Opinion: Ditch PR in favour of weighted votes
Written by Laurence Boyce on 1st April 2008 – 7:45 amOne Liberal Democrat policy area I can never get out of bed for is proportional representation. Don’t get me wrong; there is so much at fault with our present constitution – starting with the simple observation that we don’t really have one as such, through the farcical arrangements pertaining in the Commons and the Lords, and never forgetting the fact that, bizarrely, we still appear to be subjects of a Monarch ordained of God, named Betty Windsor.
However, though our democracy may be somewhat imperfect, it remains a democracy nonetheless; and the notion that we are labouring under some colossal electoral injustice is, I’m afraid, just another instance of Lib Dem whining we would do very well to drop. I’m quite sure that Liberal Democrat fortunes would rise a little under a system of PR, but hardly enough to justify making this a flagship issue. The rules of the game may be arcane, but we all know in advance what the rules are, and we all know how to vote tactically if needs be – thanks in no small part to a million bar charts which have probably outlived their useful purpose.
But, while the myriad options for systems of proportional representation have been gone over in tedious detail, there remains one topic of electoral reform which appears to be strictly off limits, and it is this: that maybe, just maybe, not all votes are equal. Or rather that, while all votes are clearly equal, some votes may be more equal than others. The purpose of this article is to address this rather glaring omission, propose my own suggestions for reform, and of course open up the floor for debate.
The first thing to say is that, up until now, what I am about to propose would not have been technically possible. Using only the prevailing piece of paper, pencil, and big black box technology, it is really quite infeasible to attach a value scale to the assembled collection of opinions. But the digital era is now firmly upon us and it is surely now time that we gave serious consideration to the possibilities opened up for us through the power of electronic voting.
So the first and very necessary and indeed urgent step, is to recreate the electoral register in the form of a large government database containing everyone’s personal information. The database would be backed up once a week onto a DVD and put somewhere safe. Voting would be as easy as clicking a mouse button. In fact, voting would be clicking a mouse button. Clever encryption technology would prevent any conceivable possibility of electoral fraud.
Now to where all this is leading: Once votes have been cast, they are then scaled (key point) according to some simple (or perhaps even rather complex) weighting function. The precise form of the weighting function would be determined by the Electoral Commission, ultimately under parliamentary control. Much fun is to be had from devising various options for reform but, purely to get the ball rolling, I have created an initial example of the sort of thing I have in mind.
I ought to stress that this is just a back-of-an-envelope job, with a view to instigating a lively discussion. If you don’t like my graphs, then the obvious thing is to produce your own improved recommendations. But, broadly speaking, you can see that the proposed scheme gives little weighting to votes from the very young and inexperienced. The weighting then ramps up with age, before tailing off again later in life. Eventually, when one reaches the point where most of one’s life lies in the past, the weighting diminishes once again to bugger all.
A key advantage is the ability to engage voters at a young age. I must admit that I have never quite recovered from Paul Walter informing me that his eight-year-old daughter voted for Sir Menzies Campbell in 2006, something she will probably regret should we ever meet. But with my scheme, we can sensibly open up the vote to anyone capable of firing up the computer unaided. Of course, their votes would count for precious little at that stage but, crucially, they will be actively engaged in the process.
More controversially perhaps, the scheme discriminates between the sexes. My thinking here is a bit vague, but is broadly based upon the fact that men are notoriously more inclined towards violence than women. I’m thinking that maybe if we were to give women a greater priority earlier in life, then we might not find ourselves fighting quite so many disastrous and un-winnable wars around the world. However, in order to preserve gender equality, their weighting must dip below that of men at the last.
The problem we currently face is that, without such technical arrangements in place, the electoral system is a very blunt tool which can be hopelessly unresponsive to pressing problems. It’s a bit like trying to fix the economy when one only has access to the crudest levers of power, or like trying to cure an illness with only the most primitive drugs. In such situations, one may certainly make a difference – a big difference even – but there are likely to be some rather unpleasant side effects.
It is only a highly and skilfully tuned scheme that has the power to reach the parts that other electoral systems simply cannot reach. Rather than fuss over PR, is it not time that Liberal Democrats embraced some truly radical proposals for electoral reform that can really do the business? You may not like my graphs, indeed I would not be surprised to learn that they might be flawed in one or two minor respects. But can anyone seriously suggest that even my initial proposal is not a huge improvement over our present, crude, and wholly unscientific arrangements?
