If Welsh Labour wants a two-member-constituency voting system, this is the one they should adopt

In the recent row over possible changes to the voting system used for elections to the Welsh Assembly, one of the alternatives proposed by the Labour Party was a system of two-member-constituency First Past the Post (see the Devolution Matters blog for an overview of the row). In other words, to expand the number of Assembly Members (AMs) to 80 from the present total of 60 (made up of 40 constituency AMs and 20 top-up regional AMs under the proportional AMS voting system), Labour was proposing having two AMs per constituency and using FPTP to elect them.

Presumably, the model of FPTP they had in mind was that voters would get two votes each, thereby ensuring that where Labour was the most popular party, it would be guaranteed to win both seats even if it were not the choice of a majority of voters. Labour is not known for its enthusiastic backing for fair voting systems, after all. FPTP wouldn’t be so bad if people had only one vote, so that the Labour vote would be split between both candidates, giving other parties more of a chance, especially if they fielded only a single candidate in constituencies where they knew they had no hope of winning both seats.

However, a fairer, more rational and more proportional electoral system for two-member constituencies would be the following, which I’m calling ‘TMPR2’: Two-Member Proportional Represenation (version two). This is a simpler and more practical version of the TMPR system I have previously discussed. TMPR2 works as follows:

• There are two representatives (AMs, MPs, etc.) per constituency
  
• Each voter has two votes. Voters are not obliged to use both votes: they can vote for just one candidate if they wish
  
• The individual candidate obtaining the most votes automatically wins one of the seats
  
• The individual winner may be either the representative of a party or an independent
  
• In addition, if any independent candidate wins the second-highest total of individual votes, that independent candidate is elected
  
• However, assuming the second-highest total of votes is not won by an independent, the winner of the second seat is decided on the basis of the share of the vote won by each party:
  
  • If any party wins over 50% of all votes (that is, the number of actual votes cast, which is higher than the number of voters, as people can vote for two candidates), then both of their candidates are elected (unless one of the candidates obtaining the highest or second-highest total of votes is an independent, in which case the party obtaining over 50% of the vote wins only one seat)
    
  • In the instance where one of the seats is in fact won by an independent, the party candidate elected is the one that has obtained more votes than the running mate from their own party
    
  • If, however, no party wins more than 50% of the vote, then the two parties obtaining the highest shares of the vote win one seat each (except in the case where one or more independent candidate are elected, whereby only the top-ranked party or no party respectively wins a seat)
    
  • In the case that two parties win one seat each, the successful candidates are those who obtained more individual votes than the running mates from their own parties
    

Advantages of TMPR

• This is a reasonably proportional system
  
• It encourages trans-party voting: voters could and would vote for candidates from different parties. This would equalise the parties’ share of the vote, with the established parties’ share coming down and the smaller parties’ share rising. For instance, quite a lot of right-of-centre voters, if the system were applied in England, would vote for one Conservative and one UKIP candidate; whereas many left-of-centre voters would vote for a Green candidate alongside a Labour or Lib Dem candidate. This means that the vote share parties need to win in order to be elected could be considerably lower than under FPTP. In fact, there is no lower percentage limit on eligibility for a seat. And TMPR2 encourages this pluralism by allowing voters to divide their loyalty between more than one party
  
• It incorporates some of the best features of established, familiar voting systems:
  
  • Like FPTP, the candidate obtaining the largest number of individual votes automatically wins a seat
    
  • Like AV, if any party wins over 50% of the vote, it takes the whole constituency (i.e. both seats), unless an independent candidate has won either the highest or second-highest individual vote
    
  • It’s a crude form of PR, similar to STV in the sense that a party, as opposed to an individual candidate, needs to win more than a ‘quota’ of 50% of the vote to win both seats
    
• It encourages voting for individuals – and hence, for independents – alongside parties: as voters have two votes each, they will be freer to choose candidates on their individual merits alongside their membership of a particular political party. There would be more of an incentive for independent candidates to run, such as high-profile, respected local figures taking a stand on important issues for the local community
  
• It’s easy to understand and operate: there are no complicated voting or counting mechanisms involved, and the result is a clear and direct expression of voters’ preferences. There are no unexpected consequences and fewer tactical-voting constraints for voters. Voters would know that the way they voted would have a direct impact on the result: each of their two votes increases the chances of that individual candidate or party; and if voters are torn between the party / candidate they genuinely prefer and the party they feel they need to vote for in order to ensure that another party does not win (tactical voting), they can hedge their bets and vote both ways.
  

Disadvantage of TMPR2

TMPR is probably not as proportional as the existing system – AMS – used for elections to the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament. In fact, in an Electoral Reform Society analysis of the 2011 Welsh Assembly election had it been conducted using AMS with 30 constituency seats and 30 regional top-up seats (instead of the present 40/20 ratio) compared with an 80-seat Assembly elected using STV, AMS emerges as the more proportional system. It would be interesting to see the outcome if they ran the same analysis on TMPR2.

However, pure proportionality is not everything; and TMPR does preserve the close links between individual AMs / MPs and relatively small constituencies. By comparison, AMS gives more power to the parties, as top-up AMs / MPs are predominantly elected because of their party affiliation rather than their individual merit or on the basis of local issues. In addition, TMPR is much simpler to understand and operate than either STV or AMS.

Real-world prospects for TMPR2

In reality, TMPR2 has very little chance of ever being implemented, at least not for the Welsh Assembly. As the ‘inventor’ of TMPR2, I don’t exactly have a lot of influence. But as the possibility of two-seat constituencies was being mooted, it seemed timely to bring forward TMPR2 as another alternative: as a possible compromise between FPTP and proportionality. The Labour Party wouldn’t like it, because it’s too fair and proportional. The experts at the Electoral Reform Society probably wouldn’t like it because it’s not proportional enough. But maybe the people would like it if they were offered the choice, precisely because it is fairer than FPTP but less complex and fussy than STV and AMS, with a more transparent link between how people vote in each constituency and the winners.

Anyway, I’m just throwing it out there to see if there are any takers.

AV referendum: for the sake of England, don’t vote!

Do you think the First Past the Post voting system used for electing UK MPs should be changed to the Alternative Vote? Do you even care?

Firstly, should anyone who supports the idea of an English parliament give a monkeys about the voting system used to elect the UK parliament? On one level, no: the fact that this AV referendum is being held on the same day as the elections for the Scottish parliament, and Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies, but that the English have never been consulted about a parliament of their own; and the fact that we’re being offered only the disproportional AV system, whereas those very devolved elections use a different, proportional system, is a downright insult. So not only is there no representation for England as a nation on offer, but there is to be no proportional representation for England even within the UK parliament. So I know where I’d tell them to stick their AV.

On the other hand, a ‘better’ electoral system for electing English MPs would surely be a gain for the nation even while we’re being governed by an unrepresentative UK executive and parliament. Does AV constitute such a gain? Well, in my view, AV is marginally – very marginally – better than FPTP. It does ensure that parliamentary candidates have to secure the explicit support of a larger proportion of their local electorate in order to win – though it doesn’t guarantee that MPs must obtain the support of a majority of voters: that depends on how many voters don’t express a preference for either / any of the candidates remaining after the less popular candidates have been eliminated.

However, in reality, this greater share of the vote MPs have to win, which includes the second and subsequent preferences of voters whose first-choice candidates have been unsuccessful, already exists in latent form under the FPTP system. The only difference that AV makes is that it allows voters to explicitly express that support with their preference votes, so that – for example – a winning plurality of, say, 40% is turned into a winning ‘majority’ of 52%. That extra 12% of voters who are broadly content for a candidate to win on 40% of the vote are still there under FPTP; so AV in a sense just legitimises what happens under FPTP: the election to parliament of MPs who fail to be the first choice of a majority of voters.

AV is, therefore, mainly a means to secure buy-in to an unfair system that has ill-served England. That’s what FPTP has been: over the past few decades, it’s given us Tory and Labour governments that have never commanded the support of a majority of English men and women. It gave us the divisive, confrontational and egomaniacal Thatcher regime; and it was responsible for Blair’s New Labour, with its legacy of asymmetric devolution, British-establishment Anglophobia, public-spending discrimination against England, and the overseas follies of Iraq and Afghanistan, with so many brave young English people exploited as cannon fodder in unwinnable, unjustifiable wars.

FPTP has failed England. AV is only a very slightly mitigated version of FPTP. Both will lead to more disproportional, unrepresentative UK parliaments that will continue to ignore not only the just demands for an English parliament but England’s very existence. Under the present UK political settlement, England as such is completely discounted and passed over in silence. The pro-AV campaign says that, under AV, your vote really counts. But England will still count for nothing, whether we have AV or FPTP.

So make your vote really count this Thursday in the AV referendum by greeting it with the silent contempt with which the political establishment treats England. England’s voice is not being consulted; so respond with sullen, stern silence in your turn. Don’t vote for a system – the UK parliament itself – that disenfranchises you. And let the result – whether a win for AV or FPTP – be rendered as meaningless as it really is through a derisory turn-out across England.

England will have its say one day in a meaningful referendum: on an English parliament. And I bet neither AV nor FPTP will be on offer as the voting system for a parliament that truly represents the English people.

DPEV: absolutely the best single-member voting system for the UK and England – honest

OK, I admit it: I’m a voting-system geek, if not obsessive. I really dislike AV, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it leaves England short-changed: nothing done to address the West Lothian Question or the broader English Question, to say nothing about the unaccountable nature of executive power in the UK, which relies on a disproportional voting system and a subservient parliament to run the country virtually as an elective dictatorship.

During the course of the last few months, in this blog, I’ve discussed a number of alternative single member-constituency voting systems that are better than the Alternative Vote, in my view, despite the fact that AV is the only alternative on offer. It seems to me I’ve been fishing around for a ‘killer’ system: one that is simple, fair and transparent but which also addresses the two main failings of First Past the Post and AV – that they 1) produce disproportional results and 2) bring about governments with no real mandate that can basically get away with whatever they want (a simplification, I know, but it sometimes feels that way). In addition, if a voting system passes the ‘English parliament test’ – or at least a fairness-to-England test – then all the better. Basically, if I’d be happy if the system in question were used to elect an English parliament, then it must be OK.

I now think I’ve come up with such a ‘killer voting-system app’, so to speak. It’s called DPEV: ‘Dual Parliamentary and Executive Voting’. How it works is as follows:

1. DPEV is a single-member system. There are two parts to the voting process: a First Past the Post ballot of individual candidates and a separate ballot listing the parties standing in that constituency. Voters must select the individual candidate they’d like to be their MP by marking a cross next to their name – exactly as under the present FPTP system. Again, just as with the present system, the winner is the candidate obtaining the most votes. Voters must also mark a cross next to the name of the party or parties they’d like to form the next UK government. Here, they can vote for more than one party, thereby expressing a preference for a coalition government of the parties in question.
   

    

2. The individual-candidate vote is used to determine the composition of Parliament, whereas the party vote is used separately to determine which parties have a mandate to form the next government. Basically, if one party wins an outright majority of the party vote, they are deemed to have a mandate to form the government. Otherwise, the strongest multi-party combination is considered to have a mandate to form a coalition government so long as the overall total of votes for both or all of the parties involved adds up to more than 50%.
   

   For example, let’s say that 30% of voters want the Tories only to be in government; 25% want just Labour; 10% want only the Lib Dems; 16% want a Lab-Lib coalition; and 11% want a Tory-Lib Dem coalition. Here, the system decides there is a mandate for a Lab-Lib Dem coalition because this was the most popular party-combination vote (i.e. 16% vs. 11% for a Con-Lib combo) and the total number of voters wanting either a Labour or Lib Dem government (single-party or coalition) adds up to a majority (51%). However, if the percentage of voters wanting a Lab-Lib Dem coalition had been only 14%, those parties’ combined vote would add up to only 49%. In that case, despite having the largest coalition vote, there would be no implied mandate for a Lab-Lib Dem coalition, and it would be down to the Conservatives and Lib Dems to try to reach a coalition deal, as the combined total of individual and joint votes for those parties would be 51%.
   

One other point of detail here: to form a government, a party or combination of parties must garner over 50% of the party vote in England as well as across the UK as a whole. This is because, without devolution for England, the UK government is also an acting English government and so must have a democratic mandate in England separately. Obviously, the best solution would be a completely separate English parliament and executive. But in the absence of that, this does address the West Lothian Question, if not the English Question: it wouldn’t matter, on one level, if English laws were passed by parliamentary majorities that included non-English MPs if the government enacting those laws had a legitimate democratic mandate from English voters. This is what this ‘England lock’ on the government is designed to ensure.

