Myth 1: STV is too complicated

Arguing that systems such as STV should be rejected because not everyone understands voting in any way other than placing one X next to one candidate seems a bit mean towards the electorate. Instructions on ballot papers are easy to follow. If you’re told to place a ‘1’ by your favourite candidate, a ‘2’ by your second-favourite and so on, it’s pretty clear what to do.

If you can list five things in order of preference, you can understand your role in an STV election. To suggest otherwise is like suggesting that if you don’t understand the intricate workings of an internal combustion engine, you are incapable of making a car move.

What voters in STV elections do know is that casting a vote for their preferred candidate and/or party broadly helps determine final representation.

In some ways, voting in an STV election is actually simpler than voting with the old ‘firstpast-the-post’ system. In an STV election, you rank your choices, safe in the knowledge that you won’t be accidentally helping one of the candidates you really dislike. In a ‘first-pastthe- post’ election, you cannot guarantee this, which is why so many people vote ‘tactically’, i.e. not for their favourite candidate, but for the one with the best chance of keeping out a candidate they dislike. No need for such ‘tactics’ with STV.

If you can list five things in order of preference, you can understand your role in an STV election.

 

Myth 2: STV means we end up with the same daft system as Israel/Italy/Weimar Germany.

This is not true. these countries do not/did not have STV. The Electoral Reform Society is unequivocal in its support of STV. Other people and other organisations support different PR systems, but none of them really resembles the systems of the countries mentioned above.

The nearest other country to use STV is Ireland - where it works so well that when the politicians asked the people, twice, in referendums, to get rid of it, they voted ‘no’: they wanted to keep STV!

 

Myth 3: STV creates discord within political parties

As far as the voters are concerned, competition to help them out and thus to win their votes is almost certainly a good thing.

Furthermore, even where members of the same party are competing for votes, it still does them good to work together—the majority of votes are cast on party lines, and a party that appears disunited is not terribly attractive to voters. Depending on how the party plays it, all its candidates can still get elected together.

Most important, parties are coalitions and the people in them have different views on different topics. STV can show these views to the electorate and gives voters the chance to show which they prefer.

 

Myth 4: STV means policy decisions are made in smoky backroom deals, not out inthe open in a single party’s manifesto

There is a lovely romantic notion that comes with first-past-the-post voting that a party publishes its manifesto, stands on that basis, and then works hard to implement it when the public have endorsed it. And that on the contrary, with coalition government, manifestos are chopped around, mixed and matched, and the voters thus have no idea what they’re voting on, as compromises will be reached behind closed doors, in the infamous post-election ‘smokefilled rooms’.

Leaving aside the fact that most voters do not read a single manifesto, let alone make a decision based on having read all of them, if manifestos were adhered to, we’d have had a referendum on the Westminster voting system by now, as included in Labour’s 1997 preelection promises.

If the need for a coalition looks likely, parties tend to make their intentions clear before the election and stand on that basis. It is often imprudent to do otherwise – voters can easily feel betrayed if the party they voted for is seen to team up with another party that they’re not so keen on. Such betrayal, or the appearance of betrayal, is the most suicidal electoral act a party can perpetrate: if voters feel that the party they voted for has abandoned its principles to get into power, that party will most likely be mauled at the next election. This happened to the New Zealand First party which was punished in the 1999 election after going into coalition with a party it had vigorously denounced during the previous campaign.

 

Myth 5: STV means that the small parties call the shots

One of the most common arguments against proportional representation of any kind is that where no one party has enough votes for a majority, the third party get to ‘call the shots’ and decide who to form a coalition government with.

This is a possibility. It is not, however, a probability. As mentioned above, parties seen to be sacrificing principles for power can meet with almighty electoral backlashes. Moreover, if the third party is really to ‘call the shots’, it must be able to threaten to jump ship and join the other big party, or its influence will be limited to that granted by its popular support.

 

The truth is that third parties acting as a coalition partner have limited control over policy decisions. They remain the subservient partner, just as their vote share would indicate. Study of the policies put forward in the partnership agreements that formed Labour-Lib Dem coalitions in Scotland in 1999 and 2003 shows that the influence of Labour manifesto policies was much stronger than that of the Lib Dems.

