Improving the UK Parliament using ✨Democracy✨ (and better arguments)
Let’s have a look at the current system we use to elect MPs to the House of Commons in the UK. Each constituency is itself a mini-election to elect one MP that to represent the local constituency. Together in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister is then usually the leader of the party with more than half of the MPs, or the MP who can “command the confidence” of the House, such as in the recent coalition (2010) and minority (2017) governments.
Each MP is chosen using a voting system called plurality voting, or “First Past the Post” (FPTP), which is a terrible name because there isn’t a “post” to get past; the winner is just the candidate who has the most votes. This is a system that sounds fine and sensible until you look at the effects of it.
Here is the result of the 2017 general election for the constituency of Ceredigion in Wales:
Plaid Cymru won the seat, with 29.2% of the vote. This means that over 7 out of every 10 people in that region didn’t vote for the winner. And, indeed, over 7 out of 10 people didn’t vote for the runner up, either. Or for third place, and so on. Ceredigion was the most extreme case for 2017, but in total 175 of the 650 MPs were elected despite more people having voted against them than for them.
If we go back to the 2015 election, the worst case is worse:
This is Belfast South, the historic record holder for the smallest percentage an MP won a seat with: just 24.5%. Fewer than 1 in 4 people voted for the winner!
Things start looking increasingly worse when you see how the results scale up to the House of Commons as a whole. As a thought experiment, imagine there are 100 constituencies in a two-party system, each with 20 electors voting. In every constituency, Party A’s candidate wins with 11 out of 20 votes. 55% of the population voted for Party A, and Party A wins every seat. The 45% of people who voted for Party B are completely unrepresented. Is this fair?
This is how we end up with governments with large majorities, even though the winning party frequently gets only about 40%, or often much less, of the popular vote.
An Alternative
You may remember in 2011 there was a referendum on “AV”, the Alternative Vote. (You may also notice a trend for terrible names for electoral systems.) AV is also known as instant run-off voting. Regular run-off voting is like episodes of a TV talent show: each week viewers vote for one “candidate”, and the least popular candidate is eliminated. This repeats weekly until there’s just two left, and everyone reaches the final knowing that the winner has earned the support of more than half of people who cared to vote. A lot of countries use this to pick a head of state, such as France (though they just have two rounds, one to eliminate all but the top two, then a run-off to pick the president).
Instant run-off voting is much the same, except rather than taking weeks to elect someone, voters are asked up-front to say who they’d vote for in the next round if their preferred candidate is eliminated. While this doesn’t give each candidates time in-between each round to practice their singing and dancing, it’s a nice compromise in favour of not asking people to keep on going back to the polls.
Ireland uses this system to elect their president. Here’s the result of the 2011 Irish Presidential elections, squeezed down into a GIF:
Each round the least popular candidate is eliminated (along with any other candidate who doesn’t reach a reasonable percentage of the vote) and their ballots are reallocated to the next preference on the ballot paper. In the end Mr Higgins won, with a reasonable claim that most voters preferred him over the next best option.
And, to clarify, by “rounds” I really do mean a round of counting ballots. At the end of each round, the piles are re-stacked (with a few optimisations), taking into account the next preference of ballots that initially voted for an eliminated candidate.
You may also remember that the AV referendum rather wholly rejected the prospect of using this in the UK.
How to lose a referendum
(Full disclosure: I campaigned for the Yes to AV side, though I wasn’t involved in the organisation.)
It’s fair to say that AV doesn’t fix the thought experiment we did above; one party could still win all the seats by scraping together just over 50% of the vote in each seat. One of the main reasons for electoral reform is that the make-up of the House of Commons doesn’t more accurately reflect the number of people, nationwide, who voted for each party. This concept is called proportional representation, and AV doesn’t qualify. It does have some benefits though— forcing politicians to endorse some of a different candidate’s policies would be a big step forward in combating tribal behaviour in politics, in my opinion. But nonetheless, AV was a compromise borne of negotiations between the Tories and Liberals during the coalition agreement talks that, it turned out, made nobody happy. It was an uninspiring choice to put to people. It wasn’t true proportional representation.
It was also an unfamiliar choice. People like to know what they’re voting for, and if they’re unfamiliar with it, they’re less likely to endorse it. The Yes campaign did noticeably better in regions of the UK that already use systems other than First Past the Post for other elections:
- Northern Ireland (uses Single Transferable Vote for the NI Assembly, an extended form of AV for electing several candidates per larger constituency, broadly considered “proportional enough” by activists.)
- London and other cities with an elected mayor (uses Supplementary Vote for Mayoral elections; a limited form of AV where voters can choose just a primary and secondary choice of candidate.)
- Scotland (uses Additional Member System for the Scottish Parliament, a proportional system.)
- Wales (also uses Additional Member System, for the Welsh Assembly.)
It’s worth stating that the UK as a whole uses a proportional system (with, like most of this article, a few asterisks I won’t go into now) for electing MEPs to the EU Parliament, and Police and Crime Commissioners are elected in England and Wales using Supplementary Vote, but it’s fair to say that people haven’t generally been paying much attention to these.
Bearing in mind the four regions above (London, Scotland, NI, and Wales), here are the results of the AV referendum:
Let’s not kid ourselves, the results were bad almost everywhere, but the least deep red areas were, I hope you agree, in London (even some green areas here!), Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
So in regions where people were already used to having more choice, the idea of switching away from FPTP was apparently more salient.
Most importantly: opponents of electoral reform know this. In 1997 the Tories attempted to block the creation of the Welsh Assembly, despite a narrow referendum win in favour of it. And in the 2017 Conservative Manifesto, the Tories state that “we will retain the first past the post system of voting for parliamentary elections and extend this system to police and crime commissioner and mayoral elections” (emphasis mine). Not only does FPTP directly help the big two parties win more elections, merely using it makes it easier to keep using it.
