Jess Garland, Policy and Research Officer at the Electoral Reform Society   In the wake of the pomp and pageantry of the Queen’s speech last week, a victory for the voter emerged from the Cabinet Office in the form of the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill.   Last year the government’s draft bill on electoral registration seemed set to disenfranchise millions, creating a mockery of our electoral system by enabling citizens to simply ‘opt out’ of their democratic right to vote. The Electoral Commission estimated the proposals could lead to a drop in the completeness of electoral registers from over 90% to 65%.   Following months of campaigning by the Society, in which we presented evidence to the committee and lobbied hard to remove the most harmful elements of the bill, the bill introduced last Thursday is a million miles from its original draft. Gone is the bizarre ‘opt out’ and the annual canvass, critical for reaching voters who have moved during the year, has been reintroduced for 2014 (albeit by delaying the 2013 canvass). ERS has long argued that an annual canvass is necessary in the year individual registration is introduced in order to capture the two to three million people who will have moved in the months between canvass and introduction. It is also heartening to see that the government has listened to the Society’s concerns about abolishing the fine which registration officers rely on. The government will now legislate for a civil penalty similar to a parking fine.   Whilst we welcome these changes, it is no time for complacency. The devil is in the detail of the regulations and we will be scrutinising both this bill and the secondary legislation to ensure we do not see the sort of drop experienced in Northern Ireland when individual electoral registration was introduced there. The impact on postal and proxy voters is still a concern. Research by Scope found that in 2010, 67% of polling stations had one or more significant access barriers for disabled voters. It cannot be right that people with a regular postal or proxy vote who fail to notice the change are required to attend a polling station in order to exercise their democratic right.   The missing millions are still out there. With electoral registers only 87% complete at present we need to not only ensure more people do not drop off the register but to look at ways to increase registration across the board. Depleted electoral registers have greater democratic implications. They will be used to draw the next set of constituency boundaries which means unrepresentative registers will lead to unrepresentative constituencies – with some MPs representing many more constituents than others, most likely in inner city areas.   The leader of the opposition announced this weekend that his party would begin a voter registration drive. Clearly low levels of registration should be a concern to politicians, but is enough being done to tackle the root causes of the issue? Low registration is closely linked to low turnout but it is also indicative of a wider disconnect. Making voter registration easier will not address the underlying problems but it is an important step in making the processes of democracy more in-tune with ordinary citizens’ lives.   Abolishing the archaic system of household registration is the first step in what could be a greater modernisation of our electoral system; creating one that is appropriate for 21^st century citizens and their lives. Individual electoral registration opens the door to further innovations in future, such as linking electoral registration to other citizen-state transactions like applying for a driving licence and online registration.   In October last year the proposals for individual voter registration were being called the biggest political scandal you’ve never heard of. The Society has campaigned hard to make voters' voices heard, and the government has listened. We have a better bill as a result.     To find out more about what the ERS has done on electoral registration visit our missing millions campaign page

Katie Ghose, Chief Executive, Electoral Reform Society   Well another Queen’s Speech has come and gone.   We can only welcome the government’s pledge to legislate on reform of the upper house. But Lords Reform will take more than words; it will require action.   If you hold the power to help decide how Britain is run you should be elected by us, the British public - that’s democracy. The public know it, so how long can a small privileged clique of politicians afford to fool themselves?   In the current economic climate to be handed a job for life because your father was a lord, and to be able to turn up, claim £300 and go home again, is quite simply an embarrassment.   Hearing politicians bewailing the time it will take to pass Lords reform, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that it is their petty in-fighting that will prolong the process.   There is no reason for this process to be drawn out. MPs from the three main parties were elected on a commitment to Lords reform, the proposals are backed up by consensus from a century of debate and public opinion is behind an elected second chamber.   If we blow this opportunity now we’re going to end up spending another hundred years of our parliament’s time trying to undo that mistake. We cannot allow the turkeys to veto Christmas. Politicians’ self interest must not be allowed to waste any more of our time.

Willie Sullivan, Director, Electoral Reform Society Scotland Since Thursday’s local elections we’ve been crunching the numbers. Did voters get a fair deal? What has breaking from First Past the Post meant for Scotland?   Well what we’re seeing is a widening gulf between local democracy in England and Scotland.   We’ve focused on six English and Scottish cities and its’ clear English voters are drawing the short straw - with less choice and less chance of affecting the result on polling day.   A tale of 6 Cities - Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Manchester:

City	Edin.	Glas.	Dundee	Portsm.	B.ham	Manc.
Voter Choice
Candidates/Ward	7.47	10.67	7.75	3.86	5.23	4.91
Parties/Ward	6.41	8.38	5.63	3.79	5.20	4.75
Representation
Voters getting who they voted for (%)	72.66	75.93	79.78	46.17	54.98	65.22
Women’s representation (%)	25.86	30.38	24.14	14.30	42.50	34.4
Voting system	STV	STV	STV	FPTP	FPTP	FPTP
Estimated National Turnout	Scotland 42%			England 32%

  Scotland abandoned First Past the Post for local government elections in 2007 and adopted the Single Transferrable Vote form of Proportional Representation. This has brought competitive elections into all the local ‘One Party States’ that once blighted Scottish politics.   Scottish voters got more choice at the polls and more chance of deciding who speaks in their name in their town halls. And while most Scots got a councillor they backed for their trouble, most of the English just threw their votes away (33,000 in Birmingham, 27,000 in Portsmouth, and 90,000 in Birmingham alone).   Glasgow has transformed itself from rotten borough to a multi-party democracy. Scotland now has a local democracy we can all be proud of, and getting rid of First Past the Post made that possible. With the Single Transferable Vote people have got a real say on who runs their local authorities.   Voters in England should settle for nothing less.  

