We all understand the disproportionate effects of first past the post (FPTP), but what about the distance it puts between voters and politicians?
The size of constituencies used in FPTP, and the even larger ones used in STV, mean that politicians can’t hear the voices of individual communities clearly. The link between voters and MP gets weaker the larger the size of the constituency they are elected in.
There is only one electoral system that will make the gap smaller and deliver proportional results, non-contiguous first past the post. For an explanation on how this works, click here. (For reference, 19% of council seats are Lib Dem, not including district seats.)
An MP is not given an easy ride in safe seats in this system, FPTP/AV constituency boundaries mean it is practically certain who will get elected. For a party to lose representation under STV, there may have to be a significant swing of many thousands of votes in a 5 member constituency of hundreds of thousands of voters. No parts of wards will go neglected, Labour parts of Tory safe seats will have representation, and vice versa. In Non-Con. voting, the majority in safe seats would consist of no more than a few thousand votes, meaning a challenger could get elected first time round, without having to build up a voter base over many election cycles. Communities will get the representatives they vote for, and parties will have a democratic mandate because they have won elections to get where they are. A fringe 5% of the vote is not the same as 50% of the vote in 50 wards.
As councillors and MPs would always be of the same political party, team building would be made easier. Councillors would be the local face of this team, meeting constituents on a day to day basis. Or, rephrased, meeting many more constituents than the Mp could do alone. They would be able to answer questions on policy that may not be made clear, or distorted in the media. For example, communication over immigration would have been made a lot easier between Labour and their constituents if voters had a direct conduit to their Mp, who is currently far too remote for many voters to access. The same message coming from a local person would have a different resonance than if it had come from a cabinet minister that spends their life in London.
This would be an important counterbalance to celebrity politics. Elections should be won on ideals and not on slick media TV debates. Months of hard work should not go to waste because of a slip-up by one person on one night. Community sized constituencies would mean a bad performance on one night would not mean electoral disaster, as one team of activists could saturate an entire constituency in one day. Voters could be met and the message that the party wants to get across strengthened.
I would like to here how you received this idea, and criticism is welcome.
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19 Comments
The only people who really want to change the electoral system are a Lib Dem party desperate to taste power.
If that wasn’t the case, then their efforts would be received in a different manner.
So LibDem’s, this is your challenge. Defeat the war mongering and corrupt Gordon Brown and the Labour Party, for surely the LibDem’s are the only true party of the right in Britain….of course you can wave bye bye to the south east.
@JOn – get a life
@Robert Draper – bizarre, arcane, unworkable. BTW learn to spell independEnt, and ‘hear’ not ‘here’ ….
Fails IIA and cloning, hugely: the way to win this election is to split your opponent’s vote as thinly as you can.
Let’s say we have 100 wards with a quota of 10, 10 Tory candidates, and 100 Liberal candidates, evenly distributed. The Liberal candidates, between them, take 90% of the vote, and the Tories take 10%. Per candidate, that is 9% for each Liberal, and 10% for each Tory. The Tory candidates win every ward and every seat.
In general, the winner is whoever has a position that has the least competition within the segment of the population that agrees with its views. That’s going to be the extremist parties.
It doesn’t work. I suggest you study voting systems theory.
I couldn’t make head nor tail of this, either the system of electing MPs or the alleged link between Councillors and MPs. I think if you tried to simplify it to the point where it really made any sense, you’d find you’d reinvented the ‘best loser’ form of additional member system suggested back in the 1970s.
Don’t waste time trying to come up with ever more clever and arcane electoral systems. No system is ever going to be perfect, and there are several workable systems in use in various countries (including the various countries of the UK). The Lib Dem preference for STV is long-established, principled and justifiable. There’s not the slightest point in diverting political energy into the geekish enterprise of inventing outlandish new ways of building a rolling locomotive facilitation device.
Also, what Andrew said…. (By the way, Andrew, what’s IIA?)