* Laurence Boyce is a Liberal Democrat member, and well aware of what day it is.
Posted in Op-eds
1st April 2008 at 9:55 am
It’s April the 1st and I sincerely hope that this is a joke. In case it’s not, I’ll bite.
Your voting scheme is simple discrimination. Treating one person (or their vote) as more valuable than any other is simply wrong. Maybe we shouldn’t weight the votes of men less, but the votes of blacks, or gays, or Jews? We used to have a voting system like this; in previous centuries we weighted the votes of women and slaves as being zero. Because the votes of men (aristocrats/land-owners) were “more equal” to the votes of women or slaves people or commoners. Perhaps you should go and read Animal Farm; what you’re proposing is that “some animals are more equal than others”.
The only weighting you can come up with that doesn’t discriminate against any group is one where every vote is equal. Which we already have.
I also suspect, based on what you’ve written, that your technical grasp of the implications of your massive database, and of electronic/internet voting, could be better. Encryption is irrelevant when voting, authentication is vital. With your database you create a single point of failure, if the database data is corrupted or manipulated no independent data exists to verify against. Additionally, there’s a reason intelligence agencies and terrorists use compartmentalisation, the less information you have in any one place, the less you lose/are-damaged if security fails, and security always fails in the end.
1st April 2008 at 10:26 am
Nice one - had me going for the first few paragraphs
1st April 2008 at 10:57 am
I think a clever person’s vote should count at least double that of a stupid person - In no other area of society are the dumbest people treated as equals to clever people so why should this be any different to the absolutely critical decision of who runs the country?
Present crude arrangements indeed.
1st April 2008 at 11:01 am
They say that the best way to insure against Government abuses is not to give them powers that could be abused in the first place. A system such as this, whilst interesting, would so utterly open to huge abuse (just think what a govt like that in Zimbabwe would be able to achieve with this system) that it would be total insanity to even try to implement it.
1st April 2008 at 11:06 am
Like most political thinkers through history, I believe that the Government would be best run by people like me; the only question is which electoral system best delivers that result.
1st April 2008 at 11:09 am
Steven Ronald wrote:
“I think a clever person’s vote should count at least double that of a stupid person”
It’s not so unreasonable - graduates used to have two votes - they could vote for the university burgesses as well as their constituency MPs. They were even elected by STV!
The only aspect I’d take issue with is that Laurence Boyce’s suggestion favours the clever at the expense of the good. Why not reward holiness as well as intelligence? Regular churchgoers could receive points for each service attended. Perhaps ministers, priests, rabbis and so on could also give their flocks a rating that could be incorporated into the system.
Atheists would score zero, of course. Militant atheists would get a negaive rating …
Chris Phillips
1st April 2008 at 11:15 am
You got me there for a sec Laurence - well done!
1st April 2008 at 12:20 pm
“So the first and very necessary and indeed urgent step, is to recreate the electoral register in the form of a large government database containing everyone’s personal information. The database would be backed up once a week onto a DVD and put somewhere safe.”
Unfortunately too close to the truth to to be funny (and the rest of this is
- there is legislation in place for a national electoral register database to store that information and with powers for the Secretary of State to vary it “in such respects as he thinks appropriate”. All passed by Parliament with cross party agreement and virtually no debate.
I don’t understand how we oppose ID cards for creating a huge national database and supported this.
1st April 2008 at 12:58 pm
Great ‘girls on top’ graph - I’ll put it on my Focus leaflets any day…
1st April 2008 at 1:07 pm
I would vote for a very heavy loading for liberals who understand economics, with double loadings for believing science works & having a beard & for having been expelled from the party.
Merry 1st of April.
1st April 2008 at 1:38 pm
cpg said “It’s not so unreasonable - graduates used to have two votes - they could vote for the university burgesses as well as their constituency MPs. They were even elected by STV!”
Obviously with the diluting of the University graduate elite in recent years we’ll need to rehash this system slightly.
Anyone with a degree from a University which has held that status for say 100 years of more is clearly the brightest sort of graduate just look at how many of them are in the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet. Ok maybe lets not look to closely. But they should obviously have 5 votes, if they have a First from Oxbridge 6 or a Double First 7.