Rosie Campbell, Birkbeck University London & Sarah Childs, University of Bristol   It is a widely held view that the first-past-the-post electoral system disadvantages women and that electoral reform would improve the representation of women in the UK Parliament. In Westminster elections party candidates are selected constituency by constituency – too often women are selected for the party’s less winnable seats. Only on election-day does it become obvious that the House of Commons is once again over-represented by men. Proportional representation is, however, neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for improving the political representation of women. This is not to say that a more proportional system is not desirable but the surest and most immediate way to guarantee a fairer representation of women in elected bodies is to apply quota rules, irrespective of the electoral system.   Evidence from the UK and around the world clearly demonstrates that operating under a more proportional electoral system is no guarantor of women’s political representation. Whilst at first glance the Scottish Parliament appears to be an example of electoral reform working in women’s favour, when we look more closely at the figures we see that the high numbers of women returned to the Scottish parliament can be largely attributed to the Labour party’s use of twinning in its single member constituencies rather than high numbers of women in the party lists.  We don’t wish to argue that electoral reform is of no benefit to women, moments of constitutional change often provide a window where women can disturb the political order and demand space in the new institutional arrangements. But the choice of PR is important. In OSCE countries with a party list system of PR there are on average 4-6% more women in lower house. List systems can make initiatives to improve the representation of women easier to implement, and harder to ignore. Certainly in a closed list system parties can ‘zip’ men and women candidates, alternating them on the party list, and therefore greatly increasing the likelihood of women getting elected and not just selected. Should a party place all of their women candidates at the bottom of the list the distribution of seat winnablity by sex of candidate would be plain for all to see.   Global Trends: the case for quotas   When it comes to the global league table of women’s representation there are some surprising countries in the top ten. In fact if you ask undergraduate students of politics to rank order countries by the percentage of women in the legislature fail they invariably fail to get the right order.   Top 10 Percentage of women in lower or single house in rank order

1. Rwanda 56.3%
2. Andorra 50.0%
3. Cuba 45.2%
4. Sweden 44.7%
5. Seychelles 43.8%
6. Finland 42.5%
7. South Africa 42.3%
8. Netherlands 40.7%
9. Nicaragua 40.2%
10. Iceland 39.7%

www.ipu.org   Their expectations – and no doubt others – is that established democracies will do  best. In fact this is rarely the case. The UK House of Commons does particularly poorly, with just over 20% women MPs, coming in at an embarrassing 49^th place. It is beaten by other European countries, including Spain, Portugal and Belgium even as it is ahead of France and the US. The scale of women’s under-representation in the UK Parliament is often met with surprise; perhaps because women MPs often wearing bright jackets are highly visible against a background of grey suits, and perhaps too because they are used strategically by party leaders - ‘doughnutting’ the Prime Minister on the Parliamentary benches, or on the campaign trail, or at press conferences.   Around the world the single most important factor related to higher levels of women’s representation is the use of quotas. About half of the top 20 OSCE countries registering sharpest growth in women’s representation have used legal quotas; of the bottom twenty none had such constitutional requirements. Sure, there has been overall improvement in women’s representation over time, but there is no simple linear trend, with stagnation in some countries and regions, for example, Scandinavia, and fall back in others, such as those countries that make up the post-soviet space, and in Scotland and Wales.  In other cases there has been substantial and steady growth (Switzerland, Spain, Austria) and in yet others sudden rises (Belgium and the  Netherlands). In all this, there is no clear unambiguous relationship between electoral system and the proportion of women in the lower house.   The way forward for the UK: time for quotas too   A change in the electoral system in the UK might well have pushed Britain up in the international ranking by a few places. But if we want to see sizeable changes then sex quotas are a better - and arguably post the AV referendum, the easier - choice.  Recall that in 1997 there was a big jump in the number of women MPs:  the figure doubled overnight from 60 to 120. This had nothing to do with the electoral system per se. Instead, it was the Labour party’s use of a quota system, in the form of all-women-shortlists, that accounts for the rise, and explains too their continuing higher levels of women’s representation. In the 2011 parliament they still have more women MPs than all the other parties added together Quotas are, for sure, by no means a simple panacea, they need to be well designed and robustly implemented or some parties will find ways to circumvent them, but they provide nonetheless the most effective means to improve the political representation of women. As one of the recommendations of the 2008-10 Speaker’s Conference made clear, it is time for Parliament to consider legislative quotas for women.   Find out more about the different PR systems and their strengths and weaknesses on The Electoral Reform Society's Voting systems made simple