So basically: in the absence of an outright majority for any party in the party-vote bit of DPEV, parties must try to form majority coalitions, beginning with the multi-party combination vote (i.e. where people vote for two or more parties together) that obtained the largest share of the votes across the UK, so long as those coalitions command an overall majority of the votes across the UK and England.

What would happen if neither a Lab-Lib Dem nor a Con-Lib Dem coalition could muster a block of votes of over 50% across the UK or in England only? In this instance, the parties would have to bring in a third coalition partner that had won a sufficient percentage of the party vote across the UK and England, as applicable, to constitute a majority mandate, so long as that third party had won some MPs. However, even so, it is possible that a majority coalition could still not be formed, either because there was insufficient political will among the parties involved or because there would be parties for which people had voted that were without MPs, such as – for example – UKIP, the Greens, the BNP or the English Democrats. In this instance, the parties would have to try to form a coalition or single-party government based on the majority of available party votes. E.g. if only 80% of the UK-wide party vote had been for parties that succeeded in winning MPs, then the government (single-party or coalition) would have to command over 40% of the party vote across the UK, and whatever the corresponding majority percentage would be in England: probably higher than 40% given the lower share of the votes won by nationalist or sectarian parties in England compared with the UK’s other nations.

To prevent this rule becoming a get-out clause allowing the Conservatives or Labour to form governments that were without a true majority mandate, one of the major constitutional innovations of DPEV would be that any government commanding the support of only a minority of voters (as determined by the party vote) would have to be ratified by the electorate in a snap referendum following the conclusion of coalition negotiations. And that means a UK-wide referendum if the government in question was based on minority support across the UK as well as England, or a referendum in England only if the proposed government enjoyed a majority across the UK but was backed by only a minority in England.

If such a referendum failed to win the endorsement of either the British or English people, then the parties would have to go back to the drawing board and try to find a majority coalition or alternative minority government. If the latter were the outcome, this too would need to be ratified in a referendum. Then, if this in turn failed, a new election would have to be held – but not a whole general election with all the new constituency MPs needing to seek re-election, merely a new party election, in which all of the parties that had won MPs would be standing. This would determine a new clear majority mandate, as now the choice of parties would be greatly cut down. In practice, in the absence of an outright majority for any single party in this second party vote-only election, it would be pretty obvious which combination of parties (e.g. a coalition between the Lib Dems and one of the other major parties) had a clear mandate, and the parties concerned could have a constitutional obligation to work together.

These provisions for majority coalitions or – in the absence of majorities – ratifying referendums and follow-up elections, as required, would ensure that any UK government had a clear majority mandate from the people across the UK and England, irrespective of whether the party or parties in government commanded a majority of MPs in Parliament. This relates to another original feature of DPEV: MPs are elected using a disproportional system (FPTP), but the executive is elected using a perfectly proportional system – so the government takes its democratic mandate directly from the people, not from parliament. This does mean that the parliamentary majority could be at odds with the executive majority, and governments could well find they commanded only a minority in Parliament. However, this could be a good thing, in that Parliament would be able to hold governments to account more effectively. Equally, the system for electing MPs could be changed separately, without altering the perfectly proportional method for electing the executive. E.g. you could introduce AV, STV or some other system for electing Parliament that would make it more proportional and representative, and make the majority in Parliament less likely to clash with that of the government.

Not only the executive but also MPs would be more directly accountable to their voters, in two main ways:

1. Separating out the vote for an individual MP from the vote for a government, as DPEV does, restores the direct accountability of an MP to his or her constituents. Voters can now choose an MP on the basis of their individual suitability for the role – their experience, character and values as well as political opinions – without prejudice to the party they want to be in government, which they vote for separately. By contrast, under the present FPTP system, and the proposed AV system, if you vote for the man or woman, you are also voting for the party and are presumed to be endorsing that whole party’s programme for government as set out in their manifesto. This is rolling up two distinct choices in one, and it’s what helps make MPs subservient to their party apparatus in Parliament, because they are presumed to have been sent to Parliament to fulfil that party’s programme. Under DPEV, each individual MP has been personally chosen by the plurality of their voters: having been elected independently, they are empowered to act independently.
    
2. This independence from party, and accountability to voters, would be reinforced by another constitutional innovation that would be associated with DPEV. Let’s say a Conservative MP has been elected into Parliament, but a majority of constituents had voted either Labour or Lib Dem (or for both Labour and Lib Dem) in the party vote, and a Lab-Lib Dem coalition was in fact formed. Then, if that Tory MP persistently votes against government bills at their third and final reading (e.g. in 50% or more of cases), constituents should have the right to demand a by-election to hold that MP to account. If the MP is re-elected, they could be said to have received a mandate to continue opposing government bills. The smart thing for the government parties to do in this instance would be to field only one candidate to ensure a government majority in the by-election – but whether they’d have the wit to do that or not is moot.
   

   I would envisage that voters would be able to call a by-election on this basis one year after the general election, and then again after another year, by means of, say, more than 10% of the electorate turning up at polling stations on a designated day to sign a petition for such a by-election. Once more than two years have elapsed after the general election, there should be no further by-elections of this sort, in that – ideally – there would be four-year fixed-term governments, so that holding a large number of by-elections at the close of the third year of the parliament would be somewhat excessive. (Incidentally, if a coalition collapsed before the fixed term had expired, it could be made mandatory for the parties to try to form a new coalition – but this would also have to be ratified by referendum. If it was rejected in the referendum, then a general election would have to be held.)
   

   This method of holding MPs to account could be applied to any MP that persistently voted against the party majority in their constituency. For instance, if a candidate from one of the government parties had been elected as MP but a majority of constituents had not voted for the party or parties of government in the party vote, those MPs could also be held to account and forced to fight a by-election if they persistently voted with the government. This means that MPs would truly have to respect the opinions of their voters and take them into consideration in their work in Parliament, alongside party loyalty.
   

All these aspects of DPEV would bring about much greater popular sovereignty and political accountability: the government taking its mandate direct from the people; MPs directly accountable to their voters and expected to act independently of party dictates. And, as I said above, it provides a solution to the West Lothian Question, if not an answer to the English Question – but I would say that it’s still an excellent voting and constitutional system for any English parliament and so passes my English parliament test.

How does DPEV perform in relation to the six criteria I’ve been using to assess the merits of different single-member voting systems? My first criterion is: Does every vote count, and is every vote counted? Here, I’d give DPEV four out of five. Every party vote, under DPEV, counts in the sense that the right to form a government depends on every single vote cast. However, as many parties for which people vote would still not win MPs, those parties could not participate in government. Similarly, the constituency vote counts for more than it does presently under FPTP, in that MPs are elected independently of their party affiliation and are expected to act accordingly. However, as the system used to elect MPs – at least in my initial version of DPEV – is the disproportional FPTP, many constituency votes will count for little.

In terms of the second criterion – Is the system proportional? – I’d again award DPEV four out of five: it’s perfectly proportional in terms of the party vote that is used to determine the shape of the government,but disproportional with respect to the constituency vote. However, the fact that the government derives its mandate direct from the people, and the fact that accountability of MPs to constituents is built into DPEV, makes it less critical to achieve a perfectly proportional parliament.

The third criterion is: Does the system foster accountability? Here, I’d modestly give DPEV five out of five: it embodies a very high degree of accountability of MPs to their constituents, and it also makes the government directly answerable to the whole electorate, a majority of whom have to give it their backing, either in general elections and referendums to ratify minority governments or coalitions.

Fourthly: Does the voting system allow voters to express the full range of their political and personal preferences, and send a message to politicians? Here, DPEV scores four out of five. It enables voters to support individual candidates that can be of an altogether different political persuasion to themselves, on the basis that whichever candidate you vote for (based on their personal qualities), you can vote for different parties to form the government. In addition, you can vote for as many parties as are on the ballot paper in the party vote. Not all of those votes will be effective, however, in the sense of resulting in representation – and in fact, it would be silly to vote, say, for four parties, as it is unlikely that such a vote will be rewarded with a coalition of all four parties. But all party votes are nonetheless recorded, so that voters can send a message to politicians. In addition, the more people voted for parties such as UKIP and the Greens, the more people would feel emboldened to vote for UKIP and Green candidates, too – with the added incentive that even if only one or two MPs from those parties were elected, they might go straight into government as part of a coalition.

The fifth criterion is: Does the system mitigate / obviate tactical voting? Here, I’d give DPEV four out of five. Under DPEV, there is virtually no incentive for tactical voting, other than to try to defeat the candidate of a particular party in the constituency vote. But the reward for doing so is considerably less than under FPTP or AV, in that MPs of any hue are supposed to act independently and can be held to account if they put party interest above that of constituents by opposing legislation that the constituents have by implication supported (by voting in a majority for the parties that are in government).

Finally, How easy is the system for voters to understand, trust and use effectively? Well, DPEV should be easy for voters to understand and use to their best advantage. You just vote for an MP in the same way as now; and you can vote separately for the party or parties you want to form the next government. However, some voters might find the separation of the candidate and party vote confusing, and also might not use the option to combine votes for multiple parties very effectively (i.e. they might select several parties or not understand that selecting multiple parties means you’re expressing a preference for a coalition of them all). So I’d give DPEV four out of five here.

So here’s how I rate DPEV in comparison with the other single-member systems I’ve discussed, including several I’ve ‘invented’ myself, as I have with DPEV. For the sake of comprehensiveness, I’m also rating the variants of AV I’ve discussed recently (FMT (First Past the Post Majority Top-UP) and AV 2.0); and the method I evoked in my post yesterday, whereby you just have two preferences, and if there is no majority of first preferences, the second preferences of all voters are added to all candidates’ totals, and the winner is the candidate obtaining the most votes (let’s call that ‘TPP’: Two-Preference Plurality!):

Criterion	FPTP	AV	AppV	ARV	TMPR	AV+	NetV	3CV	Bucklin
Does every vote count?	3	2	3	4	4	3	4	3	3
Is the system proportional?	1	2	2	3	3	3	3	3	3
Does the system foster accountability?	3	3	4	4	4	4	4	4	3
Does the system let voters express their views?	1	2	3	4	4	3	4	3	2
Does the system mitigate tactical voting?	1	2	2	3	4	2	3	3	3
How user-friendly is the system?	3	2	4	3	3	3	3	3	4
Total scored out of a maximum of 30	12	13	18	21	22	18	21	19	18

 

Criterion	DPEV	FMT	AV 2.0	TPP
Does every vote count?	4	3	4	4
Is the system proportional?	4	2	2	2
Does the system foster accountability?	5	3	3	3
Does the system let voters express their views?	4	3	3	2
Does the system mitigate tactical voting?	4	2	2	3
How user-friendly is the system?	4	3	2	4
Total scored out of a maximum of 30	25	16	16	18

 

Clearly, different readers will rate these voting systems differently according to their own perspectives: my ratings are to an extent subjective. My scoring system is, however, based on an attempt to think through the main implications of the systems in terms of the degree to which they provide an accurate and user-friendly means for voters to record their opinions, and how they might influence voter behaviour.

But DPEV is the clear winner: a single-member system that would produce more accountable government and MPs, and would be fairer to England. I know I would say so, but it gets my vote!

Send A V-Sign to Westminster: Spoil your ballot in the AV referendum on 5 May

Check out the article of the above name at Rise Like Lions and sign up to the Facebook campaign to send a message to Westminster about the referendums we really want (English parliament and the EU) by spoiling your ballot in the AV referendum next May!

AV could bring about a Tory landslide, increase the North-South divide and bring back two-party politics

Very little joined-up thinking appears to have been done about what the real-world political impact of AV would be if the British people collectively decide to introduce it at next May’s referendum. Here’s how I think it could pan out:

Scenario No. 1: By spring 2015, the coalition is still in place and is popular, having balanced Britain’s books and being seen as having set in motion a ‘revolution’ (one of Cameron’s pet terms) in the way English public services are delivered, involving greater community participation and decision making. The beneficiaries of this in electoral terms will be the Conservatives, and AV will help them to a massive landslide, which is a well-known defect of that system – although I note that the Electoral Reform Society has now dropped the list of negative features of AV, including its potential to exaggerate landslides, from its summary description of AV.

