The British election has become rather interesting in the last couple of weeks thanks to a surge in popularity for the Liberal Democrats, the country’s perennial third party. Its leader, Nick Clegg, won the first debate held among the UK’s putative Prime Ministers (try saying that three times quickly) on April 15, and roughly drew for first with the Conservative David Cameron in the April 22 debate. The polls (with the odd exception) now show Cameron’s Tories in first, the LibDems second, and Gordon Brown’s Labour Party is third. However, most electoral models show that Labour would still get the most seats (but not a majority) in the next Parliament, with the Tories second and the LibDems third in seats.
Clearly, the voting system is flawed, and it has been Liberal policy (even before the Liberals merged with the Social Democrats in 1988) to replace the current first-past-the-post system (where a plurality of votes gets you the seat) with proportional representation [PR], the preferred method being the single transferable vote [STV], about which more later.
The Tories are dead set against any change; Mr. Cameron says that the current system ensures that when the people want to fire the PM and his Cabinet, they get fired. A PR system, he claims, would let a failed leader stay in office. The other reason, about which the Conservatives say nothing, is that PR would ensure left-of-center government for at least a generation.
Labour has decided that the only way to stay in power is to cut a deal with the LibDems and they have offered a referendum in October 2011 on the alternative vote system [AV]. Under such a system, each constituency will elect a single Member of Parliament. However, voters will rank the candidates in order of preference. For instance, Labour first, Greens second, LibDems third, Tory fourth, UK Independence Party fifth, etc. If no party gets 50% +1 of first preferences, the party with the fewest firsts is eliminated, and the votes for that party are distributed according to second preferences. This will continue until someone has a majority of votes. It is important to note that this is not a truly PR system.
What is most interesting (at least for us voting system nerds) is that given the current polls AV would only change the numbers of seats each party wins without altering the fact that Labour would come last in popular vote and first in seats in Parliament. John Curtice is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and he has been crunching numbers for the Independent
and his results are fascinating (once again, at least for us voting system nerds).
The latest poll he cites has the popular vote for the Tories at 32%, the LibDems at 31% and Labour at 28%. This translates into 238 seats for the Conservatives, 112 for the LibDems and 268 for Labour. The reason for this is the concentration of the Tory vote in rural and well-off districts where they run up majorities in the several thousands and the evenness of the LibDem vote across the country, where they usually win by a whisker if they win at all. Labour’s vote is concentrated enough to win seats by a thousand or two votes, so they don’t run up useless majorities in very safe seats as often as the Conservatives do nor do they finish a close second like the LibDems always seem to do.
What Professor Curtice has done is look at polls that ask for second choices. The LibDems are second favorite for 68% of Labour voters and 41% of Conservative voters. Among LibDems, 35% would choose Labour second and 28% Tory (that adds up to only 63%, as lots of LibDems would back the Greens second). Since the LibDems are about evenly split between Labour and Conservatives on second choices, neither party gains greatly when the LibDems come third and have their vote redistributed. However in seats where Labour or the Tories are third, the LibDems could expect to leapfrog into first when the votes get redistributed. The good professor says that the LibDems could get as many as 217 seats (about double what they’d get under the current system), while the Tories would place third with only 163 (2 fewer than they won when they were crushed in 1997 and 3 fewer than in 2001). Labour, though, still comes in first with 238. So AV isn't much better than first-past-the-post if you're after fairness.
PROCEED WITH CAUTION: OK, unless you are a complete election anorak (that’s British for "nerd," -- I needed a synonym), you can skip to the last paragraph. Otherwise, hold on, to your hats, as we’re gonna get all mediaeval on this voting thing’s backside.
The Liberal Democrats have suggested what they are calling AV plus (originally proposed in 1998 by the Jenkins Commission). This approach would use the AV system as above, and select a further 10-20% of Members of Parliament from a regional list. The extra MPs give this a PR flavor, but it is a long way from the STV. By my own calculations (which assumes an unreasonable uniformity in voting for the regional list and 20%, or 132, of MPs coming from the lists and 80% from the single-member constituency – that is 418). The result is Labour with 227 seats, the Liberal Democrats with 215, and the Tories get 172. AV plus still gets the "wrong" answer, but it does start to look closer to fair.
Another system of voting relies solely on lists (Israel for example), where the entire nation is considered a single constituency and each party puts up as many candidates as there are seats available. If the party wins even a small percentage, it gets a seat or two. This makes the smaller parties much more powerful, disproportionately so when one looks at the power of the Shas Party in Israel for instance. Under such a system, the Tories’ 32% would entitle them to 32% of the seats, the LibDems’ 31% would get them 31% of the seats and Labour’s 28% would give them 28% of the seats. The problem with this system is that it severs the tie between MP and constituent. The old "write your Congressman" approach to problems ceases to exist as an option because you don’t have a specific legislator answerable to you.
The preferred method of the Liberal Democrats is STV, a system currently used in the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland for certain elections, Scotland for local elections, the Australian Senate as well as in city elections in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Under this system, the constituency has a multiple number of members. A good example would be a 7-person city council. The whole city is the constituency and 7 people are going to be elected. Most likely, each party will nominate 7 candidates. To get elected, a candidate must reach the Droop Quota (which is NOT the number of Viagra pills Bob Dole sold on TV, and is very similar to the Hagenbach-Bischoff quota and an improvement on the old Hare quota. What’s the difference? Let’s not get THAT mediaeval). The formula for calculating that quota is:
Droop Quota = [valid votes cast/(seats to fill +1) ] + 1.
So, let’s presume 1000 valid votes were cast for our 7-member city council. The Droop Quota is [1000/(7+1)] + 1 = (1000/8) + 1 = 125+1 = 126.
Thus, any candidate who has 126 votes or more is declared elected (in the event of a fraction, one rounds to the nearest integer). That candidate’s votes get redistributed to his/her second choice (usually but not necessarily a member of the same party). Once all the elected candidates’ votes are redistributed, and the remaining candidates are short of the Droop Quota, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and those votes get redistributed. This continues until the 7 seats are filled. The beauty of this system is that it means anyone who can muster about 12.5% of the vote in this case, gets elected. Rather than ignoring 1/8 of the population, those votes matter. The ugliness of this system is the amount of aggravation that the vote counters go through. I was an election manager in one race where there were 19 parties contesting the election of 9 seats (if memory serves). The count took close to 18 hours non-stop using several counters.
Unfortunately, we can’t use the current polls to analyze the STV approach because we would need to know how many seats there would be per constituency, where each party ranked in each constituency, and which way the Greens, UKIP, Unionists and Nationalists would go (through fourth or fifth preferences most likely). In the end, though, I suspect that the result would have the party with the most popular support winning the most seats and the third most popular finishing with the third most seats.
And to think I used to try to impress female members of the Union of Liberal Students by holding forth on this kind of thing -- ah, my mis-spent youth.
Here endeth the lesson.
IT’S SAFE TO CONTINUE READING HERE: The third and final debate among Messrs. Clegg, Cameron and Brown is Thursday, April 29 at 8:30 pm British Summer Time (7:30 pm GMT, 3:30 pm Eastern, 2:30 pm Central, 1:30 Mountain, 12:30 Pacific). It will be televised live on BBC1, will likely be streamed on the Internet through http//news.bbc.co.uk, and it may well be run on C-Span Sunday May 2 at 9:30 pm Eastern (as the previous debates were). The topic is to be "The Economy."