Electing ‘None of the Above’
Abstention-Based Sortition: a tonic for electoral malaise?
The United Kingdom has just had an extraordinarily strange election — more to the point, an extraordinarily strange electoral result. I have a proposal to avoid future elections being as undemocratic as this one, by taking non-voters seriously.
The headline result of the 2024 general election was that the Labour Party won a landslide, and the Conservative Party lost astonishingly badly. There is a lot that this summary misses.
Labour now have a virtually unassailable majority in parliament… despite winning only about a third of the votes cast. John Curtice called this election “the most disproportional in British history” — and that is really saying something. Labour came first in 411 of the UK’s 650 constituencies; each one has its own winner-takes-all race, and that’s the end of the story under First Past The Post (FPTP). It doesn’t make a jot of difference to the result how much any of those seats were won by, or what proportion of votes any party got overall — or how many people didn’t think it was worth voting.
Interpreting Abstention
Labour winning 63.2% of seats on 33.7% of the vote is not even the strangest thing about this result. Once you factor in that less than 60% of registered voters turned out to vote at all, and only 52% of the total adult population, it becomes clear that Labour has full control of the UK parliament despite only one adult in six actually voting for them.
The way that our existing system deals with voter abstention is to completely ignore it. I question that approach. Turnout is, at best, a bonus statistic right now: provided as an afterthought for the curious, along with the similarly irrelevant count of spoiled ballots. It can’t affect the outcome, and political parties are not expected to factor it into their calculations — indeed, politicians who make any effort to appeal to non-voters are often ridiculed by mainstream commentators.
If someone doesn’t vote for anyone, that’s treated as a decision not to be heard, not to have your opinions taken into consideration.
But is ignoring abstention really the correct way of dealing with it? I am not the first to observe that if No Vote was a party, it would be bigger than any of the other parties in many recent elections. In the 2024 UK general election, 40% of the electorate chose No Vote, against a mere 20% for Labour. I think that bears repeating.
In the 2024 UK general election, 40% of the electorate chose No Vote, against a mere 20% for Labour.
Taking Abstention Seriously
What if we took seriously the implied message of abstention — that none of these candidates are worth voting for? Under the existing system, a No Vote is treated as a vote for whichever politicians everyone else decides on. But if you ask abstainers, they are far more like to tell you that they didn’t think anyone was worth voting for.
In other words, it’s not that abstainers are happy to go with whoever gets elected. It’s typically the opposite: they’ll be unhappy with any of the options on offer. I would suggest that this implies that whoever is up for election, they’ll be no better than some random person off the street.
What if we take that seriously? Rather than counting them out of the equation, I suggest that we treat No Vote wins as a vote for some random person.
By this measure, the 2024 general election becomes a catastrophic loss for professional politicians, and a landslide victory for sortition: the process of choosing people by lottery, and putting them in positions of power and responsibility.
It might sound silly when you first come across it, but ‘citizen juries’ have been employed to great effect in many parts of the world, finding solutions to problems in ways that often involve open discussion and compromises, in a way that seems anathema to career politicians. Serious proposals have been made for upper chambers consisting at least partly of randomly selected citizens, empowered with the resources to learn enough about a range of issues to make informed choices about them (for example, by Common Weal and Tom Shakespeare). Deliberative democracy has a long pedigree, and many well-established advantages, including breaking deadlocks, widening participation, and considering perspectives that are often missed.
Representation Matters
Introducing sortition into the electoral system in this way would plug a major hole in our democratic system: politicians would have something to lose by alienating swathes of the population even if their opponents are no better.
This would be a radical change for the better. The Labour Right, for example, has notoriously relied on the belief that the working class has got nowhere else to go. If they don’t want to vote Labour, they just won’t vote… and so what if they don’t? The calculation goes like this: even if Labour lose two votes for every Tory they convince to switch to their side, in a two-horse race, they’re effectively breaking even.
If every refusal to vote was respected as an expression of the belief that the politicians aren’t worth voting for, there would be a whole lot more pressure on politicians to be worth voting for. They would be forced to look at who is not being represented.
Yes, it would also result in an influx of non-politicians into the halls of power. Would that be a bad thing? It’s not at all clear that it would. Politicians are literally the least trusted profession in the country — it’s no wonder that so many people don’t want to vote for them! And yet, we leave them in charge of all the law-making, again and again.
We know that elected politicians are not remotely representative of the populations they come from — they are far more likely to be male, white, rich, and older; and to be educated in one of a small range of academic subjects. Adding fully random citizens to the mix would immediately go some way towards balancing that out, but it would be straightforward to go one step further: to skew the selections towards demographics that are otherwise systematically under-represented. For example, if Parliament is two thirds male, two thirds of those chosen by lottery could be female. Most sortition systems have weighted selection towards representative samples, rather than choosing purely at random.
It is not surprising that — as the IPPR shows in their report Half of us: Turnout patterns at the 2024 general election — turnout is much lower among people who are younger, poorer, or not white. The disparity is even bigger once you take into account people who are not registered to vote. These people do not see themselves or their priorities reflected in parliament, and have persistently been left behind by the UK’s political system.