Now the 20th century Brick Universites such as East Anglia although they have some prestige can only manage say 4 votes, those who graduated from the former Polys or Unis that once were Polys like myself 3. Those whose degree come from a Further Education establishment without their own Univerity granting powers therefore only two.
Obvisously a problem would arise with graduated of the University of Ulster. Clearly those who have a divinity degree from the Magee Campus should not be discrimiated against by the upstarts take over and should be given their full entitlement of 5 votes. Graduates from the Coleraine Campus would qualify for 4. Jordonstown being a former Poly would only allow their graduates 3 votes. As as for he former Belfast Art College that makes up the Belfast Campus clearly this is open to arbitration, somewhere between 2 and 3, 2.67 votes may be fair.
Obviously while this system may add to the differences percieved of certain graduates it is nothing new and would enhance the above proposal no end.
1st April 2008 at 2:18 pm
Define “clever”, Steven Ronald. I know people with high IQs whom I would have no hesitation in calling stupid, because they have badly thought out beliefs based on nothing. Maybe some kind of reasoning test. Any would-be voter should have to write an essay under exam conditions
http://hh-asquith.blogspot.com/2008/03/this-should-be-speech.html
1st April 2008 at 2:29 pm
A reasoning test?
Wouldn’t that disadvantage the religious? Aren’t all/most of their views on morality, ethics and the way of the world based on faith, not reason?
1st April 2008 at 2:42 pm
Thanks Martin and everyone else. I am indeed “aware of what day it is” and everyone will recognise a certain exaggeration for effect in what I have written. But now I’m going to go and spoil it all!
No, it’s not a joke.
I really think “weighted votes” is what we need (and thanks to Stephen for thinking up that phrase). First off Martin, I don’t see that my scheme is discriminatory. Everyone has an equal democratic right when summed over a lifetime. Sure, at any particular point there is discrimination with respect to age and sex, but of course that already happens in law. Retirement depends upon age and sex, and so it should because those are relevant factors.
And of course voting depends upon age too. We deprive the vote to the very young who have the most pressing concerns imaginable with respect to their education and so on. Now the Liberal Democrat response is to advocate votes at 16. That is a proposal I could never go along with. I would never think it sensible to give a sixteen-year-old the same vote as a mature adult - it’s just crazy. But a gentle ramp up to the age of 21? Now surely you’re not against that Martin? At least in principle?
As for the possibility of discriminating against blacks, gays, or Jews, well I’d be against that because that is morally abhorrent. And this is the point. We can’t keep allowing these “slippery slope” arguments to hold us back. It’s exactly what the Catholic Church is doing at the moment - trying to make us think that experimentation on human-animal hybrids is going to lead inexorably to a sheep with a human head on it. Can’t we just argue the case on its own merits?
But of course when it comes to the sexes, there’s simply no getting away from the fact that men and women are radically different. By a whole chromosome in fact! So much effort has gone into creating equality between the sexes, and this is entirely understandable given the extent to which women have been subjugated throughout history. But maybe now it’s time to just restore a little scientific perspective to our thinking?
On the data front, it is not beyond the wit of man (or woman) to create a secure IT system, though this does seem to be eluding us at present. It time, these things will become possible and the risks will be minimised. Suppose that somebody could produce some fairly innocuous graphs which are not so exaggerated as mine, and suppose that they could also make a convincing case that such arrangements, if allowed to bed in, would have rendered our involvement in the Iraq war extremely unlikely.
Are you still not even so much as raising an interested eyebrow?
1st April 2008 at 3:01 pm
MartinSGill says:
“A reasoning test?
Wouldn’t that disadvantage the religious? Aren’t all/most of their views on morality, ethics and the way of the world based on faith, not reason?”
I wouldn’t shed any tears if clinically sane Melanie Phillips, Rowan Williams, Iqbal Sacranie, Stephen Green, Peter Hitchens, and other assorted believers were denied a vote. And Daily Hate Mail/Scum readers too. We could get a Lib Dem landslide out of this
1st April 2008 at 3:25 pm
Laurence,
If I am not agreeing with you 100% then I am disagreeing with you 100%. Today is one of the latter situations!
Politicizing the weight of votes, and who gets to vote at all is something that we should be attempting to avoid at all costs - after all, it is surely Parliament that appoints to the Electoral Commission, and thus politicians can sway the voting system to favour themselves. The Tories might (perhaps reasonably) say that the successful (academically, financially, etc) should have more votes - but the rich tend to vote Tory, so they actually benefit their own supporters through the weighting process, keeping themselves in power (or with more power than they ought to have, anyway).