How would AV contribute to a Tory landslide? AV would do nothing to diminish the Conservatives’ dominance of the South of England (excluding London): they poll between 40% and 55% in most constituencies in this part of England; and they would easily amass enough second preferences where they needed them, including from Lib Dem first-preference voters, to hold these seats. In addition, AV could allow the Conservatives to virtually wipe out Labour in the South, as Labour pluralities could be overturned by the effect of Tory and Lib Dem first-preference voters awarding their second preferences to each others’ parties.

In the Midlands and the North, Labour pluralities could also be overturned by the same effect, the main beneficiaries being the Tories, as they would mostly finish in second place on first preferences, and so Lib Dem second preferences would mostly transfer over to the Conservative candidates (that is, assuming that this pattern of second-preference voting takes place, which depends on how popular the coalition is, and whether there is any formal or informal pact between the coalition parties to encourage this sort of voting).

Net result: massive Tory majority.

Scenario No. 2: In this scenario, the coalition’s popularity has dipped and Labour’s has risen. This would result in a stark North-South divide, with Labour making virtually a clean sweep in the Midlands and North of England (to say nothing of Scotland and Wales), while AV again did nothing to eat into the Tories’ dominance of the South.

In this instance, in the North and Midlands, AV would transform Labour first-preference pluralities into majorities, as disgruntled Lib Dem supporters of third-placed candidates would award their second or third preferences to Labour ahead of the Conservatives. In the South, any Labour resurgence would simply split the opposition, while the Conservatives would still consistently poll upwards of 40% on first preferences and so would in most cases easily garner enough second preferences to win. So you’d end up with an even more starkly polarised England, and indeed Britain, than under FPTP, with the Tories virtually wiped out from the Midlands upwards and westwards, and Labour still making no in-roads in the South.

Two-party politics: What both of these scenarios have in common is a return to two-party politics. I can’t see any realistic scenario for how AV could improve the Lib Dems’ electoral performance, despite this being a much-touted advantage of the system for that party. If anything, AV would exercise even more of a two-party squeeze against the Lib Dems. In the South of England, under both my scenarios, even if they finished second on first preferences, they would not command enough Labour second-preference support to be elected. In the Midlands and the North, they would finish mostly third – so their votes would be transferred to Labour or the Tories.

Existing Lib Dem seats would be under threat from any swing to either of the other parties – although AV does offer some protection to the Lib Dems here in that, so long as their candidates finish at least in second place on first preferences, AV gives them a chance of winning in the final run-off against either the Labour or Tory candidate.

Conclusion: Even if you don’t accept either of my specific scenarios, or that voting patterns will pan out the way I suggest in the presence of those scenarios, AV will do nothing to remedy some of the most damaging political consequences of FPTP: disproportionate Conservative dominance of the South of England; polarisation between the South and the rest of Britain; electoral elimination of third and smaller parties. If anything, AV will make these things worse.

And in terms of the strategy for moving forward from AV to PR – such as that strategy is, because it seems built more on hope than expectation – how on earth do supporters of PR see that as being advanced by a system capable of generating massive landslides for the Tories or Labour; one which consolidates those parties’ dominance of particular regions; and one which destroys any hope of plural politics? It seems to me that those parties will simply say, ‘Thank you very much and goodbye’.

Alternative alternative voting systems, part five: AV+, or denying (proportional) representation to England

The Alternative Vote Plus (AV+) is the system for UK-parliamentary elections recommended in 1998 by the Independent Commission on the Voting System (the Jenkins Commission) appointed by the New Labour government. That government then reneged on its 1997 manifesto promise to hold a referendum on whether to adopt the recommendations of the Commission.

AV+ is a form of Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system, in which single-member constituency MPs are topped up by MPs elected from a proportional open party list encompassing a wider geographical area – in the case of AV+ based around traditional counties and urban areas. It is therefore very similar to the Additional Member System (AMS) used to elect the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. Indeed, the Jenkins Report recommended that the same top-up areas be used in Scotland and Wales for UK-parliamentary elections based on AV+ as for their national elections using AMS. The difference with AV+ is that it is AV rather than First Past the Post that is used for the constituency part of the election.

The way in which it was proposed that the top-up element of AV+ would work is described in the Jenkins Report here. The total number (80) and geographical distribution (65 in England) of top-up areas is described here. In addition, it was proposed that about 15% to 20% of all MPs would be elected via the top-up part of the system.

My contention in this article is that one of the main, if unstated, reasons why New Labour never carried out a referendum on AV+ is that introducing it would inevitably have raised questions regarding English governance in general that New Labour wanted to keep permanently brushed under the carpet. The same could in fact be said of PR in general: the implementation of any form of proportional representation for the UK parliament would inevitably create a dynamic towards an English-national politics. This is because a PR election would produce a body of English MPs that for once reflected, albeit still imperfectly, the actual level of support enjoyed by each party in England. It would be contrary to this proportionality if MPs elected outside of England altered the balance of power between the parties, especially if this overrode the will of English MPs (e.g. if Labour used its Scottish MPs to maintain a majority in English matters that it would not otherwise have based on English MPs only). But even if the balance of power was not affected by non-English MPs legislating for England, the legitimacy of them doing so would be questioned much more forcefully. That’s because proportional representation is predicated on geographic representation: the importance of ensuring proportionality is to ensure that people within a certain geographical territory have elected representatives and governments that reflect how they voted and are therefore properly accountable to them. But that principle would be violated if representatives from outside that territory continued to make laws for it.

With regard to AV+ in particular, and Mixed Member Proportional systems (including AMS) in general, I would argue that it has the potential to offer solutions to the West Lothian and English Questions that the British Establishment doesn’t want, because it introduces a distinction between English and British governance. Indeed, it is because of the potential for AV (without the top-up element) to serve as a stepping stone towards a form of AV+ in which a distinct English level of governance is recognised that I have previously argued I would be prepared to back AV in the proposed referendum in May 2011, for all my considerable criticisms of AV. In that previous article, I argued that a House of Commons elected using AV, coupled with a House of Lords elected using a regional party-list form of PR, could provide a transitional stage towards a hybrid English-British parliament. In this parliament, executive responsibility for English matters would belong to AV-elected English constituency MPs (although they would need the voting support of their party-list-elected colleagues), while the party-list MPs would also sit in a new federal British parliament responsible for reserved matters. (I outlined this constitutional blueprint in detail in the now sadly discontinued English Parliament Online site. I’ll republish the article here at some point.)

That particular model for Parliament is based on the idea that you could map two other distinctions onto the distinction between constituency MPs and party-list MPs: 1) the distinction between devolved and reserved matters; and 2) the distinction between national and Union-British politics and governance respectively. On this basis, under AV+, the primary focus for constituency MPs’ activities and accountability would be devolved issues affecting the day-to-day lives of their constituents in the nations from which they were elected, such as health, education, transport, justice, housing, etc. The top-up, party-list MPs would then be responsible and accountable mainly for reserved and Union-wide matters, while also having regard for the impact of their decisions on the nations from which they had been elected. Building on this principle, in my hybrid English-British parliamentary model, the English party-list MPs would be accountable to their constituency colleagues for their decisions in the British parliament: the English parliament would have powers of scrutiny over British legislation, just as the British parliament could scrutinise legislation from the devolved parliaments, or at least the English parliament.

In the case of AV+ as proposed by the Jenkins Commission, the top-up MPs do not in fact have such a Union-wide or English-national remit, as they are elected from smaller regions. However, even such a system could evolve into a situation where, for instance, only English constituency and top-up MPs could deliberate on the finer points of England-specific legislation at the committee stage, while the support of England-only constituency MPs and party-list MPs from across the UK could be required to pass the bills at the final reading. This would provide some means for Scottish-, Welsh- and Northern Ireland-elected MPs (i.e. the party-list MPs from those countries) to have a say regarding the impact of English legislation on their countries, while not allowing Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish constituency MPs to meddle in areas that are dealt with for their countries by devolved parliaments and assemblies. I.e. this presents an almost ready-made solution to the West Lothian Question.

Indeed, there would be no requirement to retain Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish constituency MPs at all in a Westminster parliament in which English legislation was enacted primarily by English constituency and top-up MPs with additional scrutiny by Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish party-list MPs fulfilling the role to which I am arguing top-up MPs are best suited: considering the impact of legislation on their countries and on the Union as a whole. The introduction of AV+ could, then, have led irresistibly to the abolition of non-English constituency MPs at Westminster, their role having been taken over by MSPs, AMs and MLAs (although this would require further devolution, such that the law-making powers of the respective parliament and assemblies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were equivalent to, and exercised in the same areas as, the continuing UK parliament’s powers to legislate for England.).

As a result, the remaining UK parliament would have comprised: English constituency MPs, English party-list MPs and non-English party-list MPs. All MPs would have been equally entitled to vote both on reserved matters and at the first and third stage of English legislation – but with non-English party-list MPs no longer having the power to outvote English MPs in relation to England-only legislation. Where a conflict arose between the English MPs and the non-English MPs regarding such legislation, doubtless the usual political deals and quid pro quos would have come into play, given that the non-English MPs raising concerns would belong to the same parties as their English colleagues. So such a system would undoubtedly continue to protect the interests of the UK’s smaller nations rather well, probably to the detriment of England. This is not the most logical or fair outcome, but it’s what the UK parliament could easily have evolved into if AV+ had been adopted: once you had created bodies of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs not directly elected by constituents (the top-up element), there would be no purpose (other than gerrymandering) to retain constituency MPs from those countries as well, as their role in assessing the impact of English bills on their countries (including the Barnett consequentials) could more than adequately be fulfilled by the party-list MPs. You might have to increase the number of such MPs so that their total would be proportionate to the number of English MPs (both constituency and party-list) relative to the size of each country’s population. And you’d accordingly have to change the system for electing the party-list MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so that the distribution of seats reflected the parties’ shares of the vote. In other words, this would be a full party-list system, and not just a constituency top-up as it could continue to be in England.

However, this was not to be and will almost certainly never be now. Nevertheless, the system we may end up with as a result of the coalition government’s planned reforms – AV-elected constituency MPs from across the UK and regional party list-elected Lords – could well present a similar ready-made solution to the West Lothian Question. That is, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish elected Lords could replace constituency MPs from those countries in their role of scrutinising English legislation with respect to its impact on their countries. In such a situation, there would again no longer be any practical need to retain the unwanted services of non-English MPs in the creation of laws and regulations that apply to England alone.

Lords elected outside of England deliberating and voting on English bills has been dubbed the ‘Upper West Lothian Question’. But if the powers of the Lords were limited to revising and delaying bills, with the final say being given to English-elected MPs only, then this could be a workable solution to the West Lothian Question. Doubtless, party-political and unionist considerations would result in resistance to stripping non-English MPs of their role in England’s governance. But eventually, the duplication of the West Lothian Question that would result from both non-English MPs and non-English Lords voting on English laws would come to seem so grossly unfair and superfluous that a decision would have to be taken as to which elected body, the Commons or the Lords, should fulfil that function, if at all. An elected Lords including non-English members could easily come to be seen as a more legitimate body for deliberating on the impact of English bills on the UK as a whole, as the Lords would be a body with a genuine UK-wide remit, reflecting the logic I referred to above: party list-elected representatives having an overall responsibility to ensure the interests within the UK-wide context of the broader geographic areas from which they are elected (which, in the case of non-English-elected Lords would be the whole of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland respectively), while constituency representatives should be directly accountable to their constituents on devolved matters.

So, whether in its originally envisaged form, or in the interplay between an AV-elected Commons and a party list-elected Lords, or indeed as employed in my model for a hybrid English-British parliament, AV+ has a strong potential to force a resolution of the West Lothian Question. And that’s because it creates a body of elected representatives with accountability at a more national and / or Union-wide level in addition to constituency MPs: it creates national, including English, blocks of MPs and / or Lords, and a justified expectation on the part of each nation’s voters that the people only they have elected should be accountable to them for the laws that affect them.

It’s for this reason – to try to prevent the emergence of an English-national politics and political consciousness – that AV+ will almost certainly never be implemented in its originally envisaged form. Nonetheless, I’ll finish by assessing it here using the same criteria I’ve employed to determine the merits of other voting systems, but with an additional eye towards the particular benefits or disadvantages that England would have stood to gain from AV+.

