UKIP rise: Expect the unexpected

As polls open in County Council Elections all the talk is on UKIP’s prospects.
 
Our elections were never designed for 3 party politics – let alone 4. Our fickle First Past the Post system has long since ceased to be a reliable gauge of local opinion and UKIP’s rise will throw these problems into stark relief.
 
A UKIP surge letting in Labour or shoring up the Lib Dems? Labour gains against the Lib Dems letting in the Tories? We’ve seen it all before, and we will see it again.
 
Some election experts will no doubt describe these results as ‘predictable’ but that’s only because of our system’s track record of misreading public opinion.

We will have to wait on the results.  The only certainty is that once again the public aren’t going to get the local democracy they voted for.

 
A taste of things to come: The results of vote splitting in previous elections:

 

• Great Yarmouth, 2012: 20% vote for UKIP, they got no seats, but dragged enough votes from the Conservatives to let in Labour.
• Plymouth, 2012: UKIP get 20.3% of the vote but lose their single seat. Labour get 43.9% of the vote, win 12 seats, as opposed to 7 for the Conservatives on 30.9%. Almost no Lib Dem vote (3.2%). Council swings from Conservative to Labour control.
• Brighton, 2007: Greens gained 4.1%, mostly from Labour, leaving the Conservatives one off a majority.
• Liverpool, 2008. Labour get 39% and 16 seats. Lib Dems get 34.6% and 13. Conservatives get 8.5% and 0. Liberals get 6.9% and 1. Had Conservatives and Liberals backed Lib Dems instead would have stopped a Labour majority in that year.
• Westminster, 2010: Conservatives get 42.7% – 48 seats. Labour get 26.3% – 12 seats. Lib Dems 19.2% and Greens 10.5%. Both no seats. Almost no UKIP vote (0.7%). Divided left, homogenous right = Conservative supermajority.

Do you live in a Rotten Borough?

With this year’s county council elections only a few weeks away, we’ve undertaken new analysis that has revealed the parlous state of local democracy in England and Wales.
 
Evidence shows 21 million people are now living in the local government equivalent of ‘One Party States’ – with single parties holding undeserved supermajorities, and other parties incapable of providing viable opposition.
 
One hundred and four councils in England and Wales now have a single party holding in excess of 75% of council seats. In every case this is wholly out of proportion to the support the governing parties enjoy locally – and has given these administrations carte blanche on official business.
 
Of course all three major parties have ‘One Party States’ – which include both urban and rural authorities. 

ERS has defined ‘One Party States’ as authorities with a single party holding over 75% of council seats, leaving opposition incapable of providing any checks of council decision making. With a 2/3 alone majority parties have the ability to overturn standing orders, and change the way the councils are run. We’ve allowed the possibility of some party rebels offering pseudo-opposition to the one party state in their area.
 
Any decent democracy requires a viable opposition. But the 21 million living in local One Party States don’t have that luxury. These authorities enjoy power without real accountability – and council taxpayers deserve better.
 
We can’t rely on governing parties to keep themselves in check. Our councils need a critical mass of opposition for basic scrutiny to work – it’s what the public keep voting for. But our broken voting system is handing out fake supermajorities to parties out of all proportion to their real support.
 

The coming elections will barely make a dent on these One Party States, and it’s why they breed complacency. When councillors in Slough and Tunbridge Wells voted themselves pay increases they knew they were untouchable.
 
Quite simply no councillor and no council should be beyond the reach of voters.
 
It’s time for England and Wales to follow the lead of Scotland, and abandon First Past the Post for a fair voting system in local elections. Since they made the move in 2007 most of Scotland is still run by single party governments – but all councils now have vibrant opposition.
 
Fair votes have made Scotland’s One Party fiefdoms a thing of the past. There are lessons here for anyone who believes local democracy in England and Wales should be better.
 
It’s time to make the change: the solution is right in front of us. Fair votes in Scotland has worked. The same single transferable vote (STV) system the Scots use could offer Welsh and English voters so much more.
 