Secondly, saying “women are less violent therefore more votes earlier in life” is, I hope, the April Fool’s end of your argument. One has to attempt to control for every single gender-differentialled foible or none at all, and I know which I’d rather!
1st April 2008 at 3:28 pm
A ludicrous article published before noon on April 1st, which is actually serious? This must be a double April Fool.
Hmmm.
1st April 2008 at 3:48 pm
It’s an interesting mental exercise, but it’s fundamentally illiberal, and is a ready made tool for despots to have their way.
Imagine Laurence if a pro-religion government were elected and all atheists as morally inferior (which is of course total nonsense) had a reduced weighting.
Any policy or law about how we are governed must have safe-guards to protect citizens from a run-away or dishonest government. Your approach means that if a single safe-guard fails, the weighting commission, all the other safeguards fall like dominoes, since the ruling government can bias any future election to silence it’s critics.
We need to work to improve those safeguards and make a fairer system, you idea goes entirely in the opposite direction.
1st April 2008 at 4:05 pm
Chris, you must surely have figured out my strategy by now. It is to be as mad and crazy as possible, and still look sane and sensible when set alongside religion!
Sanbiki, I think I would agree with what you say. We obviously don’t want this sort of social engineering going on, but then personal wealth can come and go. I think I was thinking more in terms of immutable characteristics. You can’t change your age (except through getting older) and you can’t change your sex (except in the rare instances when you do). In fact, now I come to think of it, I’m not sure that I can think of any useful dependant variables apart from age and sex. Can you?
It’s interesting that may posters have focused upon intelligence as an “obvious” choice. I would totally disagree with that. I think that intelligence is hugely overrated. In fact, the most stupid people I know are always highly intelligent.
1st April 2008 at 4:08 pm
Agreed Martin. Suppose we limit the dependant variables to age and sex (or any other useful ones that people can come up with). Not personal beliefs, which people could lie about anyway, and not intelligence or the lack of it.
1st April 2008 at 4:17 pm
Laurence, I’ve spotted a mistake in your graph - there are one too many Rs in “daft proposal” :p
1st April 2008 at 4:19 pm
Nice one Joe!
1st April 2008 at 5:03 pm
It was funny up until the point you said it wasn’t a joke.
It wouldn’t work for three reasons:
1) You don’t know when people are going to die, so you can’t average over their entire life.
2) The biggest argument used against a proportional system is that it’s more complicated than our existing system. The system you are advocating is positively Machiavellian by comparison.
3) This would hand over vastly more power to an IT system than even the national ID card system would. Quis custodit custodes?
Are you sure politics is for you, and, if so, are you sure you’re in the right party?
1st April 2008 at 5:06 pm
It’s a slippery slope. We start with age and sex now. In a few years a government comes in that wants to add another weighting: “we already do weighting, we’re just making it fairer”.
It also cannot work. The moment you reduce the value of my vote I’d feel discriminated against (along with loads of other people). I already do feel discriminated against by the current electoral system, your changes would just make the discrimination more blatantly obvious than it already is.
Race and religion will get drawn in eventually; it always happens, even if it’s by a round-about way of favouring those age groups over or under represented by a certain religious view or race.
1st April 2008 at 5:14 pm
Something I’m very wary about in politics is legislating for tendencies. So women might tend to be less violent than men, but it is obvious that not every woman is less violent than every man.
Similarly, there is a bit of a hoo-hah going on about whether black people tend to be less intelligent than others, which is surely something we should be interested in for a weighted vote scheme, but suggesting that Darcus Howe get less of a vote than Wayne Rooney is not going to fly.
How about people with Downs? That’s a genetic condition which almost guarantees a shorter lifespan and degraded mental capacity. Should they get a lesser vote?
1st April 2008 at 5:27 pm
It’s a slippery slope.
Martin, just about everything is a slippery slope towards something else. (Or the thin end of a wedge, or a frog in a pot.) And by the way, I’m starting to get really sceptical about that frog in a pot analogy. I reckon that if you slowly heated up a frog in a pot of water, then at some point the frog would get a bit uncomfortable and jump out. Slippery slope merchants would have us believe that the frog would never notice and get roasted alive. How likely is that exactly?