My first criterion is, Does every vote count / is every vote counted? Here, I’d give AV+ three points out of five, compared with only two for AV on its own. AV fails to count often the majority of second-preference votes and still produces situations in which the votes of a large minority of voters (and sometimes even a majority, if the eventual winner fails to secure a majority of primary and preferential votes) have no influence on the final result. The top-up element of AV+ remedies this situation to some extent by ensuring that the most under-represented party or parties at constituency level are able to secure some degree of representation. Therefore, under AV+, the majority of votes are not counted / do not count at constituency level; but most voters’ choices for either their directly elected MP or regional party top-up representative should influence the result.

Second criterion: is the system proportional? Here again, I’d give AV+ as originally envisaged three out of five. It is proportional but only in a limited way, as the ratio of top-up to constituency MPs (about one to five) is not high enough to ensure a strongly proportional result, especially as AV itself can be wildly disproportional. This is in contrast to other Mixed Member Proportional systems, which have far higher proportions of party-list representatives (e.g. Germany, where 50% of MPs are elected in this way).

Criterion No. 3: Does the system foster accountability? AV+ scores four out of five here: not only does it preserve the close link between MPs and their constituency, but it also improves the accountability of Parliament to the UK as a whole (by virtue of the improved proportionality) and of English-elected representatives to English voters, as discussed above. It fails to score a perfect five, because it is only imperfectly proportional, and because AV alone in fact does little to improve the accountability of MPs to the majority of their constituents, or to eradicate safe seats.

Criterion No. 4: Does the voting system allow voters to express the full range of their political and personal preferences, and send a message to politicians? I’d say that AV+ merits only three out of five here, compared with two out of five for AV alone. You do get quite a fine-grained menu of choices under AV+: you can express the full range of your preferences in the constituency vote and indicate your strongest preference in the top-up party vote, with a reasonable expectation that at least one of your choices (party and / or individual) will be elected. However, in practice, I’m not sure whether people wouldn’t end up treating the constituency vote in the manner of an FPTP election while voting tactically in the top-up vote. That’s to say, if you know your preferred candidate has little chance of winning the constituency election based on AV, you might limit your vote to one candidate (either your preferred candidate or a tactical vote), and then vote in the top-up election in exactly the same way: for your preferred party if you thought they had a chance of gaining an extra seat that way, or tactically for another party that stood a better chance of winning the extra seat or seats on offer.

For example, if the last election had been fought using the AV+ system, and the parties standing in my constituency and ‘region’ had been the same as they were (i.e. no English Democrat or BNP candidates), then I’d have been tempted to vote for only the UKIP candidate at constituency level (as only the Tory could win in practice, so why bother expressing anything other than your real first preference?) but Lib Dem in the top-up vote, as that party stood the strongest chance of winning the additional seat: FPTP-style vote at constituency level, tactical vote in the ‘proportional’ part of the system.

As for the fifth criterion, Does the system mitigate the need to vote tactically?, I’ve just partially answered that question: no, there would still be strong tactical voting pressures and incentives in both the constituency and top-up elections. So I’d give AV+ only two out of five here.

The sixth criterion is, how easy is the system for voters to understand, trust and use effectively? Here also, I’d give AV+ only three out of five. AV alone is quite a complicated and non-transparent system that generates unfair results (based on the possibility that the winner’s majority is smaller than that of another party if all second preferences were counted). If you add to that the rather complicated, bitty top-up system suggested by the Jenkins Commission for AV+, then the question of how to vote in order to secure a desired outcome, and the link between how one had voted and the eventual result, could be quite bewildering for many voters. On the positive side of the equation, AV+ would in fact produce fairer results by virtue of the mechanism it employs to compensate the parties most disadvantaged by the disproportionality of AV. And English voters in particular would feel they were more empowered to achieve a result they actually wanted, and a parliament that truly represented them. Across the UK as a whole, voters would soon come to understand that they had two chances to hit their desired target and would begin to use AV+ astutely to procure if not their most preferred outcome, at least one they had chosen, whether enthusiastically or tactically.

To summarise, here is how AV+ stands in relation to the other systems I’ve discussed in this series of articles to date:

Criterion	FPTP	AV	AppV	ARV	TMPR	AV+
Does every vote count?	3	2	3	4	4	3
Is the system proportional?	1	2	2	3	3	3
Does the system foster accountability?	3	3	4	4	4	4
Does the system let voters express their views?	1	2	3	4	4	3
Does the system mitigate tactical voting?	1	2	2	3	4	2
How user-friendly is the system?	3	2	4	3	3	3
Total scored out of a maximum of 30	12	13	18	21	22	18

AV+ emerges as significantly better than the AV system the establishment is condescending to allow us to choose over FPTP, but significantly inferior to the range voting ARV system, or the more open and empowering but still constituency-focused TMPR system discussed in the previous post. But in any case, we won’t be getting the choice of AV+ or any of its cognates (AMS or MMP) any time soon, because the last thing the establishment wants is any English-national dimension to elections.

Lessons from the Australian election for AV in the UK

The Australian elections are heading towards an almost perfect tie. At the time of writing, the governing Labor party had won 70 seats, with the opposition Liberal-National Coalition gaining 72, while independents had won four seats and the Greens one. This meant that, with three seats still outstanding, no party would cross the threshold of overall control (76 seats) and a coalition deal would have to be struck between one of the larger parties, the independents and potentially the Greens.

The results in terms of seats belie the fact that the Coalition had obtained 43.5% of ‘primary votes’, compared with 38.6% for Labour and 11.4% for the Greens. So based on vote share alone, the Coalition [capital c] ought to be entitled to try to form a coalition [small c]. ‘Primary votes’ are what we’d call over here ‘ first-preference votes’: Australia uses essentially the same preferential voting system that we’re going to have the option of adopting in the referendum next May, and which is known in the UK as the Alternative Vote (AV). The only difference is that, in Australia, voters are obliged to express a ranked preference for all the candidates in the election; whereas, in the UK, voters will be allowed to rank only the candidates they actually want to vote for.

In my view, the Australian results demonstrate once again just how bad a system AV is and how it favours two-party politics, or two-and-a-half-party politics as it would be in the UK. This is because people’s higher-preference votes for smaller parties inevitably end up being eliminated in the counting process, and only those voters’ lower-preference votes for the major parties are ultimately used to determine the result. This tendency is exaggerated even further in Australia by the fact that you are obliged to exhaust the ballot (express a preference for all the candidates), so that almost every vote comes down to a contest between the two largest parties.

Also, the fact that the Greens achieved their best-ever result, and yet their 11.4% of votes translated into only one seat, shows how unfair and disproportional the system is. What essentially happened in this election is that first-preference votes for the Greens were transferred almost entirely to the Labor Party in the preference count, which frequently enabled the Labor Party to overtake the Coalition, which had obtained more primary votes than Labor in many seats. This is how Labor managed to almost achieve parity with the Coalition on seats despite its much lower share of primary votes.

In the UK, this mechanism is likely to favour the Tories and the Lib Dems at the expense of Labour. In Tory-Labour fights – in England, this is mainly in the Midlands and the North – it’s quite conceivable that more Lib Dem voters would put down the Tories as their second preference rather than Labour, especially if those two parties are still in a coalition. So if Labour is only narrowly ahead of the Conservatives on first-preference votes, it’s quite possible the Tories could leap-frog Labour to victory thanks to the Lib Dem second preferences. As a consequence of this threat, I’ve suggested elsewhere that Labour voters in close Tory-Labour elections held using AV should consider voting tactically and putting the Lib Dems down as their first choice, in order to ensure that the final two parties left in the count are the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, and so enable the Lib Dems to beat the Tories based on the second preferences of Labour voters. This example demonstrates how, despite what is claimed for it, AV actually encourages some rather perverse tactical-voting scenarios.

Meanwhile, in Tory-Lib Dem fights – e.g. in southern England – the Lib Dems are more likely to benefit from this mechanism as Labour voters’ second or final preferences would be expected to be for the Lib Dems, if anything, rather than the Tories. Now, you could say that this aspect of AV is actually fairer than allowing the election to be decided purely on the highest plurality (i.e. based on the largest minority of ‘first preferences’ only, which is effectively what First Past the Post does in most seats). But if more people genuinely want one party to win rather than any other, isn’t that a fairer result, even if it produces disproportional outcomes at a national level? AV is arguably better at producing the ‘Condorcet winner’ (the candidate that would be preferred by most voters overall to any other candidate in a straight one-to-one comparison) but not so good at indicating the candidate that is strongly preferred by the greatest number, which FPTP in theory does better – although FPTP results are distorted by tactical voting. These problems do not exist in either of the ARV or TMPR voting systems discussed in previous posts: ARV always awards the win to the most popular candidate overall, regardless of whether this is the Condorcet winner or not; and TMPR gives the seats to both the Condorcet winner and the party that is strongly preferred by most voters – or both to one party, if they are the same.

Be that as it may, as in Australia, we’d effectively end up with two-party politics in England using AV, except the two parties in the North and Midlands would be the Tories and Labour (unless tactical voting for the Lib Dems by Labour voters of the kind I suggested above kicked in), and the two parties in southern England would be the Tories and the Lib Dems. This would effectively consolidate the three parties’ stranglehold over English politics while squeezing out the smaller parties. The only way parties like the Greens and UKIP could win seats would be if there was a strong candidate from one of those parties that supporters of the other parties would vote for tactically, whether as their first or subsequent preference, in order to unseat the incumbent MP. This is in fact what happened in the Australian seat of Melbourne, won by the Greens yesterday, as first-preference supporters of the Coalition – with its notoriously hardline anti-Green leader – hypocritically transferred their subsequent preferences to the Greens in order to defeat the Labor candidate, who came top in terms of primary votes. This shows just how pernicious tactical voting can be under AV: the Greens benefiting from Coalition tactical votes designed to beat Labor, whereas normally Green voters transfer their vote to Labor.

So don’t believe it when people try to claim that AV eliminates tactical voting: far from it. Nor is it remotely proportional and, arguably, fair in terms of awarding the win to the most popular candidate in each constituency. You could argue that the overall result in Australia, in terms of seats, is proportional to the extent that, in most seats, it came down to a straight fight between the main left-of-centre and right-of-centre candidates, and that these two fundamental positions were evenly matched overall. But this does consolidate the dominance of only one left-of-centre and one right-of-centre party – or, in England, two left-of-centre parties and one right-of-centre party. And, on top of which, AV would perpetuate the electoral divisions between the different English ‘regions’, making Labour only a party of the Midlands and North, and the Lib Dems only a party of the South; while the Tories are the only real right-of-centre alternative nationwide.

No wonder the Tories were so keen to put AV, and not PR, into the coalition agreement! And perhaps there was some cynical calculation on the part of the Lib Dems to the effect that permanent three-party politics, which is the most likely consequence of AV, would at least assure they had a quasi-perpetual influence over Westminster’s unaccountable governance of England.

Alternative alternative voting systems, part four: TMPR

TMPR stands for ‘Two-member proportional run-off’. This is another method that I’ve invented, in the wake of ARV, which I discussed in the last post in this series.

TMPR is a blend of, and compromise between, the UK’s present single-member, highest-plurality system (First Past the Post – FPTP); an instant run-off, majority system such as the Alternative Vote (AV); and a multi-member proportional system such as the Single Transferable Vote (STV). It contains enough of what’s good about each of these systems to offset what’s bad about them, which I aim to bring out in my detailed analysis below. So TMPR ought to satisfy proponents of each, although – like compromises in general – it may end up satisfying no one.

TMPR offers all of the following benefits to some degree:

• It’s crudely proportional
• It preserves the close link between an MP and his or her constituency
• It would largely eliminate ‘safe’ seats
• It would ensure that the great majority – i.e. significantly more than 50% – of constituents have at least one MP they’ve voted for as their first preference or, if not, as a second preference, making parliament much more representative of voters
• It respects the majority and, failing that, highest-plurality principles
• It gives voters the option to vote for their genuinely preferred party as well as exercising a tactical vote
• It would give the smaller parties a much greater chance of making a break-through than FPTP or AV
• And it would be easy for voters to understand what to do and how to get the most out of the system.