Robert: I am genuinely unsure I can get a solid grip on what it is you are suggesting. Perhaps you could work on setting out what you are on about more clearly? Having said that, what I did follow didn’t exactly leap out at me as “the answer”. I’ll stick with STV for now.
Lets say there are 100 wards and you need 10 wards to form a constituency. If there are only 10 Tory candidates, and if the Tories won in every ward they stood in, they could take a maximum of one seat.
Could you please elaborate as to how they could take all the seats?
Well, at least the feedback allows me to see that the article has failed.
Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives: the principle that adding more losers to the election should not change the outcome. Independence of cloning is closely related: the principle that adding more identical candidates – same party with no distinguishing features, for example – should still not change the outcome. Regular plurality voting doesn’t meet either criterion, which is one of the biggest problems with it, but doesn’t fail anywhere near as badly as this one. (You can’t get IIA to work in a voting system that doesn’t have other serious flaws – Arrow’s theorem – but it’s still useful to look at how well or badly they handle that case)
How do you fit 10 Tories into one seat? Are they supposed to dogpile? That doesn’t make any sense.
“The size of constituencies used in FPTP, and the even larger ones used in STV, mean that politicians can’t hear the voices of individual communities clearly. The link between voters and MP gets weaker the larger the size of the constituency they are elected in.”
I think this is overly presumptive. With currently sized constituencies MPs manage to connect with individual communites, and with multi member STV MPs would be forced to connect with individual communities to keep their job. Remember that the larger STV constituencies would have multiple members allowing individual communities a greater opportunity to contact an MP than if they had only one.
100 council wards which are represented in Westminster parliament by 10 Mps, 10 conservative council candidates who stand in 10 council wards, if they all won, the Tories would have 10 wards that would become a single constituency and would send one MP to Westminster. They would have 10% of the Westminster seats, not 100%.
“I think this is overly presumptive. With currently sized constituencies MPs manage to connect with individual communites(sic), and with multi member STV MPs would be forced to connect with individual communities to keep their job. Remember that the larger STV constituencies would have multiple members allowing individual communities a greater opportunity to contact an MP than if they had only one. ” Kieran.
It is an assumption that Mps will get more distant under STV. I look at it this way, does the Isle of Wight (110,000) feel as close to A.Turner as the Outer Hebrides (22000) feel to A. Macneil? My answer is no.
I specifically disagree with the point “currently sized constituencies MPs manage to connect with individual communities”, communities that usually vote Labour in a safe Conservative seat are ignored, and vice versa. Under the NC system constituencies would still have the same sized electorates, but all the individual communities in the ward have voted for the winning party. To create a closer link, I envisioned councillors coming into the equation. It would have been much easier to explain had I left them out of it, and simply said that votes were toted up at ward level.
I also believe that Mps under STV would cater to idealogical constituencies, would connect themselves to their principles and not a set of voters. They would find it impossible to connect to a single community and maintain their commitments to everyone else, let alone connect to the entire 700,000 in an MPs electorate.
STV does give voters choice, but also rewards parties for coming 2nd, 3rd, 5th. Council wards don’t really represent communities, especially the ones that have over 15,000 members, but a councillor knock every voters door, something impossible in STV.
I have a degree in politics from a respected university, and I specialised a lot of my study time, before and since, on electoral systems.
I have no idea whatsoever how this system is supposed to work. Rob, perhaps you could have a look at the excellent electoral reform society site and see how they explain things, then redo a summary in the comments?
I’m a fan of STV as the best system I’ve seen, for a large number of reasons; if someone genuinely has a better option, I’m interested, but I don’t understand, at all, what you’re proposing.
And, frankly, if someone with my specialised training can’t get my head around your explanation then it’s not explained clearly. Sorry; you may have a great idea here, but you need to explain it as such.
After some deliberation, and a bit of guesswork, it seems that the best that could possibly be said is that this proposal is seriously lacking any understanding of what elections involve or the nature of democratic representation.