You may have noticed that I spent an entire section above explaining how AV works. It’s a difficult to explain choice. Worse, the Yes campaign was working on the incorrect assumption than the news media would explain the system fairly, which it didn’t (it relied on debates and quotes to do so), leading to the bizarre situation where the No to AV campaign, their opponents, got to explain the system they were opposing. Naturally the No campaign explained the system in deliberately incomprehensible ways to put people off it.
Remedies
So how could a future campaign do better?
Easy to explain choice
“It’s just like the current one, except X” is a good template.
For example, “It’s just like the current system, except you vote for a national party instead of a local candidate” has just explained a system called Closed Party List proportional representation (used nationally in Iceland and Israel; and in England, Scotland, and Wales, for EU Elections).
Another easy-to-explain system is Mixed-Member Proportional (or the near-equivalent Additional Member System), where you use exactly the same system as now, and just add a second column on the ballot paper to allow people to vote for a party, which is used to balance the chamber with extra “regional” members to achieve a proportional result. (It’s essentially a combination of FPTP and Closed Party List). This is used in Scotland, Wales, the London Assembly, and nationally in New Zealand.
Actually explain the choice!
Here is the campaign literature from No to AV:
Isn’t it informative? We’ll ignore the, uh, issues, with the fact that they made up some numbers for electronic voting machines that were never part of the proposal (nor needed! Ireland counts votes using STV — an extended form of AV — just fine by hand); framed the idea of a candidate needing the endorsement of more than half of voters as a bad thing; and made the system look overly complicated in the process. (It’s interesting how their “winner” has, by my reckoning, a mere 38% of the final vote, which would put that constituency in the bottom 21 constituencies for representation in 2017 along with Ceredigion above.)
What the No to AV leaflet does do is answer people’s questions about what they’re being asked to vote on, however (in)accurately.
By comparison, here is the Yes campaign’s literature:
The Yes campaign couldn’t even bring themselves to say “Yes to fair votes”, settling instead for “fairer votes,” in what seems a reflection of the lacklustre enthusiasm everyone had for AV. They entirely fail to say how the new system worked, missing a chance to reassure people about it, and instead tried to play off the idea that MPs somehow don’t work hard enough (whereas most issues I find people have with politicians is that they can be cynical and self-serving…)
In short, the No campaign made the losing campaign look complicated, undemocratic, and a huge money sink, while the Yes campaign never really came up with a convincing argument as to why an imperfect system is still better.
Does this sound familiar?
Familiar choice
People are also much easier sold on incremental updates to an existing system than a complete overhaul.
Logistically it’s easier to justify small updates too — just look at House of Lords reforms over the last 100-odd years. Changes such as removing hereditary peers were minor changes that made a cumulative difference.
A small update could also include a more complete change of a less major system. Oh, did someone mention local elections? In England these also use plurality voting, except they managed to find a worse system than First Past the Post — in my previous home, the election of councillors to Christow Parish Council was the first eight past the post! (A case could be made here for Approval Voting, but I digress…)
Even in the less extreme example of the district council (left), voting for two candidates using plurality just means that a single party will likely win both seats; in this case the Tories got both:
I think if you showed most people these results, and told them to pick two winners, they would probably choose one Conservative and one Liberal Democrat, rather than two Conservatives. Any vaguely proportional system would do this.
Given how little power local councils have, surely changing the voting system here to make it fairer would be an easier sell; there’s less at risk if it (somehow) were to go wrong, and the results are even more obviously “wrong” than in single-seat MP constituencies. It would also have the advantage that it would increase familiarity with different systems, and de-mystify them.
Suggestions
Here are some steps I could envision leading to wider electoral reform.
Reform local elections first
Local elections, as I described above, are a much easier obviously broken system to campaign on changing and a much (perceived) lower risk than changing something as fundamental as the way we elect the UK government. Councils, for better or worse, have extremely limited powers, which makes them a low risk change.
There’s a strong case for reform and fewer counter-arguments.
Pick an easy-to-explain, inspiring system
Electoral reform advocates could argue for as many different systems as there are advocates in the room. I personally don’t mind which system was picked as long as everyone gets enthusiastically behind it for a campaign, but an easy to explain system with as few possibilities for No-to-AV-style objections as possible seems like the best choice to me, as outlined above.
If there were local elections being held every few years, familiarising people with a new system that is easy to understand and has no risk associated with it — bins will still be collected even if councils have no overall control by a party, schools will still open, and so on — this would remove resistance at a national level on the grounds of unfamiliarity.
Campaign on the basis of FPTP being terrible
Point it out at every opportunity! Everything wrong with the current system can and should be traced back to FPTP if possible.
Point out the costs of FPTP. Does anyone account for money wasted by projects being cancelled/re-commissioned or tinkered with by successive majority governments flip-flopping between two polar opposite opinions? Hung parliaments produce coalitions or compromises, which I would suggest more people want from their politicians.
Support smaller parties where sensible
All of the smaller parties want electoral reform, naturally, and I’ll assume that the big two aren’t going to change their policy on retaining FPTP any time soon.
The lower combined support for the two main parties, the better the case there is for reform. Voting for a smaller party isn’t entirely a wasted vote either (though there is still a case for voting tactically when it matters); it’s worth bearing in mind that even if you live in a safe seat and your vote is nominally wasted there, the Electoral Commission still allocates funding based on nationwide vote share.
Summary
Hopefully this article has highlighted some of the ways that the current electoral system is broken and how the AV Referendum was a missed opportunity, but how there are still many routes to achieving electoral reform in the UK Parliament.
