I know this is a very “party report” heavy couple of days on LDV with Zoe’s and Sal’s excellent reports on the Federal Conference Committee and the Federal Executive respectively, but there is yet more.
Last September, Conference approved Constitutional Amendments bringing in One Member One Vote for Conference.
However, the Federal Executive subsequently received advice from the Chair of the Federal Appeals Panel that the Committee Election Regulations would need to be changed in order for the next set of Committee elections to be conducted by One Member One Vote. That’s why local parties were advised to elect Federal and Regional Conference representatives for this year.
I’m part of a small group of Federal Executive members who are looking at the regulations or the Leadership, Presidential and Committee elections. The first stage of our work is to change the Committee Election Regulations to permit elections by One Member One Vote. You can see the draft changes here. The current version is here
There are two substantive changes. The first is that the requirement for nominations from 2 conference representatives has been replaced by 10 party members. This is consistent with the requirement in Scotland which has worked well since its introduction in 2009.
The second change is to get rid of the paragraph that forbids candidates from using email, e-groups, conferencing or websites to promote their candidacy. In the days of free social media, it’s an anachronism.
Spring Conference will be asked to ratify these changes in the Federal Executive report, but we were keen to seek feedback from members about these changes. The principle of OMOV has already been passed by Conference. This is simply about getting the regulations right so that committees can be elected in the same way. Please send your feedback to [email protected] by 12 noon on Friday 5th February.
The reason we want to make the changes now rather than lump them all in with the Governance Review is to enable any by-elections at regional or state level to be carried out by One Member One Vote.
We have not forgotten that we will need to consult very widely on any provisions for quotas on the basis of gender, BAME or other protected characteristics as outlined in the motion passed by Conference in Autumn 2014 which stated:
“Conference instructs the Federal Executive to consult fully within the party, and then submit a properly written constitutional amendment to a conference before the 2016 round of committee elections, to enable conference to debate arrangements for gender and any other quotas for future elections.”
We will let you know in due course how you can contribute to that discussion.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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10 Comments
The Daily Politics covered electronic voting in Estonia, not very secure apparently.
The draft version seems to be in Pages format, which is Apple-specific. It probably wants to be in PDF so more people can read it.
Thanks, Zoe. I’ve changed that now.
Just had a look at the election regulations.
1. My feeling is that if it is meant to be OMOV then the nominators should also be members not party organisations or sections (local party etc). Bluntly if you want to be elected, not being able to find 10 signatures in this electronic age should tell you something.
2. Make the default electronic in the regulations. People should have to opt for paper votes. The cost of doing an all member paper mailing is prohibitive. Automatic paper if we do not hold a working email address (I guess 20% but the the figure would be informative for FE members to know). I would recommend that an earlier all member mailing (not an email) ought to do a prenotification of these elections and ask the missing folk for their email address if they have one.
I agree with Erlend.
Additionally, we can not call it Ensuring that committees can be elected by One Member One Vote, because it doesn’t actually do that. What is ensures is that half the committee places are elected on a OMOV system. For Federal Committees to be elected by OMOV we would have to have direct OMOV elections for all committee places which means that the placemen (11 members in total) would have to be replaced by members elected by the party as a whole rather than by the great and the good.
Under the present system some members have two votes, some three and some four depending on whether they are councillors, MP’s MEP’s, Councillors and MP’s, and if they sit on any of the committees they get an additional vote.
I welcome the news that these regulations will come to York. The impression we got at Saturday’s FCC was that they were going to be bundled up into the governance review, which would have been unhelpfully last minute for this year’s elections.
I haven’t looked through the new regulations in detail yet but I’m slightly confused by the old ones banning conferencing, websites, etc. The rules used for the 2012 and 2014 elections certainly allowed FaceBook campaigning, in a change from previous elections.
I note the footnote on both old and new versions saying these were amended in September 2011, which would have been ahead of the last annual elections in 2011. Obviously this date is wrong for the new regs, but if it’s correct for the old regs, was there a change made in 2012 which has been lost, or was FaceBook campaigning just allowed by a Returning Officer’s ruling…?
On a minor point, one candidate produced promotional badges in 2014. The rules should be clarified to either explicitly ban this sort of real world campaigning expenditure or, preferably in my view, to allow it with a very small cash limit of say £20.
Jon, there will be more consultation in more depth for the gender/BAME quotas but that needs to be done over more time.
Iain, this is about how the elections are carried out, not how the committees are made up, so your point is not relevant to this discussion.
Gosh, quotas are creeping in all over the place as a foregone conclusion, aren’t they?
I presume LDV is not the only vehicle for this consultation, so as a local party chair, or simply as a member, am I going to hear about it by any other route?
It’s a welcome change that the consultation is happening, and generally the proposals are good. There are a few small improvements that could also be made (such as fixing a typo!), but also there is one chunk of changes which conference asked the FE to make that aren’t included in these proposals. It’d be better if they were: http://www.markpack.org.uk/137142/lib-dem-committee-election-rules/