(1) How can an MP effectively represent a constituency made up of seven or eight different council wards which are nowhere near each other, and who have nothing in common apart from the party allegiance of the councillor which represents them?
(2) How can parties and candidates effectively select candidates for MP when they wouldn’t know the size or shape of the constituency they would be seeking to represent?
(3) How and when would elections for Westminster actually work? Either the size and shape of constituencies for Westminster elections would be fixed at some point, which would allow elections actually to be held, or they would be entirely fluid, depending on the party allegiance of local councillors.
If it was fixed, and allowed (as it would need to do) three or four years’ time afterwards so that parties could campaign properly, and ensure that their candidate is known, liked and trusted by local people, then by the time the election is held (let alone during the MP’s term of office) then another set of council elections will have been held and no doubt the political composition of representation of council wards would also change, which would defeat the entire purpose of the system.
However, it is also possible that an MP’s constituency could change shape during their term of office if council elections happened, or they might also effectively be removed from office because of council elections, if the party entitlement dropped because the party lost council seats. Is it fair or reasonable for an MP no longer to represent the area with the main local employer, or main local services, or even their own house or constituency office, simply because local people chose to elect a councillor from a different party? What happens to an elected MP if one councillor defects to a different party, or becomes an independent – would the MP be automatically removed from office? That would not only hand enormous power to individuals who may bear a grudge against them (for example, because they sought but lost the selection contest against the MP for the candidacy for Parliament), but would disenfranchise voters who know and like their MP but have no influence over them losing their position.
What happens for people who live in wards which have a councillor whose party allegiance is not well enough represented locally to entitle them to a single MP? Would they have no representative in Parliament at all? If not, who gets to decide what happens to them?
What happens for rural areas where there are lots of independent councillors – who would choose an independent candidate for the MP?
What about Scotland, where STV wards have 3 or 4 councillors for the same area, and not a single ward in the country has all of its councillors from the same party? Or indeed those metropolitan boroughs who have three-member wards, each elected under FPTP, where there are also sometimes councillors from different parties?
Would there even be Westminster elections any more, or would MPs be chosen by small committees of councillors?
How would the size and shape of constituencies be determined if there were enough council wards represented by the same party in an area to entitle that party to two MPs?
Not a single one of these questions is answered directly or by inference in the description of the system. My conclusion is this: a hell of a lot more work would need to be done to turn this idea into a coherent proposal and, even then, it is likely that the obvious flaws and deficiencies would make it utterly redundant in any serious comparison of systems. It is often said that no electoral system is perfect – this one seems to me to be as far from perfect as it is possible to imagine.
10 MPs standing, not 10 councillors.
What you have to realise is that every time you take a subset of the population (say, a voting district), and say that the majority of that district will have the authority to represent everybody in the district, you’re discarding the votes of some of the population, and hence making the system less representative. This is how Labour managed to get a majority in Parliament with only 35% of the popular vote. The proposal here does it twice (once per ward and then once per MP), which makes the effect significantly worse, allowing tiny fractions of the population to select the government. It’s basically the opposite of proportional representation.
Any realistic voting system needs to discard less votes than plurality voting, not more.
The biggest advantage of STV is that when it does break down (as every voting system must), it does so in a manner that is not particularly worrying. STV’s failure mode comes when the voter preferences are arranged such that there is a group of candidates that are all about equally preferable, and that group is larger than the number of seats available to them. When this happens, STV will pick candidates from that group in an erratic and unreliable manner, and not necessarily include the one who would have won in plurality voting. Since they were all about equally preferable, this is not a serious problem.
Illustrative example: suppose we have candidates A, B, C, D, E, and three seats. Individual approval rating of the candidates is: A 86%, B 33%, C 32%, D 32%, E 5%. STV would be expected to elect A plus two of {B, C, D}, but might not pick B as a winner – depending on exactly how people voted.
