Fair votes: on their way to UK?

When I started Legal Eagle, about 18 months ago, I said that it would be as much about the politics of law as practical legal topics. Nothing could be more the politics of law than political reform itself and this is the topic of the minute as the new Liberal-Conservative coalition has committed itself to a referendum on a variant of proportional representation, the Alternative Vote System. This is turn could lead to a major change in the law.

Jimmy Carr the comedian has apparently recently declared that the easiest way to explain proportional representation is to someone who’s interested and already understands it. It is indeed a difficult topic when studied in academic depth and it is now incumbent on politicians to simplify the key concepts and explain why implementation of them in a practical way would lead to a much fairer voting system.

Actually pure PR is quite easy to understand. It’s the variants which are a compromise with element of our existing First Past the Post system which are more difficult to grasp.

I am now going to give examples of what an election result would be per 100 votes cast for different candidates under 4 systems:

1. First Past the Post (FFTP) – which is what we currently use in the UK
2. Pure proportional representation (PR)
3. Alternative Vote System (AV) – which is the system which should now be going to referendum as part of the Liberal-Conservation coalition programme
4. Single Transferable Vote (STV) which is ideally favoured by the Liberal Democrats, and by the Electoral Reform Society

Suppose there were 100 votes given in a constituency and there were 10 constituencies and the outcome was as follows:

Tories 49
Liberal 32
Labour 19

1. Under FPTP, Tories would be elected. If this pattern was repeated in 10 seats, they would get 10 MPs (hence the need for tactical voting in our current system)
2. By contrast, under PP, if this pattern was repeated in the 10 seats, allowing for rounding up, Tories would get 5 MPs, Liberals 3 and Labour 2
3. Under AV, if no candidate gets over 50% (as in example) the votes of the lowest candidate are redistributed on second preferences. Thus in our example the Labour votes will be eliminated. Let us assume that the Labour voters all gave Liberal as second preference. The Labour votes would be added to Liberals which would give Liberals 51, and the Liberal candidate would be elected. If this pattern was repeated in the 10 seats, the Liberals would get 10 MPs
4. Under STV, there would be one constituency comprising the 10 seats. So assuming the voting pattern was repeated the outcome would be:
Tories 490
Liberals 320
Labour 190
To get elected for one seat in the first round, a party would have to pass a quota of 100 votes. So in this example, the Tories would get 4 seats, Libs 3 and Lab 1, with 2 seats spare. The spare votes would then be reallocated on second preferences. But none of these gives any party another seat as they have all give second preference to candidates in the same party list. So we have to go to third preferences. Here the candidate with the fewest votes, the third Liberal are eliminated and let us say the third choice is Labour so Labour gets 110 and gets the 9th seat, with rounding up from 90 to 100 giving the Tories the last seat. So Tories get 5 MPs, Libs 3 and Lab 2 (the same outcome as pure PR in this case).

So one election counted four different ways produces three different results. I believe STV is the fairest voting system but there is no perfect system.

For more information on voting reform look on the site of The Electoral Reform Society.