It’s a well established pattern that candidates with names higher up the alphabet do slightly better in multi-member ward elections in the UK than those with names further down the alphabet. Other factors (including the perceived ethnicity and gender of a name, along with other information such as the party label) usually have a larger effect, but there is something of an alphabetic effect all the same.
New research has shown this to be the case in the first STV local council elections held in Scotland, leading to calls for change.
The Scotsman reports:
Across Scotland there were 247 cases where candidates who appeared higher on the ballot paper got more votes than a candidate from the same party further down the list, and only 53 cases where the lower-placed candidate got more votes.
Voting reform campaigners Fairshare said: “The probability of such an unequal distribution occurring purely by chance is less than one in a million billion billion billion.”
A recently-completed Scottish Government consultation produced a range of alternative suggestions, including drawing lots to decide the order of names on the ballot paper, producing a random order or printing a variety of ballot papers ensuring every possible permutation of names is used.
Ministers are now considering the responses to the consultation before drawing up the regulations for the 2012 local government elections.
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3 Comments
if that is the case then printing different orderings of names in each constituency seems the answer. a bit expensive but if it is fairer than it doesn’t matter
Flo Fflach, some misunderstanding there, I think. The problem is not between “constituencies” – the problem occurred within the wards. So to avoid the ‘list ordering’ effect you have to randomise the names on the ballot papers within each ward.
That is not expensive or difficult because bar-coded ballot papers are printed by digital technology that can be programmed to print the list on each ballot paper in a unique order. No problem in reading the votes back in because that is also done electronically.
But having the list of candidates on each ballot paper uniquely randomised does raise some practical issues, especially for voters with certain types of disability, as Fairshare Voting Reform made clear in its submission.
I raised this very point with a local authority Chief Exec (who shall remain nameless) at an ERS/Electoral Commission fringe event at a party conference. She completely dismissed this as “perceived” difficulty and reported that this was also the view across other Chief Execs and SOLACE. I then asked other campaigners in the room from around the country to say if they had seen the same issue in their areas, and most of them had (not that Lib Dems suffered in the main; the Tories and Labour lost out in more instances we knew of). But electoral administrators fear the added complication of dealing with this *genuine* (not perceived) problem, since it would involve either a few different versions of the ballot paper for the same ward (which would allow a candidate to be near the top, the middle and the bottom among different individual voters or areas), or the novel idea of a circular ballot paper (hat tip to Amy Rodger). But fair processes are for the benefit of the public and our democracy, not administrators.