Very few voting systems perform quite this well. There are some interesting methods that are a little bit better than STV (mostly trying to satisfy the Condorcet criterion as well, which says that a candidate who pairwise beats every other candidate must always be elected), but they’re substantially similar and just nail down the failure cases a bit more firmly.
It’s worth noting that this is not an aphorism, it’s mathematically proven. We have a very detailed understanding of ways in which voting systems can behave badly, and ways to design systems that are resistant to them.
This is a key point in a different way as well. There’s huge amounts of evidence that ‘safe’ wards contribute to both voter apathy and the rise of certain extremist parties.
This system, if I’m understanding the basic properly, proposes to use the existing wards to allocate seats after votes are counted, meaning that parties are even more likely to concentrate resources in swing wards and ignore ‘safe’ wards, leaving them even more ignored.
At least currently a ‘safe’ ward in a marginal seat still gets some campaigning within it for a general election.
Other point I’m completely unclear on; who are the candidates, and which votes are being counted?
I am sorry I couldn’t answer your questions in the original article. This site says articles must be less than 500 words and not published elsewhere on the internet, so I couldn’t take what I originally wrote on my blog. Unfortunately, the images on the blog will no longer appear. So what I’ve done is create a PDF file, which I’ve always been more comfortable with.
This is the link: http://www.mediafire.com/NCFPTP
I’ve answered you questions at the end, Derek Young. MatGB, I hope the PDF answers your questions. Safe seats will have majorities of no more than a few thousand, so a single person wishing to knock on those doors could easily do so. No safe seat would be insurmountable, and candidates would not have to build up votes over many election cycles to be within striking distance of the incumbent.
I’d like to point out that council wards are not less proportional, small parties have councilors but no Mps, Lib-Dems have 19% of non-district cllrs and only 9% of MP s. Though I do take note that I’ve been (understandably) misinterpreted, I am not proposing to discard votes twice.
Well, I’ve had a look at that pdf. I think I just about understand what you’re proposing, and I think you should give it up! Some problems:
— Voters in a minority in their particular ward are as completely ignored as under the current system. (Which means, as MatGB has pointed out, that if you live in a very safe ward in an otherwise marginal seat, you’ve become an irrelevant voter with this change – a serious downside.)
— If I’ve understood your last Q&A answer correctly, it appears you really are proposing that winners of wards who don’t win a constituency form a sort of electoral college, which makes democracy even more indirect.
— Council wards have boundaries that are pretty much as arbitrary as FPTP parliamentary constituencies, which makes them a pointless basis for the sort of conjuration you’re doing.
— If you’re going to get rid of the ‘local link’ for MPs, then just do it, and have regional or national constituencies – you could have AMS if you wanted. There’s no point in a system in which people from different wards get lumped in with other wards on a scattered geographical basis, just because a plurality of people in each ward happened to vote for the same party. Some people believe MPs have a genuine role as local advocates; others believe that their proper function is purely as national legislators. If you believe the former, then scattering wards around in unpredictable ways destroys the effectiveness of the MP in that role; if you believe the latter, then there are much, much better ways of determining the allocation of seats to parties.
If nobody had invented STV, or regional open list PR voting, then your proposal would be an interesting contribution to a developing discipline of electoral systems. As it is, much better systems exist, and yours does not solve any problems with those other systems that could not be better solved in another way. Given how difficult it is going to be to ever get a change from the current appalling system to one of the much fairer systems that exist, inventing a new system with no discernible advantages can only impede the cause of much-needed reform.
Rob
On the topic of better electoral systems, the existing FPTP system could be converted to PR Government without changing the electoral system.
This could be done simply by changing the way Parliament votes, by scaling the parliamentary voting strength of each party to reflect their total votes, rather than their seats. (MPs get a fractional vote less than, or more than 1, depending on whether their party is relatively over or under-represented in the House based on total votes cast.)
OK, maybe not a brilliant system, but when there is so much resistance to changing the electoral structure and mechanisms, maybe it would be easier to get agreement to change the way Parliament conducts its votes and keep all the familiar aspects of FPTP.
