As I said earlier, the party’s presidential and vice presidential elections have been counted.
Josh Babarinde and Victoria Collins have been elected as President and Vice President respectively.
The presidential result was as follows:
Josh Babarinde 3742 69%
Prue Bray 1698 31%
Turnout 9.1%
The vice presidential race was closer
Victoria Collins 2788 57%
Kamran Hussain 2102 43%
Turnout 8l2%
Congratulations to both Josh and Victoria who take up their new roles on 1st January. The President chairs the Federal Board and is there to be the voice of the members to the leadership. The Vice President is responsible for increasing diversity in the party.
All four candidates contributed to an illuminating, positive and interesting campaign.
After the count, Josh said:
I’m so grateful to Liberal Democrat members for electing me to serve as our next Party President.
With the traditional parties failing to stand up to Reform’s division, I’m fired up to help ensure our party is ready to be the last line of defence against them.
I’ll be working across the party to broaden our reach, apply my youth work experience to engaging young voters ahead of votes at 16, and get battle-ready for next May’s elections for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd and councils and Mayors across England.
Ed Davey added:
Huge congratulations to Josh Babarinde on his election as President of the Liberal Democrats. Josh has already achieved so much as an MP, including securing a landmark change in the law to protect victims of domestic abuse.
He has also worked tirelessly to stand up for the people of Eastbourne, demonstrating that Liberal Democrat community politics is the best antidote to Nigel Farage’s dangerous, divisive politics. I have no doubt Josh will be a tremendous President and together we will take the fight to Reform UK and stand up for a decent, caring Britain.
I also want to thank Prue Bray for her spirited campaign and dedication and commitment to the party, and Mark Pack for the brilliant job he’s done as President of the Liberal Democrats, helping us to deliver our best ever election results.
* 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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18 Comments
Do we know the turnout ?
Not high – now added
Congratulations to Josh and Victoria, but 9.1% and 8.2% turnout? Seriously? I hope the turnout was better for the other positions.
Good grief. That is an appallingly low turnout. A total lack of engagement by the membership with the presidential campaign.
There is a Wikipedia page on the presidency of the Liberal Democrats which lists turnout for each election. I can’t vouch for its accuracy.
812% is a turnout worthy of North Korea. Sadly it was only 8.2% of a worryingly low membership.
Have the results been published on our website yet. I couldn’t see them under internal elections. I could see a press release that didn’t include the numbers.
With a turnout of 9.1% and 5440 votes the total membership is 59,780.
With a turnout of 8.2% and 4898 votes the total membership is 59,732.
What a shame the turnout hasn’t been given to two decimal places.
I would have voted but never received a ballot – the party knows where I am when they want my money though!
Voting for President & Vice-President was easy enough but the ballot paper also had all of the committees listed and seeing it all together, I know, put some people off even starting. I did, but it was such a cumbersome and time consuming process to view all the manifestos, one at a time, and then forgetting who said what and having to go back and check again before I selected my order of preference. I could, of course, have just picked names I recognised but I didn’t think that was right or fair. In the end though I missed voting on three of the bodies because I had had enough. If we want more people to vote we could start by making viewing and comparing manifestos easier.
I agree with Elaine that the ballot is daunting because some categories have so many candidates (admittedly a nice problem to have).
I found the hustings transcriptions to be quite useful, but it’s still really difficult to go through. I’m not sure what the solution is, but there has to be an easier way.
Agree with Elaine and John the process was far too long winded but i believe the result was not overly effected by the poor turnout .
I thought the ballot form itself was quite well designed: The way you could drop and drag candidates into preference order and rearrange them seemed intuitive to me. Maybe there could have been a clearer option for people who just wanted to vote for President and not for the various committees – for whom most people would be less likely to have heard of the candidates. But in the end, LibDem members are already people who are politically committed, so are unlikely to be put off by a complicated ballot form.
Which leaves as the most likely reason for the low turnout that neither candidate was inspiring to many members. I suspect one big problem there was we had two candidates who were both presenting almost exactly the same viewpoints on the key issues of the election, potentially leaving any member who disagreed with no-one to vote for.
I wish Josh well but hope he will reflect on the low turnout and consider how to engage more with ordinary members.
I’d say the issue with the other elections is there are far too many positions available for a single STV election.
We really ought to be electing the committees in halves and accordingly halve the number of candidates each member can nominate. This should result in fewer candidates to choose between each time.
Electing the president and vice president in separate years could also be helpful, as the presidential race currently overshadows the vice presidential one.
@David: Yes I’d agree with staggering the elections, and electing committees in halves.
One of the other issues is that – at least in England (not sure about Scotland or Wales) we have three sets of elections going on at the same time: president/vp/federal committees, English Council reps to federal committees, and regional reps to the English Council. I’ve seen a fair few people getting confused about which election is which! Plus the fact that local parties are holding their AGMs around now too). Really seems a bit much to all be happening at the same time.
The ballot paper wiuth it’s ‘drag and drop’ system for ordering preferences is very well designed and easy to use.
The problem though is the election statements. You had to open a separate PDF file to view each one, which given the number of candidates was extremely time consuming.
expect many members were daunted by this and didnt bother to vote, or else said “I’ll do it later” and never got around to it. Itwas only the reminder e-mail that prmpted me to vote).
Why not have one PDF with all the statements for each post or committee being contested? This would mean they would actually get at least a look, as it is I expect a lot of people didn’t even look at most of them.
A further problem was that so many of the statements were so bland, boring and content free, it was very difficult to know what candidates stood for that differentiated them from all the others standing who seemed to be equally worthy!
It feels like I make the same complaint every Year – the system for electing Committees is crazy, I didn’t manage to list more than half the people & I don’t have young children or a Job.
One solution would be to divide the membership into Regions, each member would vote only for candidates from their Region, national votes would be added up according to size, 10% of the membership would get 10% of the committee places. We would all be faced with much smaller lists to choose from & more chance that we might recognise some of them.
Holding different Elections at different times would help too, it would certainly have helped with the Presidential Vote.
While the overwhelming size of the candidate list in almost every election is a major problem that needs to be addressed – to be successful candidates need to have a huge personal following (i.e. run a very successful blog) or be part of a slate of a well organised faction – the huge underlying problem is almost totally overlooked.
Our party membership has been allowed to fall to almost catastrophically low levels over the last six years – down from 127,000 to 60,000, and little said and nothing done about it. If asked, every candidate for president or vice-president has said it will be a priority for them, but it should have been for the last six years and even now, no one from current President downwards to wannabe presidential candidate has even started to come up with an idea of a strategy to deal with it.
LDV has barely mentioned it, but almost every other topic, including quite a few articles from those indicating that various current members should not be members, to yet more pontificating on our favourite fix for the democratic system which won’t come about until we are in government has been aired repeatedly.
So a big shout out for Peter Davies and Michael BG, but unless we all get to grips with how do we make more Liberal Democrats, we really will be on the road to nowhere.
If p[eople think there were a lot of candidates for these you should have been around for the eleection of the 50 strong ‘Peers Panel’ election in 1999 which had IIRC something like 200 candidates and a manifesto booklet something akin to a house brick 🙂
(Also for the record the very unlamented to-become-Baroness Faulkner polled precisely 2 first preference votes 🙂