Making It Work
I would suggest that serving as a Random Parliamentarian (RP) should be voluntary, in the sense of allowing anyone to opt out. Nobody should be forced to take on great responsibility, but nor should power go only to those who seek it.
The role could come with a salary pegged somewhere above the national median, but not massively so. The pay would be fair, but being an RP should not be something you would want to do just to get rich. Those who earn well above the national average would have much less incentive to take part than poorer citizens; this is a feature, not a bug.
As with existing MPs, RPs would be allocated generous expenses to hire researchers, office staff and so on, and guidance on how to go about it. They could be allocated additional resources to help them to access expert advice. To avoid discriminating against those with caring responsibilities, there should also be a budget available to hire people to take on existing responsibilities.
It would be sensible to allow RPs plenty of education opportunities and a period of adjustment — say, a few months — to get up to speed with their new role, learn about major issues of the day, and so on. They should also be warned ahead of time that they could be called up if more than a certain number of seats are not allocated to politicians.
Perhaps it would be helpful to give RPs the opportunity to work part-time. This would make it feasible for many who might otherwise struggle to take that time out, including those who can only work part-time. This would mean they don’t have to leave behind their existing jobs and responsibilities, and can stay anchored in their communities and industries. I have long thought that politicians should have this opportunity, for all of the same reasons — some people face far greater barriers to participation in Parliament, and that is always a problem.
If people don’t believe that random members of the public will do at least as good a job as elected politicians, of course, then that would be one more reason to show up and vote.
Some Calculations
You might be wondering what this election would look like under this new system, if we leave FPTP in place and simply treat No Vote as if it were a party. It turns out that by my calculations — which you can check here — abstention won in 609 of the UK’s 650 constituencies in 2024. In other words, only one seat out of every sixteen had more voters for any political party than it had non-voters.
Labour barely managed half the support of No Vote (20.4% to 40.3%). Their vote was also well behind the combined vote of all the smaller parties (25% of registered voters, or 42% of actual votes). The result was a landslide in spite of this, with 411 Labour seats — still nowhere near what No Vote would have got if it was counted.
Truly, this was an election that was lost, very badly, rather than won.
Adam Ramsay put it beautifully:
In 2024, Starmer promised to make politics boring again. He didn’t win by exciting people to the polls with hope, but by convincing Tories he was so dull they could ignore the whole thing, stay at home, and not bother to vote against him.
Evidently, this was a viable electoral strategy for Labour this year — but should it have been?
To be clear, this election was exceptional in the sheer scale of support for nobody at all. The picture was very different in 2017, which was the first election in 20 years where more than two thirds of registered voters turned out, energised by a Labour Party that worked hard to represent people who had previously felt disenfranchised. On that 69.2% turnout — still low by historic standards — just 155 constituencies would have gone to the No Vote non-party. Even in 2019, when turnout dropped to 67.3%, only 220 RPs would have been selected.
The fact that 2024 would have seen an overwhelming landslide for No Vote is an artifact of the UK’s indefensible FPTP system, just as Labour’s real-world landslide was. Under straightforward proportional representation, only 40% of seats, 262, would have gone to RPs. That would still have been enough to profoundly change the political calculus of Westminster, but it would not have made politicians irrelevant in the way that they would have been under FPTP, faced with a tidal wave of 609 RPs.
What Next?
This Abstention-Based Sortition proposal is, of course, just one of the ways that we could be working to revive British democracy. I’m sure it has its flaws, and many other improvements are also worth considering.
The Institute for Public Policy Research report mentioned earlier suggests automatic registration on the electoral roll, votes for 16 and 17 year olds and tighter controls on political spending: all eminently sensible, if a little on the cautious side.
Replacing FPTP with almost anything closer to Proportional Representation would be another obvious step; the failed referendum on replacing it with the Alternative Vote system suggests that it is worth thinking carefully about which replacement to choose, but I make no judgement here on which way to go with this.
As I argued in 2016 in a (partial) defence of democracy, we should also be paying far more attention to opportunities for democracy outside of electoral systems: there is a place for direct democracy, if it’s done right; more urgently, every part of our economy could benefit from being made more democratic.
My proposal here is no doubt an imperfect one, and you are invited to pick holes in it. Whatever changes we see, though, it is high time that we stopped disregarding non-voters. Concluding that our electoral system won’t represent you is not the same as saying you have no interest in being represented.
The current situation is incredibly fragile, once you scratch beneath the surface. Any government would be challenged by the combination of the climate crisis, international tensions, the cost of living and the after-effects of Brexit. The ruling party may have a virtually unchallengeable majority right now, but it could only convince a sixth of the adult population to vote for it. Worse, most of that sixth voted for them to get rid of the Tories, or because they wanted change — and yet, Labour achieved this victory by promising to continue many of the Tories’ policies.
When so little of the population feels represented by the government, and the political system provides so little hope for them to ever be, all of that discontent is bound to come out somehow. This is going to be an interesting few years for UK politics, despite Keir Starmer’s best efforts.