 

Myth 6: STV leads to weak and unstable government and permanent toothless consensualism

Is our political culture built on the idea of an elected semi-dictatorship where we want one side to win and have all the power, and then we want to get annoyed with them and get rid of them a couple of elections down the line? The media often has a curious attitude to this.

When a government or administration has a big majority, it’s ‘arrogant’ and ‘against the public will’, and when it’s a coalition, it’s ‘in chaos’.

Proportional representation is less likely, on the whole, to deliver landslide majorities to a single party. It will only deliver a majority to a single party when that party gets a majority of the votes.

It should not be forgotten, though, that single-party administrations can exist under proportional representation – all that is required is for a party to command wide enough support among the electorate, as opposed to the old ‘first-past-the-post’ system, where a level of support somewhere around 35 per cent of the electorate is good enough for 100 per cent of the power – as was the case in the last Westminster election. In Spain and Malta, for example, the normal pattern has been for single-party government despite PR.

In many countries, even with highly proportional systems, stable coalitions are formed which alternate in government. In recent elections in Norway and Sweden centre-right and left alliances have exchanged power in clear-cut election results. There was no mushy consensual politics in the last few Italian elections, where rival coalitions presented highly distinct appeals.

Moreover, the most unstable governments are often those governments with a small, or no, overall majority that FPTP throws up – as in Britain in 1974-79 and 1992-97, and frequently in Canada. These governments will tend to be threatened as much by their own backbenchers as minority parties, and are forced into short-term calculations in the hope of hanging on or calling another election to win a majority.

Myth 7: Proportional representation doesn’t let you kick them out

There is a lingering idea that proportional representation entrenches the same politicians in power for ever.

Politicians can only stay in office for two reasons. Either the party has the power and wish to keep them there, or the voters do. In a closed-list system, or in the safe seats generated by the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, the politicians have that power. STV gives that power to the voters, and then it is up to the voters to decide who stays and who goes.

STV also ensures that to be elected, a candidate has to have a decent level of support from within their constituency. In the previous two general elections, George Galloway (he’s the best example, there are others) has won his Westminster seat with under 20 per cent of two separate registered electorates. A system that elects an MP on such a paltry amount of votes is not one that appears best designed for kicking those MPs out.

 

Myth 8: Proportional representation helps extremist parties get into power

Where candidates are ranked, the most disliked candidate cannot win. Where candidates aren’t ranked, there is no such safeguard. In Westminster elections extremist parties, because they are so unlikely to ever gain enough votes in one constituency to win a seat, are not dealt with, they are just ignored. Many would also argue that if a party can gain, say, 10 per cent of the vote, they should not

be denied representation; often such representation will merely be the extra rope they need to hang themselves with.

Most proportional representation systems have a ‘threshold’, a percentage of the vote that a party has to receive in order to be entitled to seats in Parliament. Some countries explicitly build these thresholds into their rules; others design it into the system, so that it creates an ‘effective’ threshold.

STV has a relatively high local threshold, of 20 per cent in a four-member seat, which tends to keep out the smaller fragments while allowing parties and Independents with a significant degree of local support to win representation. Further, moderate parties are more likely to attract transfers and therefore, if the voters are willing, can win representation despite a fairly low share of first preferences. The Alliance Party manages this in Northern Ireland.

Extreme parties rarely attract transfers – people are either for them or strongly against them.

 

Myth 9: Proportional representation, especially in multi-member constituencies, severs the ‘link’ between representatives and their electorates

With STV, the opposite is the case. Some actually argue against STV on the basis that, where STV is used in Ireland, representatives are forced to pay too much attention to constituency issues.

That STV gives incentives to representatives to serve local interests is not hard to fathom.

In multi-member constituencies, there is a healthy competition between the members (and because all members are elected on the same basis, the competition is distinctly less acrimonious than that between constituency and list members in Additional Member Systems). Also, as voters have a choice at elections between candidates of the same party, developing a personal profile is an advantage when it comes to getting re-elected.

The link between constituents and their MP is at its worst under closed lists (like we use for European Parliament elections) and in the two-thirds to three-quarters of seats under FPTP that are so safe that the winner is as good as pre-determined. It is at its best under STV.

Myth 10: Proportional representation is really boring

Sorry, if it seems that way. But it is important, because it’s about how we run our democracy, and that’s about who has power, and how they got that power. And that affects all of us.