This is how the system works:

• There are two seats per constituency: larger two-member constituencies would need to be formed by merging two existing adjacent single-member constituencies (with allowance being made for proposed boundary changes, so as to ensure that the constituencies all had roughly the same population size)
• Parties can field two candidates, who are numbered one and two on the ballot paper
• Voters have a first- and second-preference vote, which they must use for different parties; they can limit their vote to only a first preference, if they wish. Votes are for parties, not individual candidates: each party’s candidates and the order they appear in the ballot paper (1 and 2) are determined by open primaries, so that voters have already been involved in selecting the individual candidates before the election
• Any party gaining over 50% of first preferences automatically wins both seats: candidates 1 and 2
• Any party gaining over 1/3 of first preferences but not more than 50% automatically wins one seat: this goes to the No. 1 candidate for that party
• If two parties gain over 1/3 of the vote but neither wins over 50%, they each gain one seat, and that is the end of the election: these seats go to each party’s No. 1 candidate
• However, if no party or only one party gains over 1/3 of the vote, all the parties remaining in the race (obtaining exactly 1/3 of the vote or less) enter an instant run-off
• This works by adding the second preferences of all voters – including those who’ve indicated the party that has already succeeded in obtaining over a 1/3 of the vote, if that is the case – to the first preferences
• If one party has already won a seat and obtains over 50% of the combined total of first and second preference votes after the run-off, it wins both seats. Similarly, if no party has won a seat on the first-preference votes but one party obtains over 50% of the combined total of first and second preference votes after the run-off, it wins both seats
• Otherwise, the winner of the outstanding seat (or seats, if two are still available) is simply the party (or parties) that obtain(s) the highest total (and second-highest total, if two seats are still being contested) of combined first and second preferences.

I’ll discuss the principles behind these features of TMPR as I proceed with my analysis of its merits based on the criteria I’ve used to rate other systems, including FPTP and AV, in previous posts in this series.

My first criterion is: Does every vote count / is every vote counted? With TMPR, as in all forms of instant run-off voting (IRV), you can get a situation where some of the votes are ‘not counted’ and therefore don’t count towards the final result: second-preference votes that are not needed to produce the final result, i.e. where two parties have already won the seats available based on first preferences. However, unlike AV, it is quite simple to include the second preferences in the presentation of the election results, even if those preferences haven’t been used, whereas it’s not the proposal, under AV, to publish the totals of all the preferences for all the parties.

Providing the totals of first- and second-preference votes would enable people to compare the results for when only first preferences are counted with those when you combine them with second preferences. This would provide valuable information for analysing patterns of tactical voting and the degree to which voters for larger parties also support the smaller parties (by voting for them as their second choice), and vice-versa: the ways in which voters for the smaller parties switch their allegiance to the larger parties in their second preferences. This relates to the discussion below about the extent to which TMPR would enable voters to send a message to politicians.

The question, ‘Does every vote count?’, mainly implies ‘are there any wasted votes under TMPR?’; i.e. does every vote count towards the final result? Well, one significant advantage of TMPR over AV is that the run-off uses the second preferences of all voters to determine the result, and not just the second and subsequent preferences of a greater or smaller minority of voters, as in AV. This is fairer and more consistent.

In addition, a greater proportion of voters’ first preferences influence the result than under FPTP and AV. For a start, a party needs to obtain only over one-third of first preferences to be guaranteed a seat; and if two parties cross this threshold without obtaining more than half of the vote, this means that over two-thirds of voters’ first preferences have been used to determine the winners of the election. If one party does gain over 50% of first preferences, this still means that the very minimum quota of first preferences that can influence the result is 50% plus one vote. This is in contrast to AV, where – despite what is generally said – the winner can still obtain the support of only a minority of voters, and even then, this is only on the basis of votes transferred from other parties.

Then, if second preferences come into play, this means that the votes of an even broader cross-section of the electorate are involved in shaping the result. One of the reasons for allowing second-preference votes for a party that has already secured one seat (by winning over 1/3 of first preferences) to enable that party in theory to win over 50% of combined first and second preferences (and thereby win both seats) is to provide an extra incentive for voters to use their second preferences for other parties. Otherwise, voters who had awarded their first preference to the party likely to finish second in the ballot (e.g. Labour) might be tempted to ‘bullet vote’, i.e. not indicate a second preference in case that damaged the prospects of their first preference in the run-off. However, as that could run the risk of allowing the leading party (e.g. the Tories) to win both seats (for instance, by capitalising on second-preference support from Lib Dem voters), voters of this sort would have a motivation for using their second preference, even if this were for a party that did not stand a chance of catching up with their first-preference party (e.g. the Greens). You could call this a ‘wasted vote’; but those votes could in fact be for minor parties that such voters genuinely sympathised with, and this mechanism would then provide a means to boost the support that minor parties receive.

So, for a combination of these factors, I’d award TMPR four points out of five for this criterion: in the absence of a clear overall majority for one party, a much higher proportion of votes are involved in determining the winners than under AV or FPTP. But there are still some votes that are not involved in determining the result.

In terms of my second criterion, is the system proportional?, I’d award TMPR three points out of five. This relatively mediocre score is despite the fact that, unlike all the single-member systems I’ve discussed up to now in this series, TMPR is proportional in its actual design. That is to say, the rationale for allowing parties to win one seat once they cross the threshold of 1/3 of the vote is that this figure represents the minimum proportional ‘quota’ required to qualify for one seat in a two-party constituency – on the basis that no more than two parties can obtain over 1/3 of the total vote. This is the same principle that is used in multi-member STV: in a four-seat constituency, the quota for a candidate to win a seat is one-fifth plus one vote.

To be logically consistent and fully proportional, TMPR ought to stipulate that, in order to win both seats being contested, a party would need to obtain two-thirds of the vote plus one vote rather than 50% plus one. However, the purpose behind allowing parties to claim both seats if they obtain over 50% support is to make TMPR more like a single-member majority system, and to provide an extra incentive for parties to go out and try to win both seats in areas where they’ve traditionally enjoyed majority support, e.g. Labour in the North of England and Scotland, and the Tories in southern England. This feature ought to make TMPR much more acceptable to those parties, given that around one-third of the current crop of MPs obtained the support of a majority of their constituents at the last election, and the constituencies involved are often concentrated in particular urban or rural areas. Therefore, amalgamating such seats into two-member constituencies, and allowing those constituencies to return two MPs from the same party if that party wins over half of the votes, should not affect the representation of that party in those areas too adversely. However, that’s without taking into consideration any change in voter behaviour that TMPR might produce, such as a greater willingness to vote for minor parties as a first preference.

Even so, TMPR is still more proportional than FPTP or AV, in that, in the absence of an overall majority, it awards one seat to each of the top-two parties in a constituency; and it makes sure that, in order to win both seats, a party must obtain the support of over 50% of voters. TMPR would be likely to generate a significantly larger (and hence, more proportional) number of Lib Dem MPs than either FPTP or AV, whether on the basis of first-preference votes (particularly in the southern half of England) or with the aid of second preferences (in the Midlands and the North of England). In the North and Midlands, there would also be lots of seats returning one Labour and one Tory MP.

In addition, as I stated above, TMPR would give minor parties more of a chance than FPTP and AV. This is because the minimum barrier to win one seat (one-third of the vote plus one vote) is lower than under AV and, typically, FPTP; and because smaller parties stand to gain more second-preference votes from people whose first preference was for one of the three main parties: particularly, where those voters do not wish to provide an advantage for one of the other larger parties by either not using their second preference at all or by giving it to another of the larger parties – but also, if voters genuinely want to show support for one of the minor parties. In this way, you could expect UKIP, for instance, to pick up a lot of second preferences from Tory first-preference voters, and the Greens to similarly gain backing from Lib Dem and Labour first-choice voters. By contrast, under AV, the subsequent preferences of Tory, Lib Dem and Labour voters for those smaller parties will generally not be counted at all, because by the time votes for the major parties are transferred, if they are at all, to another party in an AV election, UKIP and the Greens will already have been eliminated.

All the same, TMPR is a cruder and less granular form of PR than STV, in that the fewer seats are available per constituency, the more the overall result deviates from pure proportionality – as well as because of the 50% rule. Hence, as I would probably award STV four out of five for proportionality, I have to give TMPR only three out five.

With respect to my third criterion, Does the system foster accountability?, I’d give TMPR four out of five. One of the effects of TMPR would be to greatly reduce the number of ‘safe seats’. This is not just because it reduces the number of seats that Labour and the Tories can win on a plurality of the vote (because a plurality of over 33.33% wins you only one out of every two available seats, not both seats as is effectively possible under FPTP) but also because of the system of open primaries. Under TMPR, MPs and candidates from other parties would be obliged to submit themselves for (re-)selection before every election. In addition to determining whether the incumbent MP would be allowed to run again, these open primaries would also determine in which order that MP would appear in the ballot paper for their party, i.e. No. 1 or No. 2. In a constituency where the MP’s party had not obtained over 50% of the vote at the previous election, being listed No. 2 could be tantamount to de-selection, given that only the No. 1 candidate is elected when parties obtain between one-third and a half of the vote.

The point of these open primaries is partly to increase the accountability of MPs to their constituents during their incumbency as well as at election time. But this is also to allow voters the chance to select individual candidates rather than just vote for a party, which is what they do under TMPR at the election. The reason why TMPR does not allow voters to vote for individual candidates – except if parties field only one candidate – is that this prevents the election from degenerating into a highly complex series of tactical calculations (such as one party fielding only one candidate in order not to dilute its vote, to the disadvantage of a more popular party fielding two candidates) and makes it less likely that complicated run-offs are required, as many elections are capable of being decided clearly and fairly based on first preferences alone. Having open primaries compensates for this by allowing voters to pick individual candidates.

In the open primaries, all registered voters would be entitled to be involved in picking the candidates each party would field at the next election. The only voters excluded from the primary poll would be members of other parties. This system would result in virtually no MP feeling totally safe that they could be re-elected time after time. In addition, as the overall election result would be more proportional than single-member systems, parliament as a whole would be more accountable to the total electorate.

What about independent, i.e. non-party, candidates? Well, as in the case of parties fielding only one candidate, independent candidates would have to obtain over one-third of the vote to be elected. If, by some freak, an independent candidate won over half of the vote, they could by definition take up only one seat. So the other seat would be awarded to the party obtaining over 1/3 of the vote or, in the absence of that, a run-off would be held in the usual manner.

Criterion No. 4: Does the voting system allow voters to express the full range of their political and personal preferences, and send a message to politicians? When discussing my first criterion (does every vote count?) above, I argued that counting the first and second preferences of all voters would empower voters to use their vote to let politicians know what they think about them – e.g. by voting for a minor party as a first or second preference (whether out of conviction or as a protest vote). In addition, TMPR significantly lowers the risk barrier to voting for a smaller party out of conviction, as this is less likely to damage the prospects of the party for which you usually tactically vote, given that that party needs to secure only one-third of the vote to win one seat – and you can help them do so with your second preference, if that is needed.

Similarly, as I discussed in connection with my second criterion – proportionality – above, the incentive that TMPR creates to use your second-preference vote in such a way as to disadvantage parties you do not support means that many voters will vote for smaller parties that they genuinely sympathise with as their second preference, albeit also out of tactical considerations. TMPR therefore encourages voters to express both a conviction vote and a tactical vote, and their first and second preferences are more likely to genuinely coincide with their actual first and second preferences, albeit that the party they ‘like’ the most might be indicated as their No. 2 choice, depending on whether voters decide to list either their conviction vote, pragmatic vote or indeed protest vote as their No. 1 choice. So, for this criterion, I again award TMPR four out of five: voters can vote for their two most strongly supported parties, and those votes can both be influential in determining the result while also sending a message to the politicians.

The ability for people to vote tactically as well as out of conviction or protest means that I can give TMPR only three points out of five against my fifth criterion, Does the system mitigate the need to vote tactically? It is true that voters are not obliged to vote only in a tactical manner, as they so often are under FPTP. But there are some tactical calculations that can be made, such as whether and for which party to use one’s second-preference vote so as not to be detrimental to one’s first-preference party. However, there’s only a limited extent to which tactical strategies can actually come off, in that parties whose defeat you might wish to ensure will usually need to win only one-third of the vote plus one vote, and if they do so, there’s nothing much anyone else can do about it.