If you’ve been failed by local democracy we want to hear from you. Visit our Rotten Boroughs page and tell us your story…
 

The One Party States of England and Wales
 
Full data by region and party is available for download here…
 
The Lib Dems One Party States

Labour’s One Party States

Conservative One Party States

Why 32,000 people will be denied a vote in May

On Thursday 6 May, 27 county councils and 8 unitary authorities in England and Anglesey in Wales will hold elections. Sadly, they give us yet another example of the woeful state of local government.

The Electoral Reform Society is determined to lead the debate on how we build a better local democracy in Britain. The reality is that much of what occurs at local authority level impacts on the day-to-day lives of tens of millions of people. Their activities are therefore important.

Let’s take just one element of what makes a good local democracy – the way representatives are elected.

We’re been looking through the list of nominees for all the council seats as they are being released.

All the usual problems with the First Past the Post voting system are there for all to see.

This morning I did an interview with the BBC about the situation in Wiltshire. So let’s consider what’s happening there.

Apart from the fact that the majority of voters who do not support the dominant party in Wiltshire (the Conservatives) will not see fair representation of their vote, there’s a group of people who are even worse off.

That’s the 32,000 people who don’t get a vote at all. That’s right, an election with no vote. They don’t have to wait until May to find out who their councillor will be – we know now.

FPTP produces many Uncontested Seats, where there is only one candidate. These fiefdoms are strongly defended by parties who manage to engineer them, but what about the voters? The idea that 100% of those 32,000 people support one party is laughable. But small, single member wards often lead people to think ‘why bother’ when a dominant party is guaranteed to win, regardless of whether they have a majority of the vote or not.

There’s fair criticism to be made of the other parties for not standing, particularly Labour who are meant to be pursuing a One Nation approach to politics. The fact that they and the Liberal Democrats aren’t even going through the motions of putting up paper candidates speaks volumes about how politically rotten these boroughs have become.

Every vote must have value if we are to build a better local democracy. In the case of Wiltshire, the dominant party enjoys 45.3% of the vote, but wins nearly two thirds of the seats. That’s despite almost 55% of the community voting for other parties. There are similar examples to this in Labour and Liberal Democrat strongholds – it’s not particular to one party.

Thankfully there is a solution to these problems!

Scotland has now successfully held two rounds of local elections using a fairer voting system – and the results stand in stark contrast to what we are seeing in England and Wales. Using the Single Transferable Vote has abolished the phenomenon of Uncontested Seats (down from 61 wards in the last FPTP election to zero in the two STV elections). Voters get more candidates to choose from and they have significantly increased the chances of someone they vote for getting elected.

It’s only one piece in the puzzle of building a better local democracy. But the advent of the county council elections serve as a timely reminder that a change in the voting system can lead to a change in the way politics is done at community level.

You can find out more about the difference STV has made in Scottish Local Elections here
 

South Shields: Why bother with a by-election?

After David Miliband’s shock resignation we’re looking at a by-election in South Shields.
 
At the Electoral Reform Society we care about elections. But in the case of South Shields we’re wondering what’s the point?
 
The Tyne and Wear seat hasn’t changed hands since 1935. It’s among Labour’s safest. With the result of the election known today, couldn’t we could forgo the ‘formalities’ of an election?
 
We know the result already. The only thing we don’t have is a candidate. South Shields next member of parliament is now being decided by party bosses. Local voters will not get a look in.
 
We’ve had wars, recessions, and political earthquakes and this seat that has never changed hands.

Sadly it’s not just a problem in South Shields. We’ve looked at the evidence. We have 232 seats in parliament haven’t changed hands since World War 2 – with 32 seats unchanged since the time of Queen Victoria. And in these seats elections are simply a formality.

First Past the Post makes safe seats the Rotten Boroughs of the 21^st century. They take power away from local voters and hand it to Central Office.
 