I’m going to try it tonight.
1st April 2008 at 5:50 pm
Something I’m very wary about in politics is legislating for tendencies. So women might tend to be less violent than men, but it is obvious that not every woman is less violent than every man.
Agreed Sanbiki. In fact I would define discrimination as the act of treating the individual according the average properties of a group. But for practical purposes the law has to do this all the time. The speed limit is 70 mph. But most people are perfectly safe at 80 mph, while there are others (mostly women as it happens!) who will never be safe even at 10 mph.
Similarly, there is a bit of a hoo-hah going on about whether black people tend to be less intelligent than others . . .
Yes, racists love that stuff, but it’s all so tangential and insignificant in my view. In fact the world’s really stupid people tend to be white - I’m thinking of George W Bush here for some reason. In much the same way, men are supposedly more intelligent than women by a few IQ points, but it’s not like it shows at all.
How about people with Downs?
Down syndrome accounts for around 0.1% of the population. It’s hardly worth bothering about. I want stuff that’s really going to make a difference. Let’s leave mental capacity out of this altogether, and go with age and sex.
1st April 2008 at 6:21 pm
It was funny up until the point you said it wasn’t a joke.
Well, I’m still chuckling!
It wouldn’t work for three reasons: 1) You don’t know when people are going to die, so you can’t average over their entire life.
But that is already the case, Martin. Anyone who dies before their sixtieth birthday (and that’s quite a few) is effectively denied the possibility of a pension and a comfortable retirement. In so many ways, the law simply has to make these sweeping generalisations. And of course it does so with voting. According to the law, you wake up on your eighteenth birthday with your political brain switched on for the first time ever, ready and capable of making a judgement on polling day. It’s these crude and meaningless step-functions I object to so much.
2) The biggest argument used against a proportional system is that it’s more complicated than our existing system. The system you are advocating is positively Machiavellian by comparison.
Well hardly. If we move towards electronic voting, which we should anyway for a whole host of reasons, then my initial scheme comes more or less for free.
Are you sure politics is for you, and, if so, are you sure you’re in the right party?
Absolutely. I’ve already done a leaflet delivery, and I hope to go canvassing on Thursday. It’s great! By the way, how’s Jesus?
1st April 2008 at 6:34 pm
I’d be laughing if I wasn’t crying.
The problem with proportional voting systems is how to reach agreement over the proportions involved - we can argue that forever.
The problem with universal suffrage on an egalitarian basis is that neither voting nor suffering is equal across the universe.
The real question is about how we use different voting methods to separate the different forms of representation to account for the diversity within society (something our currently unreformed bicameral system attempts, but fails, to do).
Laurence is unwitting in his description of how the complexity of any one-size-fits-all solution creates a bad fit for most, but as I’m still waiting for a punchline to hit me I’m left looking at the joker.
1st April 2008 at 6:43 pm
But Oranjepan, don’t you think it’s even funnier when a Lib Dem says, “we obtained X% of the vote, ergo we should have X% of the seats in parliament”? That one always cracks me up.
1st April 2008 at 7:00 pm
ha ha - still loving this article - a finely honed piece of work.
And that graph is a work of art - “draft proposal”/”present crude arragements”/”annoying/lush/interesting/very intersting/off peak” - excellent.
1st April 2008 at 7:08 pm
Not really, Laurence, that is just a restatement of our relevance, however unvalued we may see it ourselves.
It is a directly political question which hints at an underlying critique of the contradictions within the current system: it demands a satisfactory reponse from the beneficiaries of the system as to why they support victimising smaller groups, even if it isn’t the whole picture itself.
The unspoken truth of it is that our society is more closely modelled on a vision of liberal ideas than theirs and that they can’t escape the inevitable truth that the future will be too.
1st April 2008 at 8:39 pm
Incidentally, how do I get an icon next to my name? I want to be as cool as Laurence.
1st April 2008 at 8:49 pm
It’s explained here Sanbiki.
1st April 2008 at 8:56 pm
And that graph is a work of art . . .
Thanks Steven, much appreciated. Took bloody ages, I can tell you!
1st April 2008 at 10:42 pm
I don’t get this at all…
Votes would be weighted for age / gender / education / intelligence / class / wealth / race / ethnicity, all of which weightings would be based on lumping people into broad categories.
in which case what is wrong with our existing of voluntary voting, where levels of turnout produce pretty much the same result?
