendum, STV lost. But many agree that the way that decision was communicated, and the information provided to voters, didn’t really allow them to make a well-informed choice, and there was little meaningful public debate around the vote. Perhaps you remember that referendum, perhaps you don’t, but in either case, I bet you have a much clearer memory of the debates around Brexit and the amount of news that surrounded it.
What Next?
Andy Burnham hasn’t promised any change. He has said that he’s setting up a new national commission to look at electoral reform, and that changing the electoral system will be in Labour’s manifesto for the next general election. He doesn’t tell us what system that would be, presumably the new national commission’s work will inform that, but as I said, his language does seem to give an approving nod in the direction of STV.
For my part, I have always felt that political parties have too firm a grip on our political system. While PR attempts to address the power-hold of bigger parties, it also bakes political parties even further into our system, so I am nervous of it. I like STV. It allows us to vote for people, based solely on what they bring to the table, and also makes room for us to pick between major parties who can provide clear direction and shared vision. I think STV will make political parties better, and in the end we might still vote for their candidates, but much more out of will than necessity.
Personally, I’m glad to hear the Prime Minister making this announcement. And I’m writing this because, this time round, I hope we can all grab the opportunity with open eyes and, hopefully, open arms.