South Shields and Safe Seats:

• South Shields last changed hands between parties in 1935. When Tony Blair announced the date of the General Election in 2001 incumbent David Clark MP immediately vacated the seat to make way for David Miliband. Within weeks of the general election Clark was given a life peerage.
• Arthur Blenkinsop (MP from 1964-79) was the only MP representing South Shields since 1929 with local connection – and the only one not to rise to become a Cabinet Minister.
• The average UK parliamentary seat has not changed hands between parties since the 1960s. 232 have not budged since WW2 – with 32 Seats in one party control since the reign of Queen Victoria.
• Secretary of State for Environment Food and Rural Affairs Owen Paterson holds Britain’s safest seat – North Shropshire – which has been in one party control since 1835. 2nd place goes to David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden – 1837) and 3rd to Minister of State for Schools Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis & Littlehampton – 1840)

Check out our interactive map to see if your seat has changed hands since the 19^th Century http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/safe-seats/

Reviving the Health of Our Democracy

Political and constitutional reform has had a tough time of late but going into the next General Election has never been so important. Too often shoved into the ‘too difficult’ box, reform of our democratic institutions has taken second place to the immediate social and economic issues that are somehow seen as separate from the functioning of our democracy. But political reform cannot be divorced from good policy making.
 
The growing gulf between people and politics matters because it has a high cost for decision-making. Governments that lack the support and confidence of the public are not able to act confidently to tackle the big issues.
 
As David Judge neatly describes, ‘the foundations of authorisation upon which governments claim legitimacy are becoming exposed to and corroded by a vacuum of public disinterest’. The crisis of confidence in our political institutions must be addressed and it is clear that the political world cannot continue with the old way of doing things.
 
Our new Health of our Democracy report sets out to make the case for a new politics that helps bridge that growing gap between democracy and citizenry. The public has never been more cynical and mistrusting of politics – political reform to address this increasing divide has never been more urgent.

Reviving the health of our Democracy, by Jess Garland, is available for download here…

An Ordinary Election

Andrew Burns, Labour Leader of Edinburgh City Council
 
On Thursday the 3rd May 2012, I was elected for the fourth time to represent a Ward within the City of Edinburgh Council area. It was a real privilege to be given local residents’ trust once again, and I’ll do all I can to repay that over my term.

That election was the second time that Edinburgh – and the rest of Scotland – used the proportional, Single Transferable Vote (STV) system to elect its Local Councillors. The first two elections I took part in (in 1999 and 2003) were under the First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system.

And by 2003, the last time I was elected under FPTP, I was part of a ruling Council Administration that had 55% of the seats – therefore an outright majority – on only 27% of the votes!

Being partisan for a second, that was obviously great, but as a democrat I found it pretty near impossible to defend.
 

 
So – as someone who has always been a long-standing supporter of fair votes – I was delighted to eventually be elected by that proportional system in 2007. It led to 5-Parties being represented on the Council and a much fairer balance of Councillors between those Parties. I say that, even though it led to the following 5-years, being years in Opposition for my Party and I, that’s democracy!
 
Last year the use of STV really has become quite, quite normal for electors in Edinburgh. I witnessed no difficulties amongst voters using the system, and everyone (literally) I have spoken to understands perfectly well how to cast their votes … after all, it really is as simple as 1,2,3!
 
Not only was re-elected, but I’m now leading a Labour-SNP Coalition which will help run the City of Edinburgh for the next 4-years. On a personal level, I’m obviously delighted.
 
But, much more importantly, as a democrat I can easily defend last year’s results as 5-parties once again have their fair share of councillors in accordance with the support they received from the voting public.
 
Thursday the 3rd May 2012 really was an ordinary election, in every way.

2012 Scottish Local Government Elections, 3 May 2012, Report & Analysis, by Professor John Curtice is available for download here…
 

STV’s Second Outing

In 2007 Scotland began using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) for local government elections. The First Past the Post system – once used for all public elections in mainland Britain – was consigned to history.
 

May 2012 marked the second outing for the system, and the first since elections to the Scottish Parliament were ‘decoupled’.

Today we launch our report into that election. We have sought to understand what that change has meant for Scotland’s voters, to see how the public and the parties have adapted, and if expectations – of both supporters and critics alike – have been borne out.
 

The first STV vote clearly saw massive changes in how elections and local democracy worked in Scotland.
 

Voter choice more than doubled, uncontested seats became a thing of the past, and the rotten boroughs that once plagued Scotland were undone.
 

2012 has shown modest, but measurable improvements. What we are witnessing is evidence that both voters and parties are becoming more adept at making the most of the possibilities presented by STV. We are seeing a new system bedding in.
 

Fair Votes in action – click for a larger infographic

But, as expected, the first local elections since decoupling did see a dramatic drop in voter participation. Turnout in this election was 39.1% – a 14% drop from the last election. That figure may remain head and shoulders above the 31% that turned out in English authorities that year, but that will be of little comfort to anyone with concerns about the health of our democracy.