1st April 2008 at 10:50 pm
Not quite sure what you mean there Meher. But I only ever suggested weighting on age and sex, and now I am thinking that those are probably the only variables we should consider.
1st April 2008 at 11:18 pm
Unbelievable that people are still discussing this, given that the author says it wasn’t a joke. What utter nonsense!
Chris Phillips
1st April 2008 at 11:18 pm
Pointless: You want young voters to get a lesser vote. But less of them vote anyway.
Never invent a complex system to do what a simple system will do equally well.
2nd April 2008 at 4:52 am
Well that’s a separate issue really. You can’t force anyone to participate, though having systems for electronic voting in place would probably encourage more young people to vote. But I also want older people to have a lesser vote, and I think they do vote in large numbers.
2nd April 2008 at 10:00 am
I saw that you said this wasn’t a joke, but I included it in my April Fools roundup anyway.
If you’re serious about this, you are the April Fool here.
2nd April 2008 at 12:38 pm
Thanks Ian. I am indeed a bit of an idiot. But it is noticeable, don’t you think, that few have really provided a sharp critique of my proposals. Most of the criticism has centred on where it might all lead. Discrimination based on race, intelligence, etc. - all things I did not and would not suggest.
Would my simple scheme really be so terrible? I think not. For me, the only serious question is: would it do the useful work I have in mind? I can’t say that for sure until we see some data. That’s why we need to move towards electronic voting straight away, in order to give the psephologists a chance to show us what all the various options could actually do for us.
But I think we might all be surprised.
3rd April 2008 at 8:53 am
Laurence,
Having re-read this there appears to be a subtext of ‘people with a similar mindset to my own - politically aware, neither young nor retired, atheist - get the highest weighting of votes’. This is old fashioned elitism really. Apologies if that is not what you meant, but that is how uit reads.
And who would ratify this weighting? Parliament?? Really? This scheme would be just as bad as at present - worse as you are giving voting decisions over to the state!
3rd April 2008 at 9:04 am
Having re-read this, there appears to be a subtext of “people with a similar mindset to my own - politically aware, neither young nor retired, atheist - get the highest weighting of votes.”
Why? Why people with a similar mindset to my own? And why atheist? How do you get that out of age and sex? It is true that at the age of 41, I am roughly under the peak of the curve. Probably off peak in fact. But I can’t help that. Do you think I am going to propose that the peak keeps track with me as I get older?
3rd April 2008 at 9:34 am
This proposal is clearly bonkers, so why not try something else whilst retaining the weighted votes idea?
If someone votes by post before polling day, their vote is weighted x 2
From 7am - 8am of polling day x 3
From 8am - 9am x 5
and so on, till those who vote in the last closing minutes of polling day have their votes are worth x30 or somesuch?
3rd April 2008 at 9:45 am
That’s an interesting idea Liam. I like it. One slight disadvantage would be that it would entail a massive scrum at the end, leading to the inevitable injury or death. But this might be a small price to pay for a sufficient justification.
By the way, what is the justification?
3rd April 2008 at 10:11 am
Well presumably there is a risk-weighted effect to take into account - you want to vote, and your vote to have the highest weight, but you would rather vote with a lower weight than fall under a bus on the way and fail to vote at all… Clearly it will increase the voting weight of those who can do quick risk analysis calculations. As someone who can claim to be a qualified Risk Manager I’m not going to complain about the idea
3rd April 2008 at 10:23 am
“If you really want to see a decent candidiate as your MP, you have to do more than just vote for them; you need to give them the highest possible vote you can. So to give your real choice the value they deserve, remember to get to St Somethings Parish Hall at 2158. You don’t even need your polling card….”
3rd April 2008 at 11:12 am
Oh dear! I was taken in for a while, but you do raise the issue, and I do like Liam’s knocking up leaflet.
If there’s one thing that is, as far as I can see, totally missing from the current electoral reform talk, is that it’s all about The Palace of Westminster.
A higher priority to me than AV vs AV-Plus to replace ‘first past the post’ is giving people real control of their local communities.
For example: why is there only one way of paying for local services - Council Tax. Why not allow local authorities to choose whether they want Council Tax, Local Income Tax, Land Value Tax or some combination of any? Why not give them the right to demand zero carbon homes: today?