One of the things I really dislike about these discussions is the way people talk about FPTP as if its the same system we’ve always used.
First past the post in single member constituencies was almost unknown until 1884, and ws only the norm after 1947 with Labour’s misguided Representation of the People Act. Until then, most constiuencies were based around natural boundaries analogous to local authorities, and many had more than one member (therefore they were elected via Block Voting not First Past the Post).
The “familiar” aspects of FPTP mean regular redrawing of seat borders due to population fluctuation and constituency boundaries that rarely make any sense to voters within them (seriously, Torbay doesn’t contain a huge chunk of Torbay, and my constiuency, Calder Valley, is “the rural bits of Calderdale”, it’s impossible to travel from where I live to where my PPC lives without leaving and re-entering the constituency unless I want to take back lanes through pennine hills.
A sensible constituency based system would have larger seats based around understood boundaries and if the population fluctuates significantly, reduce or increase the number of MPs in the district. Fairly easily done without confusing voters (the residents of Shibden just outside Halifax are about to leave the Halifax constituency and join the Calder Valley constituency for no apparent reason for example).
Rob’s proposals make voter confusion substantially more likely, remove the ability to vote for or against an individual candidate and seem like a solution looking for a problem, but that doesn’t actually address any of the real problems of FPTP.
Stephen, it would be much harder to implement your system. As it is right now, every MP is equal, with an equal mandate, no one is more important than any other. That’s the way it’s always been right back to De Montford. We’ve changed the way MPs are selected, who can vote, where they represent and many other things, but we’ve never changed how much each is worth. I’m not actually aware of any Parliament in the world that does what you suggest.
In addition, it assumes that when people vote, they’re ignoring candidates and just voting for a party; that’s demonstrably not the case, and never has been; I’ve voted to re-elect a sitting MP I thought was good when living ina seat my preferred party didn’t have much chance in, and I’d do it again (if my sitting MP wasn’t retiring she’d get my vote, no question, I’d campaign elsewhere).
I want a system that allows voters real choice and real control, that strengthens the constituency link, reduces confusion and gives a broadly, but not necessarily exactly proportional vote.
If someone can come up with a system to acheive these goals better than STV does, I’m all ears.
MattGB
I agree with you about what you want from an electoral system. I think it is achievable, as follows.
Accept for a moment the idea of fractional votes for MPs. Aren’t Lib Dems a Radical party?
(Yes MPs have one vote each because it has always been the case.
One vote each made it easy to count, which was sensible in the 13th C. We now have machine readable swipe cards that make recording votes and counting decimals easy and reliable.
MPs have constituencies with different numbers on the electoral roll, different numbers of voters and different majorities, so why are they all equal when it comes to giving backing to a Government programme? Under other PR systems the number of MPs gets scaled to reflect the total vote. It comes to the same thing. )
If you accept for a moment the concept of fractional votes for MPs, then only a small change is required to the public voting system.
Yes, I agree that people vote both for the party and for the candidate. They should be able to do both without compromise. This means – One vote for the party and one for the representative. The ‘party’ vote should determine the relative strength of the parties and who forms the Government, and the ‘Representative’ vote should determine who is elected as MP to represent the Constituency.
This gives the voter real control both when voting for the party – every vote counts, and for the MP – you have already cast your party vote so you can focus on voting for the best Candidate to represent the Constituency (by whatever criteria you choose).
There is no need for party lists or multimember constituencies.
This certainly strengthens the constituency link and there are no safe seats, or rather the only safe seats will be built by popular MPs who maintain their popularity locally. The Single Member Constituency reinforces the link.
It is simple to vote, simple to count and simple to administer because the mechanics are very similar to the FPTP system. (But the results are very different), so confusion should be minimised.
It gives very accurate PR government and the advantages or differences to STV are
Much simpler to understand and count.
Single member Constituency
Choose both your party and your MP.
I have skipped some details – There’s more at http://www.dprvoting.org