STV in Scotland has not been a silver bullet for all the ills of local government. Only modest gains on gender balance mean councils will remain “male, pale, and stale” until we see real progress from parties on candidate selection.

Yes, more action is needed but the system is ensuring that more voices are being heard on more councils than ever before.

There are clearly lessons for those in England and Wales who believe their local democracy can and should be better.

2012 Scottish Local Government Elections, 3 May 2012, Report & Analysis, by Professor John Curtice is available for download here…

All votes are equal. But some voters are more equal than others.

Should 10,000 voters be able to decide who runs Britain?

New analysis of Labour’s target seats for the 2015 General Election have shown just how few people are required to change the Government of this country.

Just 10,000 voters changing their mind next polling day could propel Labour to the largest party. 70,000 would provide a 1 seat majority – 150,000 voters would give Labour a thumping 60 seat majority.

Why should any of this matter?

Our politics remains in thrall to the priorities and interests of a handful of people. These Golden Voters are the ones that count.  Focus Groups will distil their fears, aspirations and desires, which will in turn inform the presentation – and the substance – of policy initiatives and manifestos.

“Will it play well in Thurrock?” will be the conversation now being had at Labour high command, as the party sets about developing policy for the 2015.

It’s Not quite the ‘One Nation‘ of Labour rhetoric, but then our elections militate against equality.

This isn’t a criticism of any one party. They’re all playing the only game in town. Any sensible party strategist, facing limited resources and with an eye on power, will put a relentless focus on the few votes that matter. It’s the inescapable logic of politics under First Past the Post.

The country faces hard choices. It’s a shame the interests of Britain will continue to play second fiddle to the interests of a handful of voters in a handful of marginals.

The Seats that Matter

The US election shows why ‘equal boundaries’ will not fix the bias in the electoral system

Like, I suspect, most election geeks I was glued to the election coverage on Tuesday night as Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney apparently winning with 332 Electoral Votes to 206.

US Presidents are elected by a system called the electoral college whereby every state gets as many ‘electoral votes’ as its number of representatives in Congress. For instance, California has 53 members of the House of Representatives and 2 members of the Senate, hence it has 55 EVs. Wyoming has 1 member of the House and 2 Senators and has 3 EVs. Washington DC also has 3 EVs, despite not being a state. EVs are awarded to the winner of the state on a bloc basis. So this year Obama won the most votes in California, and thus won all 55 of its EVs.

This system is similar to FPTP in many ways – there are safe states on both sides and key ‘swing states’ which essentially decide the election.

In 2000 the election was famously won by George W Bush with 271 electoral votes to 266 for Al Gore even though Al Gore won 48.4% of the popular vote to 47.9% for Bush. The electoral system has the capability to produce winners who have not actually won the electoral vote therefore, something also true of the British electoral system (though this has not happened since February 1974).

In the UK the electoral system suffers from electoral bias in favour of the Labour Party. In the 2010 the Conservatives won 7.1% more votes than Labour and secured 306 seats. If Labour had won 7.1% more votes than the Conservatives they would have won 354 seats, enough for a very solid majority government (indeed this would be a drop of only 2 seats from the last election).

This bias gives Labour a decisive electoral advantage.

Analysis by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, the statistician and polling analyst whose model was proved extremely successful on election night, suggests that a similar issue may be emerging in the US. His analysis suggests that Mitt Romney may have had to win the popular vote by as much as 3% in order to win the electoral vote.

The reason is simple – demographic shifts in many states have advantaged the Democrats. Virginia, once a solid Republican leaning state has turned into a swing state thanks to many liberal, highly educated voters moving to the suburbs of Washington DC in the North of the state. States like Colorado have shifted towards the Democrats due to large influxes of Latino voters.

In the UK the government (though the Lib Dems have now said they’ll vote against the boundaries) has tried to fix the electoral bias through its plan for redrawing the constituency boundaries. They argue that the issue is that the seats are of an unequal size and that this benefits the Labour Party. However, equalising seat boundaries is far from the main cause of the electoral bias. According to analysis of the provisional boundaries by Anthony Wells of YouGov Labour would need a lead of 4.3% (compared to 3% now) to win an absolute majority under the new boundaries. The Conservatives would need a lead of around 7.4% (compared to 11% now). Some of this reduction in bias is also down to the new boundaries simply being more recent than the old ones.

