15.4 million. The number of people who went out to voted two weeks ago today only for their vote to be completely worthless. One in three people eligible to vote didn't vote at all. How many of these did not vote because they knew it was pointless? It is shocking that in the UK, a country with one of the oldest parliaments in the world, 76% of people did not vote for the party that currently holds all the power.
Some people have blamed those who did not vote, or those who didn't vote Labour out of fear of the SNP. In reality, there is only thing that can be blamed for this, our broken voting system, First Past The Post (FPTP).This is a system designed for two party politics, something which we do not have in the UK. Six parties received over one million votes, and I have no doubt that the smaller of these might have garnered more votes had people believed their vote would have meant something.
The most proportional voting system is the D'Hondt method of Proportional Representation or Party List PR, usually just referred to as PR. However, I would advocate a slightly different version of Proportional Representation known as the Single Transferable Vote. Below I have included a table showing the estimated number of seats that would have been won under each voting system. It is important to note that these are estimates as it is impossible to know how people's votes might change under a different voting system, and the results would depend on how the new voting regions were drawn up.
|
Party |
Vote Share |
FPTP |
PR (D’Hondt) |
STV |
|
Conservative |
36.9% |
331 (50.9%) |
242 (37.2%) |
280 (43.0%) |
|
Labour |
30.4% |
232 (35.7%) |
199 (30.6%) |
241 (37.1%) |
|
UKIP |
12.6% |
1 (0.2%) |
83 (12.8%) |
38 (5.8%) |
|
Lib Dems |
7.9% |
8 (1.2%) |
51 (7.8%) |
29 (4.5%) |
|
SNP |
4.7% |
56 (8.6%) |
31 (4.7%) |
37 (5.7%) |
|
Green |
3.8% |
1 (0.2%) |
24 (3.7%) |
2 (0.4%) |
Party List PR: parties present lists of candidates and seats are awarded according to their party’s share of the vote. This is usually done using an electoral formula or a quota which prevents too many small parties from winning seats.
You may wonder why I am not advocating the most proportional system available. There are a few reasons, the main one being that it gives parties even more power over who is elected. They can choose the order of the candidates on the list and independents are not able to stand. Also, people will no longer have constituency MPs as regions will be much larger as they are for the EU elections to enable the results to be as proportional as possible. Finally, one of the main arguments to keep FPTP is that it delivers majority governments. PR almost destroys any hope of a single-party majority (which is not a bad thing in my book but one party does need to be big enough to give it the impetus to form some sort of coalition).
Single Transferable Vote (STV) solves many of these problems, at least partially. I have borrowed the Electoral Reform Society’s explanation of STV as I don’t feel I could explain it as well as the experts:
“The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a form of proportional representation which uses preferential voting in multi-member constituencies.
Candidates don't need a majority of votes to be elected, just a known 'quota', or share of the votes, determined by the size of the electorate and the number of positions to be filled.
Each voter gets one vote, which can transfer from their first-preference to their second-preference, so if your preferred candidate has no chance of being elected or has enough votes already, your vote is transferred to another candidate in accordance with your instructions. STV thus ensures that very few votes are wasted, unlike other systems, especially First Past the Post, where only a small number of votes actually contribute to the result.”
By using STV, some power is taken back from the parties as the public can rank their preferred candidates, not all from the same party. A friend of mine had a dilemma in the recent election where the party he wanted to vote for had put up an abhorrent candidate in his constituency. This would not be an issue under STV.
Although people would still not technically have a constituency MP, STV tends to work best when constituencies elect 3 or 4 candidates so the constituencies would not be quite as large as they would likely be under PR. This would also allow constituents to contact the MP they feel is most closely aligned to their viewpoint when they feel they need to contact one of their representatives.
As you can see from my table above, STV also is more likely to deliver slightly more seats to the biggest parties so that a coalition is able to form. There is another benefit to this as well. People argue that PR is not the best voting system as it gives too many seats to extremist parties e.g. UKIP. STV allows people to rank their preferences, which means that parties like UKIP who are unlikely to be anyone’s second choice party would be less likely to gain seats.
The result is that STV is much more likely to deliver a parliament that people voted for, and that people are happy with.
Thanks for reading, and please comment below if you disagree or you need something about STV explaining. I have not gone into depth about how the votes are counted because this can get quite complicated. However, the voting process itself is straightforward!
Most importantly, thanks for letting me keep you In The Loop. If you feel like the voting system does need to change, then don’t forget to sign one of the following petitions:
Ed
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