Finally, my sixth criterion: how easy is the system for voters to understand, trust and use effectively? Here, I’d give TMPR four out of five. Admittedly, it’s a little more complicated than FPTP, to which I gave three points out of five against this criterion. However, in essence, TMPR is pretty straightforward: voters just have to indicate a first and second preference. And it would be easy for voters to work out how to use their preferences to best advantage to try to secure the outcome they most desire, whether that’s both seats being won by the party of their choice (bullet vote just for that party); one seat won by party A and the other by party B (vote for party A as your first choice and B as your second, or vice-versa); or making a protest vote (vote for the party representing your protest as your first preference and then your usual party as your second); etc. I think voters would also realise TMPR is much fairer, in that if two parties obtain between one-third and half of the vote, they both win a seat.

So how does TMPR compare against the single-member systems I’ve discussed thus far? In the table below, I’ve compared the scores I’ve just awarded to TMPR with those for the other systems:

Criterion	FPTP	AV	AppV	ARV	TMPR
Does every vote count?	3	2	3	4	4
Is the system proportional?	1	2	2	3	3
Does the system foster accountability?	3	3	4	4	4
Does the system let voters express their views?	1	2	3	4	4
Does the system mitigate tactical voting?	1	2	2	3	4
How user-friendly is the system?	3	2	4	3	3
Total scored out of a maximum of 30	12	13	18	21	22

TMPR emerges as the best of the systems discussed in this series to date – admittedly, only by reference to my own criteria and with scores that some would dispute. I’m aware it could seem highly vain to award the largest number of points to the two systems I myself have invented (ARV and TMPR). But I’d love it if readers would take issue with any of the detailed points I make in connection with aspects of each system or with the criteria I’m using to assess them; rather than purely taking issue with the system itself in relation to more technical mathematical-probability calculations or the many specialist technical criteria for assessing voting systems. If I’m wrong to consider that TMPR has the advantages I ascribe to it, then please take me to task on them.

But for now, I hold to the view that TMPR is an excellent compromise between the best of FPTP, AV and STV, the latter of which I haven’t yet discussed. I was originally planning to discuss the AV+ system for the present post in this series. But then I had the brainwave of TMPR, which I was keen to discuss first. So – barring any further brainwaves – it’ll be AV+ next time.

Alternative alternative voting systems, part three: Approval Rate Voting (ARV)

In this series of posts on alternatives to the First Past the Post and Alternative Vote (AV) voting systems, which are the only alternatives the British people are going to be offered for English and UK elections in the proposed referendum in May next year, I’ve discussed AV itself and Approval Voting (which could also confusingly be abbreviated as ‘AV’). So what is ‘Approval Rate Voting’ (or ARV), which I’m going to discuss here?

ARV, which I’ve deliberately named as such in order to position it aggressively as an alternative to AV (and to Approval Voting), is the new-improved version of the single member-constituency system of my own invention that I previously termed ‘PV’ (or the ‘Popular Vote’). I previously described how this works as follows:

• ARV is a form of range voting. In the same way as a Borda Count (one of the main forms of range voting), it assigns a number of points to voters’ preferences. The maximum number of points that can be obtained by any candidate is determined by the overall number of candidates. For example, if there are five candidates, the highest number of points you can give to any candidate is five (i.e. they would be your first choice).
• However, unlike a classic Borda Count, voters would not be obliged to rank all of the candidates (e.g. from five to one); nor would they be obliged to award their top candidate five points. They could, for instance, decide to award their favourite candidate any number of points from one to five: a voter’s first-choice candidate would simply be the one to whom they gave the most points. In most cases, voters would give their preferred candidate five points; but it would be entirely up to them how many points they decided each candidate merited, the only restriction being that no more than one candidate could be given the same score. In other words, you couldn’t award the same number of points to more than one candidate, meaning that you’re obliged to demonstrate your preferences in the points you award to each candidate. Voters could also choose to give some candidates no points, by either writing a zero in the box next to those candidates’ names or leaving it blank.
• When the vote is counted, note is taken of the first preference of each voter, and if a majority of voters selects one of the candidates as their first choice, that candidate is elected. However, if no such majority is secured, the result is then determined by the number of points each candidate has obtained – the winner being the candidate with the most points.

The improvement, as I see it, that I’ve now introduced is to allow equal rankings: voters can give the same number of points to more than one candidate, including their ‘first-preference’ candidates, which would make those candidates the ‘joint favourites’ of that particular voter. This also has the effect that more than one candidate could obtain an overall majority of first-preference votes. The winner in this instance would be the candidate with the largest number of such votes (and in the unlikely event that more than one majority candidate obtained the exact same total of votes, the winner would be the one obtaining the highest number of points).

The effect of this change is to make ARV more like Approval Voting, in that indicating more than one candidate as one’s ‘favourite’ is similar to the way, in Approval Voting, all candidates are effectively counted as if they were voters’ equal-favourite choice. The difference is that my range-voting modification allows voters to exactly grade the extent to which they ‘approve’ of candidates by giving each of them a rating: hence, ‘Approval Rate Voting’.

Allowing equal rankings is an improvement to my first version of ARV (PV) on a number of grounds:

1. It’s more logically consistent: in the previous version of the system, it was allowed to give more than one candidate zero points; so why not allow voters to give more than one candidate any number of points, so long as those points stay within the permitted range (e.g. nought to five), which is determined by the number of candidates in the election?
2. Allowing equal rankings is also more consistent with the way voters actually think about candidates and parties: some voters may be genuinely undecided and would wish to rate two or more candidates equally. There isn’t a good enough reason to force such voters to rank the candidates preferentially, as AV does for largely functional reasons to engineer a ‘majority’ choice.
3. This change also makes the system much more open and liable to untap the latent support for smaller parties that exists in England and the UK at large, in that voters who support, say, UKIP or the Greens can make them their equal-first preference along with whichever mainstream party they have tended to vote for under FPTP (e.g. the Conservatives or the Lib Dems). In this way, the smaller parties would win a large share of the ‘approval points’ that ARV allows voters to award to the different parties; and in some cases, voters’ wish to register strong support for alternatives to the big-three parties in this way could lead to shock wins for the smaller parties, whether on a majority of first preferences or – more likely – on points.

This business of points constitutes a major innovation, which could bring radical changes to the way politicians engage with voters. Election results would include not only the number and percentage share of first-preference votes each party had received, but also an ‘approval rating’, which would be a percentage figure derived from dividing the number of points each candidate and party had received by the total number of points available to that candidate. E.g. in a constituency in which five candidates were standing, the maximum number of points available to each candidate would be the number of people voting multiplied by five. Dividing the actual number of points received by this theoretical maximum and multiplying by 100 gives a percentage ‘approval rating’ for each candidate. This could of course be extended to the UK-wide results, so you’d end up not only with each party’s share of the total vote but their overall approval ratings.

These approval ratings would generally be higher than each party’s share of first-preference votes. For example, assuming that each person indicating the Conservatives as their first preference (effectively, 36% of voters at the last election) awarded them maximum points, there would in addition be some voters that awarded the Tories fewer than maximum points (i.e. for whom the Conservative candidate was not their first preference but who wished to express a degree of approval for the Tories all the same). My sense is that this non-first-preference support for the Conservatives would not have been high enough to give them an approval rating of over 50% at the last election, just as the actual votes they received were not enough to give them an overall parliamentary majority. I estimate their approval rating would have been around 45% at the election, which is almost the same as the share of seats they won.

By contrast, when New Labour won the election in 1997, the level of latent support for Labour among Liberal Democrat and even Conservative voters was so high that I estimate Labour’s approval rating, under my system, would have been around 60% to 65%: again, similar to the share of seats they won. I’m going to consider the question of how proportional the ARV system would be below. But what these figures suggest is that the present FPTP voting system does produce results that are to some extent proportional, not to the share of vote each party receives but to the degree of approval the parties benefit from. The difference is that approval does not always translate to voting in FPTP elections. For example, I reckon that Labour and the Lib Dems would have obtained similar approval ratings at the last election: maybe around 35% to 40%. This reflects the way the parties performed in opinion polls during the election campaign, where the Lib Dems were neck and neck with Labour for much of the time but both were behind the Tories. However, when it came to voting, the latent support for the Lib Dems (what I’m calling the approval for them) was suppressed in a classic two-party squeeze whereby voters were dissuaded from voting Lib Dem in case this resulted in a victory for parties (i.e. Labour or the Conservatives) they opposed.

The ARV system would release this latent support for parties other than the big two (or two and a half) by allowing voters to express different degrees of approval for any number of parties without thereby inadvertently aiding the cause of parties they dislike. Among other effects, this could lead to the smaller parties obtaining some quite high approval ratings. For a start, as I suggested above, voters would be emboldened to award a large number of points, and even (equal-)top points, to parties with which they sympathise but for which they have hitherto refrained from voting so as not to ‘waste’ their vote. So I would expect parties like UKIP, the Greens, the BNP and the English Democrats to record quite respectable approval ratings. It would not be beyond the bounds of possibility, for instance, for UKIP and the Greens to obtain approval scores of between 10% and 20%: consistent with the share of votes and seats UKIP has won in the proportional elections for the European Parliament. Although this would be unlikely to translate into significantly more seats under ARV (as a single member-constituency system), the relatively high approval ratings for UKIP and the Greens would make it more difficult for the mainstream parties to ignore the views of voters on issues such as the EU or the environment, which the present system allows them to do. And in time, voters might become more aware of the power that ARV gives them and would be encouraged to mark smaller parties as their sole first preference in the confidence that voters of opposing political persuasions would also be doing the same (i.e. voting for smaller parties ahead of their tactical choice).

So how does ARV perform in relation to the six criteria by which I have been assessing alternative voting systems? In relation to the first criterion – does every vote count / is every vote counted? – I’d award ARV four points out of five (this compares with three for FPTP and Approval Voting, and two for AV). ARV is clearly better than FPTP in that no vote is wasted: voters can vote both for the candidate(s) they truly support and for the ‘least bad’ candidate with a chance of winning; and they can fine-tune their vote to express the precise degree of support or otherwise they want to give to each candidate. However, ARV doesn’t get a perfect five, as it’s still the case that the shares of the vote and the approval ratings obtained by the parties translate only imperfectly into shares of seats, such that votes for the smaller parties continue to carry less weight than votes for the larger parties.

With respect to the second criterion – is the system proportional? – ARV scores only three out of five (compared with two for AV). ARV is not intrinsically a proportional system in that it is a single member-constituency system; and these always carry a bias whereby parties obtaining a plurality of votes can win a majority of the seats. However, ARV would change the basis on which proportionality itself would be measured, as I suggested above: the degree to which the shares of seats were proportional would be assessed in relation not only to vote share but approval ratings. As I pointed out above, New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 was highly unsatisfactory when measured against vote share, as Labour secured only 43% of the votes. But measured against approval ratings, Labour’s 63.4% share of the seats was probably quite proportional.

This is in part a mathematical coincidence in that, for the leading parties, the share of seats won in single member-constituency elections and the parties’ latent approval ratings, as I define them, are both higher than their vote share. However, under ARV, in seats where no majority of first-preference votes is obtained, the results would be decided on the basis of approval points, where the parties would be more closely matched. In addition, the number of constituencies where no party secured an overall majority would be higher than under FPTP as a result of the change in voter behaviour described above, whereby voters would increasingly favour minor parties at the expense of the larger parties for which they have previously voted tactically. The overall election results would therefore be increasingly proportionate to the relative standings of the parties in terms of their approval ratings.

In this way, ARV would be much more effective than AV at transforming UK politics into a pluralist, multi-party environment in which results would almost always be decided on approval ratings (because no party would win a majority based on first preferences) and would therefore more accurately reflect the true degree of support enjoyed by each party (as measured by the approval rating). There would still be a bias that would tend to transform a strong approval rating into the potential for an overall majority UK-wide, even if a majority of first-preference votes had not been obtained by that party. But those results would still be relatively proportional to the approval ratings themselves and therefore would produce an outcome that voters as a whole would be by definition more content with, given that the approval rating provides an index of the real level of popularity of each party. Such would have been the case in Labour’s 1997 landslide: seats that were in fact won by Labour on a plurality would still have been won on the ARV points system, as Labour enjoyed genuine cross-electorate approval; so that Labour’s big majority would have been relatively proportional to its approval standing.