The government’s plan for fixing the boundaries is deeply disruptive, with government minister Baroness Warsi criticising the constituency map as “mad and insane”. This disruption does not even achieve what it sets out to do because the plan does not appreciate that whilst some electoral bias does come from unequal boundaries it is far from the only source, and one issue is a demographic issue of our own.

Firstly, Labour voters tend to be from demographics (ethnic minority, young, poorly educated, urban based) that turn out less than Conservative leaning demographics. Hence Labour seats are won with less voters. Secondly, Labour seats tend to be won with smaller majorities than Conservative ones. Conservative seats – especially those in the South East tend to be won by huge margins, whereas Labour’s vote is better spread out (often described by political scientists as having a ‘more efficient voter spread’).

In the US, the boundaries cannot be changed – they are set according to the state boundaries, but any electoral system that uses boundaries will produce bias. In both cases, the simplest way to reduce bias would be electoral reform.

Our American partner organisation FairVote advocates the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Technically the states decide how their electoral votes are cast, and so the Compact, if passed, would have states award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, essentially turning the election into a single national contest. At the time of writing the Compact is around halfway to adoption.

In the UK, with our parliamentary system, the best way to reduce bias is to simply make elections more proportional. Electoral bias and disproportionality are not the same thing, but reducing the latter in this case will reduce the former as it is harder to create such bias across a larger constituency.

Our 2005 publication – Conservatives and the Electoral System makes this very point.

1974 – The Year Everything Changed

“Power of the British Voter in ‘Terminal Decline.”  So read the headline in Saturday’s Guardian, which  gave us an exclusive first glimpse at the latest edition of the Democratic Audit.

The picture the report paints is stark. We live in a country where, the Guardian writes:

 The power of corporations keeps growing, politicians become less representative of their constituencies and disillusioned citizens stop voting or even discussing current affairs.”

For democratic reformers the Audit features reams of information about the democratic failings of our political system. Because at the heart of this problem lies our failed First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system.

The Audit divides between two periods in post-war British electoral history – before 1974 and after 1974.

The importance of 1974 cannot be understated. The election in February 1974 was the last time Britain had a hung parliament, but that hung parliament was caused by massive changes to Britain’s party system. The Liberals went from 7.5% to 19.3% of the vote, going from 6 seats to 14. The SNP went from 1 seat to 7 and Plaid Cymru won their first ever seats in a general election, gaining 2.

In Northern Ireland, the party system had essentially split from the British parties at the beginning of The Troubles with the formation of the SDLP (who won 1 seat), the DUP (who won another), and the UUP taking its first steps towards independence from the Conservative Party as they refused to take the Conservative whip.

In 1970 12 MPs elected were not aligned with the main two parties but in the February 1974 election this increased to 37. This was not, a mere ‘deviating election’, a one-off, there had been a genuine re-alignment of the UK party system and voters no longer voted for just the main two parties but for a multitude of others.

The differences between the pre-1974 and post-1974 party systems can perhaps be best summarised by the following table using numbers from the Democratic Audit report.

Democratic Audit refer to these two periods as the ‘Golden Age’ and the ‘Dysfunctional Age’ respectively. They describe how First Past the Post (FPTP) has become dysfunctional – failing to deliver what its defenders say it should. FPTP no longer delivers guaranteed single party governance and electoral bias has increased in the system while the number of marginals has markedly decreased to just 85.

Despite the drop in votes for the two larger parties FPTP perversely produced oversized majorities for parties, with Labour able to win a majority, in 2005, of 65 on just 35.2% of the vote. Political scientists have calculated that Labour requires a lead of about 3% to get a majority at the next election, whereas the Conservatives need a lead of about 11% creating a ‘hung parliament zone’ of 14%.

Democratic Audit speculates that 2010 could represent yet another ‘transitional year’.

The end of the old era of the party system was marked by a hung parliament in February 1974, perhaps the close of the ‘Dysfunctional Era’ was marked by yet another hung parliament – in 2010.