If we finally give power back to local people, we might manage to break away from “growth for the good of the economy”, and have development and investment, because it is really needed, not just dictated from Whitehall.
3rd April 2008 at 12:31 pm
(Apologies to everyone apart from Laurie - this is rather long!)
the notion that we are labouring under some colossal electoral injustice is, I’m afraid, just another instance of Lib Dem whining…
I agree that the situation is probably not as desperate as all that. However, that’s not to say that huge strides could be made to improve the quality of our electoral and governing processes.
Also, I for one believe in something more like PR than what we’ve got not because it would improve Lib Dem fortunes, but because it is a laudable goal in itself. Indeed, I am only really a Lib Dem supporter because they are the only party who are consistently “for” electoral reform.
We might know what the rules are in advance, but the rules are so obviously unfair in fairly easily fixable ways that those who are not complaining should surely be viewed with far more distrust than those who are.
up until now, what I am about to propose would not have been technically possible
I disagree - considering that the succeeding comments have made it clear that you would only discriminate on age and sex, an electronic system is clearly not needed, since most people have at least three pieces of ID with their name, gender and age on them (passport, driving license, birth certificate). These could easily be checked at the polling station without recourse to an electronic system.
it is surely now time that we gave serious consideration to the possibilities opened up for us through the power of electronic voting
Aside from the variable-sized vote that you are describing here, do you see any other advantages from electronic voting? Because for this purpose, as I have said, electronic voting is not really necessary.
in the form of a large government database containing everyone’s personal information
I think I’ve made my views quite clear on this, and whenever pressed on the subject of scope creep or abuse, you inevitably resort to humour and insisting that “it’s bound to happen”. I don’t think that you are really taking in the fairly strong and reasonable fears other people have that big government databases, once constructed, can be abused. I don’t really want to go over all that again here because I don’t honestly believe you’ll change your mind, and I think that it is a bit of a shame that you simply don’t seem to have it in you to engage with this sort of argument.
Once votes have been cast, they are then scaled (key point) according to some simple (or perhaps even rather complex) weighting function…
you can see that the proposed scheme gives little weighting to votes from the very young and inexperienced. The weighting then ramps up with age, before tailing off again later in life
Why does it tail off, and at what rate? When do old people no longer receive any vote at all? Why? Are not the old the most wise of us all? Surely they should therefore receive far more votes than a 20-25-year old (as it seems from the graph).
Here lies the core of my argument against: that there are so many questions, and so many variables, that attempting to compute a “fair” vote weight as age (and gender) varies is impossible. You appear to think that the view of the average 40-year old is worth far, far more than the view of an average 60-year old. Why? What happens in those intervening 20 years that makes a 60-year old less able to decide what is best for the country for the next 5 years?
Beyond impossibility, introducing a system of vote-weighting requires someone to come up with the initial graph, and a body to review it over time. These bodies will inevitably be politicized by the government of the time to sway the graph in their own favour. This is not a good thing, since political justifications will get dressed up with science to try and explain the new thinking. How do you avoid the politicization of the vote weight?
I’m thinking that maybe if we were to give women a greater priority earlier in life, then we might not find ourselves fighting quite so many disastrous and un-winnable wars around the world
Sure, and if we simply disallowed the government from launching such wars on pain of jail time we could accomplish the same effect. Giving young women more of a vote does not actually solve the core problem of forcing the government of the day to do a decent cost-benefit analysis of any warmaking and make sure that we only get entangled in wars that really are worthwhile. It’s my belief that few are, but one could make the case for interactions in Sierra Lione and Kosovo, and peacekeeping duties in Africa. There was a genocide in the Sudan while the Iraq war was on that we could have stepped in to prevent. Ditto Rwanda. Hard-headed judgement on these matters should not be trumped by emotional appeals, whether from voting women clamouring not to go to war, nor voting men clamouring that we should go to war, nor any other permutation.
without such technical arrangements in place, the electoral system is a very blunt tool which can be hopelessly unresponsive to pressing problems
Well, unless you are going to also advocate a return to Athenian collective-decision-making democracy instead of our current representative democracy (which I honestly wouldn’t be averse to, you simply haven’t done so here), then it is not the job of the electoral system to be responsive to pressing problems. Its job is to provide high-quality representatives of the people that can work out solutions themselves. In that respect, our current institutions are clearly suboptimal on both counts. For me, it matters far more that we get bright, motivated and selfless people as our leaders than tinkering with the voting system to ensure that some arbitrary conditions hold sway over the voters.