Criterion No. 3: Does the system foster accountability? Here, I’d award ARV four points out of five (compared with three for both AV and FPTP). In common with those other single-member systems, MPs are directly accountable to their electorate under ARV. But ARV represents an improvement over AV and FPTP in that it is much easier for voters to punish MPs and parties they are disenchanted with by, say, awarding approval points to other candidates while still assigning points (even maximum points) to the incumbent MP. This aspect of ARV would be likely to provoke the greatest opposition from the likes of the Conservatives, who would fear that left-of-centre voters would gang up against Conservative MPs by awarding equal-top points to the Labour, Lib Dem and even Green candidates. The same criticism tends to be made of pure Approval Voting, as I discussed in my previous post in this series.

However, ARV differs from Approval Voting in that it allows voters to fine-tune their votes to express the precise degree to which they are prepared to lend their support to each candidate; and it’s far from obvious that enough left-of-centre voters could be mobilised to give maximum points to all left-of-centre candidates in order to aggressively oust incumbent Tories. For a start, English people are generally quite fair-minded and could well be hostile towards any attempt to persuade them to vote negatively in this way. In addition, it’s likely that many Lib Dem and Labour voters would be naturally disinclined to award equal-top marks to each other’s candidates, especially as the system exempts them from having to do this, unlike Approval Voting. Besides, many Lib Dems and even some Labour voters might even award a certain number of points to the Tory MP if they thought (s)he was a good constituency MP. So, in essence, the ability to punish the parties cuts both ways, and ARV places an extra premium on MPs being both good servants of their constituents and courting the support of voters whose main preference is for other parties. It’s not, however, possible to give ARV a full five points against this criterion, as ARV still contains a bias towards creating unrepresentative parliamentary majorities or pluralities, which are one of the main causes of unaccountable government.

As for my fourth criterion – Does the voting system allow voters to express the full range of their political and personal preferences, and send a message to politicians? – ARV scores a strong four out of five, compared with only two for AV and one for FPTP. ARV allows voters to express the precise degree of their support for all the parties, and it permits them to indicate more than one party as their first preference, which ironically gives more weight to many voters’ actual favourite candidate and party than AV. That’s because, even though voters would tend to indicate their actual favourite candidate as their sole first preference, under AV, if that vote is for a smaller party, it’s inevitably going to be transferred to a lower-preference candidate representing one of the larger parties. In other words, despite being a first preference, that vote is effectively of nil effect and is not retained in the final result.

By contrast, a first-preference vote for a smaller party continues to be recorded and treated as such in the ARV count. Indeed, it is recorded in two ways: as part of the total of first-preference votes for each candidate, and as part of that party’s points score and approval rating. This means that voters can demonstrate support for key policies of minor parties in ways that politicians are forced to take note of: the percentage of first-preference votes for the minor parties will be considerably higher than under FPTP and AV, because there is a real purpose in specifying candidates from those parties as your first choice (unlike in AV) and you will not be damaging the chances of your tactical vote by so doing (as in FPTP). And the higher the approval rating for those parties, the more politicians will not be able to ignore voters’ support for those parties’ policies.

The reason why I have not given ARV a score of five out of five against this criterion is that, despite the fact that it allows voters to express the full range of their views and send a strong message to politicians, that communication is still relatively disempowered: ultimately, the full range of voters’ opinions will not be represented in parliament, as only one candidate and set of party policies can be ratified by the electorate in each constituency, unlike in multi-member-constituency systems.

Fifth criterion: Does the system mitigate the need to vote tactically? Here, I’d award ARV three points, compared with two for AV. It’s impossible to eliminate tactical voting completely in single-member systems, as there will always be a motivation to vote tactically to spoil the chances of strong candidates that supporters of opposing candidates do not like, and to improve the chances of ‘second-best’ or least bad candidates for voters whose first-choice candidates do not stand a chance. That said, ARV does enable people to vote for both their real preference and their tactical choice, in contrast to AV where often only the last (tactical) preference is the ‘real’ vote and first preferences are of nil effect, as discussed above.

Above, I also touched on the potential of ARV to enable voters to pool their vote behind all of the left-of-centre candidates in order to defeat Conservative candidates that might actually obtain the largest number of first-preference votes. In response to this concern, I’d stress the fact that if a majority, or the largest majority, of voters indicates the Conservative as their first-choice candidate, then that candidate is automatically elected under ARV. Second, as I said before, I’m sceptical as to whether enough left-of-centre voters could be mobilised to ensure that one left-wing candidate was able to win a majority of first preferences. They might, however, win on points. And if those candidates do win either a majority or a points victory, then that would tend to indicate that the Conservative candidate – as an individual as well as a party representative – was sufficiently unpopular with enough voters not to merit being elected anyway.

Finally, how easy is the system for voters to understand, trust and use effectively? Here, I’d give ARV three points: the same as FPTP and one more than AV. On the face of it, ARV is more complicated and fastidious than FPTP, where you just have to mark a single cross against your favourite candidate. But ARV is in fact quite simple and employs rules that voters are quite familiar with from situations where they have to assign a numerical value to indicate the degree to which they like certain things or agree with particular statements, such as in marketing surveys and opinion polls.

When it came to polling day, it would be easy to explain the rules of ARV on the ballot paper in no more than six sentences of plain English, as follows: ‘Indicate the degree to which you approve of each candidate by writing a number from 0 to 5 [in the case of five candidates] in the box next to each candidate’s name. 5 indicates the maximum possible support for any candidate; 0 equals the absence of any support for that candidate. You may give the same number of points to more than one candidate. The candidate(s) to whom you award most points will be considered as your first-choice candidate(s) for the purpose of determining whether the election has been won by any candidate on the basis of an outright majority. You are not obliged to give a maximum of five points to any candidate. Leaving a box blank is equivalent to filling it with a zero.’

I think voters would soon wrap their heads round this system and begin to understand how they could use it to their best advantage in the ways described in this article: to punish parties and candidates they disapprove of; to vote for their actually preferred candidate as well as tactically; and to express the full range of their political opinions. So despite being more complicated and difficult to understand than FPTP, ARV earns the same score for this criterion than FPTP by means of enabling voters to use their vote to the best advantage.

Finally, here is a summary of how ARV performs by comparison with the other voting systems I’ve discussed in this series so far:

Criterion	FPTP	AV	AppV	ARV
Does every vote count?	3	2	3	4
Is the system proportional?	1	2	2	3
Does the system foster accountability?	3	3	4	4
Does the system let voters express their views?	1	2	3	4
Does the system mitigate tactical voting?	1	2	2	3
How user-friendly is the system?	3	2	4	3
Total scored out of a maximum of 30	12	13	18	21

In conclusion, ARV is as good as or better than the other single-member voting systems discussed so far according to every criterion against which I have measured it, apart from how easy it is to understand and use to best advantage. I would argue it compares very favourably with the only properly proportional single-member systems, known as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP), which combine single-member constituency ballots with the election of non-constituency MPs on a proportional basis from national or regional party lists.

I’m going to consider one such system – AV+ – in my next post.

Alternative alternative voting systems, part two: Approval Voting

I’ve been re-examining one aspect of my critique of the Alternative Vote electoral system of the other week: the extent to which it enables voters to express the full range of their political opinions – one of six criteria against which I’ll be measuring a number of alternative voting systems. In my previous post, I awarded AV only two out of five against this criterion: you can vote both for the candidate / party you actually want to win and tactically for the candidate with a chance of winning that you least dislike; but, I concluded, there’s often not much point expressing a preference for any other parties.

However, it occurred to me that, rather than limiting yourself to just two candidates, you might as well list all the candidates you support to some degree or another ahead of your tactical vote, as doing so won’t affect your tactical choice’s chance of winning in most cases. That’s because, assuming your tactical vote is for one of the three main parties, and that none of those parties obtains a majority of the votes as defined in the AV system until the very last stage (when all three parties are still in the race), then it will be only at this stage that your tactical vote may both be needed and come into play, i.e. if your more preferred party finishes in third place and your votes are transferred to your tactical choice. But if a party you don’t want to win has already obtained over 50% of the vote before that stage, then your tactical vote would not have made any difference if it had come into play earlier: the winning party would have got its majority regardless of your tactical vote and that of all other like-minded voters. That’s just mathematical logic, which I won’t bore my reader by going into in any more detail.

But that in a way is my point: a) it’s difficult for ordinary voters to work out how they should rank their preferences under AV in such a way as to help bring about the result they want, if indeed this is at all possible; and b) beyond indicating your actual first preference and your tactical vote, is there any point listing all the other parties in between, as they don’t have a chance of winning anyway? Well, there might be a point in doing so if every single vote and every single preference was counted and recorded in some way: if the reported election results included a break-down of how many first, second, third and subsequent preferences every candidate obtained, in addition to itemising the result at each stage during the AV counting process, together with the final result. If all the preferences for all of the candidates were published in this way, then indicating a preference for multiple parties, rather than only your first choice and your tactical vote, would be a means to communicate to the parties the strength and depth of support they each enjoyed – thereby better fulfilling the criterion of enabling voters to express the full range of their opinions and send a message to the politicians.

Recording the results in this way would be likely to bring out the fact that the Liberal Democrats were the main second preference of voters – both in many individual constituencies and across the UK as a whole – while being only the third-largest first preference. This could boost the Lib Dems’ credibility, in that they could argue that they enjoyed a broad base of support and represented the consensus view; while, at the same time, they could use this data as further corroboration of their arguments in favour of full PR, in that a system like STV (which the Lib Dems favour) would be likely to convert this underlying support into substantially more seats – and a more proportional share of the seats – than the Lib Dems will probably obtain under AV.

A result of this sort would also illustrate a well known problem with preferential voting systems such as AV, which is that the party that most people are prepared to rank as at least their second favourite still obtains only a mediocre third-highest share of the seats. I’ve been alerted to the fact that this is known as the ‘Condorcet criterion’: the Condorcet winner of an election is the candidate who, when compared with every other candidate, is preferred by more voters. AV often fails to bring out the Condorcet winner (although FPTP always fails to do so). For example, if all the preferences for all of the parties were counted and recorded, it would not be uncommon for the winner under AV to actually obtain fewer votes overall (of any degree of preference) than one of the other parties. That’s because the second preferences of the two leading parties (e.g. Labour and Conservative) left standing at the end of the AV process are not counted; but those preferences are likely to be for the third party (e.g. the Lib Dems): the Lib Dems are in this instance the Condorcet winner because, for both Labour and Tory voters, they represent a more preferable alternative than the Tories or Labour respectively.

Discrepancies of this sort would potentially undermine people’s confidence in the AV system. But information about the full set of voters’ preferences ought to be in the public domain. I contacted the Electoral Reform Society to ask them if, in AV counts, this information is published as a general rule. The answer they gave was that the information should be retained and be available to the public; but it won’t necessarily be automatically published in the way I suggest (a simple list of the total number of every preference indicated for every candidate): it would presumably be a case that individuals would have to request access to the full set of results from the Returning Officer.

Maybe one of the reasons why the information would not automatically be published in the format I’m suggesting is precisely that it would show up AV’s flaws: that it engineers ‘majorities’ that don’t necessarily take account of the full range of voters’ opinions and feelings. There is, however, a voting system that intentionally records the votes of every voter for every candidate they’ve voted for: Approval Voting. In essence, what this system consists of is a sort of multi-candidate First Past the Post: instead of marking a cross beside the name of just one candidate (as in regular FPTP), you can mark a cross for any number of candidates that you support to some degree. The candidates are not ranked as they are in AV: each vote for each candidate carries the same weight and is counted. The winner is simply the candidate obtaining the largest number of votes, whether an overall majority or not.

I think this system possesses some advantages compared with AV, which I’ll explore by grading Approval Voting using the same six criteria I used to assess the relative merits of FPTP and AV last week.

The first of those criteria is: Does every vote count / is every vote counted? Here, I would give Approval Voting a score of three out of five, compared with only two for AV. The fact that every vote for every candidate is counted is precisely the hallmark of Approval Voting: it allows voters to express some degree of support – ‘approval’ – for multiple candidates without imposing on them the burden of ‘ranking’ them in ways that are often compromised either by tactical considerations, confused thinking about the impact of ranking on the end result, or even just the arbitrary nature of imposing an order of preference on candidates or parties, which is not something that all voters will be entirely clear about in their minds. In any case, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the AV system treats each preference as potentially equal: in other words, the Lib Dem candidate could in fact be your fourth preference; but if your first three preferences are eliminated, your fourth-preference vote for the Lib Dem is added to that candidate’s total and is handled by the system as if it were no different from that candidate’s first-preference votes.