You have at least inspired me to attempt my own electoral reform piece for LDV.
3rd April 2008 at 10:05 pm
Thanks Sanbiki!
Indeed, I am only really a Lib Dem supporter because they are the only party who are consistently “for” electoral reform.
Come now, there are so many more reasons to be a Lib Dem!
Aside from the variable-sized vote that you are describing here, do you see any other advantages from electronic voting?
Yes, it would engage more people.
I don’t think that you are really taking in the fairly strong and reasonable fears other people have that big government databases, once constructed, can be abused.
The way I phrased it, was a bit of a wind up. I know that databases are a problem at this moment.
Why does it tail off, and at what rate?
It’s all up for grabs! But my graphs tail off at the point where people’s concerns start to become distinctly parochial.
Are not the old the most wise of us all?
They ought to be but, based upon my own observations, I have to say that it really doesn’t show.
How do you avoid the politicization of the vote weight?
Well don’t we have an electoral commission which takes the politics out of seat boundaries and stuff?
You have at least inspired me to attempt my own electoral reform piece for LDV.
Great! The more, the merrier!
3rd April 2008 at 10:30 pm
Laurence, I think LD Members who don’t do any work in their constituencies should have no votes. After all, those who preach but don’t practice are the worst sinners of all aren’t they?
3rd April 2008 at 10:48 pm
Martin, I have done one leaflet delivery so far, and intend to do many more. I have also volunteered for canvassing, but have been turned down which I am a bit miffed about. They’ve obviously been reading this blog!
3rd April 2008 at 11:16 pm
it would engage more people.
Considering the vast information asymmetries in the voting market (politicians know quite a bit but have a habit of lying about it; pundits know a bit but think they know a lot; newspapers have agendas; journalists are lazy; most voters don’t know very much and can only believe that which they read and see on the telly), winning the War On Apathy is going to be a bit harder than just giving everyone a logon.
The real problems with lack of engagement stem from other issues IMHO: whether you think we whine about PR too much, it is pretty uncontroversial, surely, to say that FPTP is a barrier to engagement by making a lot of peoples’ votes utterly irrelevant. If everyone knew that their vote, however heavily weighted, was going to make a difference, you might see a lot more people voting.
Secondly, everyone reasonably thinks that politicians are a bunch of crooks and liars, and giving people variable votes won’t help that problem either.
Furthermore, once you’ve engaged people, you have to make sure that they have access to good-quality information about politics which they don’t right now: newspaper columnists are ill-informed idiots, from Richard Littlejohn to Polly Toynbee to Johann Hari; TV news concentrates on soundbites, doesn’t get deep enough into the issues, and allows talking heads to basically tell lies live on air and get away with it because there is no time to fact-check; party political blogs carry heavily-spun messages. These informational problems are probably really hard to solve, but they are ultimately far more important than how easy it is for people to physically vote on the day. In my opinion, anyway.
don’t we have an electoral commission which takes the politics out of seat boundaries and stuff?
To a degree, yes, you’re right. However, I think that vote-weighting on the scale (0-4) you’re talking about would be far, far more tempting for politicians to try and get their hands on, and so they are much more likely to. Besides, haven’t there been rows about how the current Electoral Commission draws up new boundaries to benefit Labour?
7th April 2008 at 10:06 am
Surely the pink and blue lines should swap places. As women’s life expectancy is longer, the pink line should have the longer tail to balance out lifetime influence.
Mind you why should we balance out lifetime influence? Once one is dead, one should leave these things to the living. Better for lifetime influence to be a flat function of lifespan. I’ll leave the curve as an exercise for the reader.
[I am of course humouring rather than genuinely interested.]
On the IT: security is not the issue, transparency is. Computers are inherently un-transparent. The Dutch are moving away from computers for this reason.
7th April 2008 at 10:45 am
Surely the pink and blue lines should swap places. As women’s life expectancy is longer, the pink line should have the longer tail to balance out lifetime influence.
No. Remember that we are seeking to drastically reduce electoral influence in the twilight years, thus women’s greater life expectancy becomes an insignificant factor in my view.
Computers are inherently un-transparent.
That is simply not true.