You could argue that Approval Voting also does this: that it treats all votes as equal, even if voters in fact have different degrees of support for each candidate. But this fact obliges voters to deliberate carefully about their choices: if you vote for any of the candidates that have a chance of winning, then you need to really weigh that choice carefully and decide whether you would be truly content to see that candidate winning before you mark a cross beside their name. By contrast, AV performs a sort of sleight of hand that could leave some voters feeling cheated. For example, voters could mistakenly believe they needed to rank all of the candidates (some versions of preferential voting actually require this) or would feel conscientiously obliged to rank as many candidates as they felt able to; and that could have the consequence that, say, their fifth-preference vote was added to the total of the eventual winner: the system has treated their reluctant, luke-warm support as equivalent to enthusiastic support, and thereby helped bring about a result that the voter didn’t want. By contrast, under Approval Voting, if you don’t like a candidate or party much, you just don’t vote for them in any form: simple.

And Approval Voting always brings out the Condorcet winner, so long as voters are sincere in their voting (i.e. they vote in accordance with their true feelings and opinions). In other words, the candidate that most voters support to some degree or another always wins: all of the votes that candidate obtains are counted and contribute to the end result. This is an improvement over FPTP, to which I also awarded a score of three against this criterion. However, there are other systems in which all votes are not only all counted but actually count more towards generating the final result – whereas under Approval Voting, as another variety of FPTP, there are still many so-called ‘wasted votes’ that never influence the result.

Does this mean that Approval Voting would deliver a more proportional result overall (the second of my criteria), which in practical terms in England might mean it favoured the Lib Dems more than AV or FPTP? Well, Approval Voting is not a proportional system either, in that it is still possible to produce a wildly disproportional parliamentary majority for one party if that party wins narrowly in a large number of seats. Nevertheless, Approval Voting does favour the consensus party to a greater extent than AV, in that – unlike AV – every vote for that party is counted. So, based on voting patterns at the last election, the Lib Dems would undoubtedly have won more seats if the election had been conducted using Approval Voting rather than FPTP, as they would have won many three-way or Lib Dem-Tory marginals. But as Approval Voting is not inherently proportional, I’ll award it only two points out of five against this criterion: the same total I gave to AV.

Is it conceivable that Approval Voting could enable the Lib Dems to actually win a general election because the system makes no distinction between ‘first-preference’ votes (of which the Lib Dems would obtain the third-highest total) and second preferences, of which the Lib Dems would obtain the greatest number? I think this eventuality is extremely unlikely because, in most areas, there is a party that clearly enjoys the strongest degree of support: the Conservatives in the south of England, and Labour throughout most of the Midlands and Northern England, for instance. Approval Voting wouldn’t allow the Lib Dems to trump this, because where support for one party is particularly strong, many voters would continue to vote for that party alone; and indeed, Lib Dem supporters might also vote for that party’s candidate in addition to voting Lib Dem. So Approval Voting is likely to alter the result only in marginals, which it would be more likely to swing the way of the Lib Dems.

Third criterion: Does the system foster accountability? Approval Voting shares the relative strength of AV and FPTP in this area, as it’s based on single-member constituencies where an MP is directly accountable to their constituents. However, I would argue that Approval Voting is more effective at fostering accountability than AV or FPTP, in that winning candidates have to appeal to a broad base of voters, even more so than under AV: the candidates need to earn the support not only of their party’s core voters but of voters for other parties. While there is no requirement for the winning candidate to procure the approval of more than 50% of voters, there would be a strong moral obligation to cross that threshold: if in theory each and every candidate can obtain the support of 100% of voters, then to fail to gain merely 50% would be seen as pretty unimpressive. Besides which, the ‘majority’ the winning candidate has to obtain under AV can be inauthentic in some cases. For instance, if a sizeable proportion – e.g. 20% – of the electorate does not express any preference for the two candidates remaining in the race after all other candidates have been eliminated under AV, then the ‘majority’ obtained by the winner is only a majority of 80% of voters, not 100% of voters.

At a national level, as Approval Voting is not proportional, it can contribute to the erosion of accountability that comes from governments having huge, unrepresentative majorities. However, if each candidate has to win the support not only of their loyal voters but of voters of all shades of political opinion, this would, I think, change the political culture quite radically in that the party of government could not depend on the support of only 35% to 40% of voters in order to get re-elected: it would have to reflect the consensus view to a greater extent. For similar reasons, fewer seats would be ‘safe’ than under FPTP and AV, meaning MPs would have to work harder to retain their constituents’ support. For these reasons, I’m awarding Approval Voting four out of five for accountability, compared with only three for AV and FPTP.

With respect to my fourth criterion – does the system allow voters to express the full range of their views and send a message to politicians? – I would rate Approval Voting more highly than AV. That might seem paradoxical, in that you can rank your votes under AV, whereas Approval Voting gives equal weight to all your choices. However, as I was arguing above, the ranking in AV is highly compromised, in that, where it’s not actually artificial (i.e. the voter is just imposing a more or less random order of preference that doesn’t really reflect the way they think), it can be skewed by tactical considerations (my next criterion, see below) or by a mistaken understanding of how the system works.

AV uses voters’ preferences in a merely functional way – as a guide to reassigning votes to other candidates if voters’ higher-preference candidates are eliminated – but does not weight those preferences in the count in such a way as to treat higher preferences as being worth more than lower preferences. However, many voters might think that their first preferences would be given more weight than their lower preferences, which would then fulfil the present criterion very effectively: it would enable voters to express the degree of support they have for each party very clearly. Even if AV does not enable degrees of support to influence the end result in this way – other than using voters’ avowed first or higher preferences to determine the result as much as possible – this deficiency could be remedied at least in part by reporting the election results in the way I suggested at the start of this article: listing all of the preferences indicated for each of the candidates. Then, at least, voters could use their vote to send a message to the politicians.

For example, many people were surprised at how badly the BNP performed at the last election, despite the fact that concerns about immigration were very high on the list of priorities of Labour’s traditional working-class supporters. That’s an effect of FPTP: those voters continued to loyally vote Labour because they wanted to ensure the Tories didn’t get in. If the election had been conducted using AV, the result might not have been very different: even if some Labour voters had decided to indicate BNP as their second preference, those votes would not have been counted, as only their first preferences would have been used to determine the result – although more voters might have voted BNP first preference and Labour second. Reporting the results in such a way as to show the subsequent preferences of first-preference Labour voters would remedy this to some extent, in that it would encourage more Labour voters to list more preferences (including for the BNP), even though those preferences wouldn’t influence the result: they would at least send a message.

With Approval Voting, on the other hand, all of these considerations fall away: people can vote for whoever they want to, and all of those votes are counted. So if you’re secure in the belief that none of your votes for alternative candidates will jeopardise the prospects of your ‘first-preference’ candidate, you can go ahead and vote for them, thereby indicating that you support other policy agendas to some extent, in addition to those represented by your traditional party. The effectiveness of the Approval Voting poll in sending these messages would be enhanced still further if the results were recorded in such a way as to show, for instance, which other parties Labour voters had voted for. That could actually be easily done by, for instance, counting the vote by logging each voter’s multiple choices in an Excel spreadsheet. This could of course also be done to log the various preferences of voters in an AV ballot.

To return to the point of departure of the present article, though, how would Approval Voting have altered the way I voted at the last election? I indicated previously that, under AV, I would have voted UKIP first preference and Lib Dem second, the Lib Dem being the only candidate with a chance of defeating the incumbent Tory. Now, there were two other candidates for whom I might have liked to express some degree of support: the Green and Christian People’s Alliance candidates. Let’s say, for example, that under AV I’d decided to vote: UKIP 1, CPA 2, Green 3 and Lib Dem 4. UKIP actually finished fourth in the real election. So assuming that after the elimination of the CPA, independent and Green candidates in the AV counting process, the Tory had still not obtained a majority, my vote for UKIP would have been re-cycled to the Lib Dem: my second and third choices would have been ignored altogether, and the system would have recorded that I was one of x thousand whose votes were transferred from UKIP to the Lib Dems. So I might as well have just stuck to my decision to vote UKIP 1 and Lib Dem 2.

By contrast, if all of the preferences were reported, my votes for the CPA and Greens would be included within the total of second and third preferences obtained by those parties. But as I said above, the results are not necessarily going to be reported in this way. Under Approval Voting, none of this is an issue: I could have just voted for all four parties, secure in the knowledge that the only vote that stood a chance of influencing the result was the one for the Lib Dem candidate; but also knowing that my votes for the other parties would be counted and would help send a message to the politicians. Accordingly, I’m going to award three points out of five to Approval Voting against this criterion, versus two for AV. There are some other electoral systems that perform better than Approval Voting in this respect, which I’ll discuss in subsequent posts. Hence, I haven’t given it a four or five.

How about my fifth criterion: does the system mitigate the need to vote tactically? It is commonly said of AV that it eliminates the need to vote tactically, but this is not in fact true. The pressure to vote tactically derives from single-member constituencies, meaning there can be only one winner. Hence, people feel forced to vote for only one candidate on the left or right who has a chance of winning, e.g. UKIP supporters voting Tory or Lib Dem supporters voting Labour. This factor still prevails under AV, the only difference being that you can specify which candidate is your actual first preference while effectively still voting tactically via your last-preference candidate. Approval Voting is no different in with respect to the need to vote tactically; although I would say that the fact that voters are not forced to rank their preferences takes some of the sting out of the obligation to vote tactically. What I mean is that AV could be even more frustrating than FPTP in that it creates the illusion of being empowered to vote according to your true preferences; but in fact, what you mark as your ‘last preference’ becomes your effective vote: the only one that ultimately counts towards the end result. So the last preference effectively becomes the only preference and the tactical vote.

Under Approval Voting, there would be a greater sense of openness and freedom, and a feeling that you owned your choices rather than being directed by the system to specify and rank those choices. If you decide to include a tactical vote among those choices, that is in a sense your choice. The meaning of doing so is slightly different: you’re indicating that you would be content for that particular candidate to win, and you haven’t been forced to pretend they are your ultimate and only effective choice, just one among several. But as the need to vote tactically is still present under Approval Voting, I’d give it a two for this criterion: the same score as AV.

Finally, is the system easy for users to understand, trust and use to their advantage? Here, I would say that Approval Voting is superior to both FPTP and AV: it’s much easier to understand and operate for voters than AV – as well as easier to count on election night – in that it’s a basic extension of FPTP requiring no complex ranking and multiple counts. You vote for all the candidates you like instead of just one as under FPTP. Simple. And it’s easier for voters to have a sense of how their choices could influence the result than under AV: you can just indicate your personal preference alongside your tactical vote without making prudential – and often erroneous – calculations about whether you should rank the tactical vote ahead of your real favourite, and whether including other candidates in your list of preferences might impair the chances of your tactical choice.

Indeed, more people would vote both according to their real preferences and tactically under Approval Voting because they would be confident that neither vote would damage the other. Not that they would necessarily damage each other under AV; but because AV forces you ultimately to choose between a personal and a tactical choice, some voters will choose one and not the other. So I’d give Approval Voting four points out of five for this criterion, compared with two for AV and three for FPTP: it’s both easier to understand than AV and more empowering than FPTP.

So let’s summarise the relative standings of FPTP, AV and Approval Voting by adding the scores I’ve just awarded to Approval Voting to my comparative table of voting systems:

Criterion	FPTP	AV	AppV
Does every vote count?	3	2	3
Is the system proportional?	1	2	2
Does the system foster accountability?	3	3	4
Does the system let voters express their views?	1	2	3
Does the system mitigate tactical voting?	1	2	2
How user-friendly is the system?	3	2	4
Total scored out of a maximum of 30	12	13	18

Approval Voting beats or ties with FPTP and AV on every criterion: it counts every vote, and every vote counts, more than AV; it’s not proportional but is not less so than AV; it fosters greater accountability, in that politicians are forced to seek the support of a greater cross-section of voters, to a greater degree than AV; it frees voters up to express the full range of their views; it is still prone to tactical voting, but no more so than AV; and it’s easier for voters to understand and use to their advantage than AV and FPTP.

In my next post, I’ll be comparing the relative merits of these systems and one of my own invention: the Popular Vote (PV).