Proposals to reform UK voting system are complex

Date Published: {J}

Did you hear they’re making a movie of Monopoly? It’s just a loop of film that keeps playing until the last person leaves the cinema.

In other unlikely news, it seems the British are finally going to get PR. Except . . . no. Even if the referendum is passed, what they’ll actually have is something called ‘Alternative Vote’, which makes it sound like you get a second choice if the party you want is out of stock. What does it really mean?

Actually, it’s easier to say what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean Proportional Representation – or anything like it. To understand why, it’s necessary to see how some systems are more proportional than others. The worst one of all is what they have of course – First Past The Post. As I’ve said before, simply picking the candidate who gets most votes is the best known way to elect a representative most people actually despise.

So what then is the most proportional? Some think it’s the one we use – Single Transferrable Vote – but actually the ideal system is to have a single national constituency. That way it is automatically proportional. If ten percent of the population vote for the Purple Party, ten per cent of the seats naturally go to the Purple Party. Simple.

Why don’t we all do that? Well the drawback is that it lacks the element of local representation. This is an ancient and seemingly natural concept in politics. People all around the country send their representatives to the capital where they make the laws. Does it still make sense in the modern world? I would argue no, it is complete and utter nonsense in the modern world, but that can wait until another day. Assuming we do still want it, about the fairest compromise is the system we use – Single Transferable Vote in Multi-seat Constituencies. Do you see the trick? It breaks the country up into areas small enough to still feel reasonably local, but big enough to share out seats in proportion to votes.

Being a compromise, the system has to be fine-tuned. This is done by setting the constituency size; the more seats it has, the more proportionally – but less local – the representation. This can be easily seen by imaging one big constituency with all the seats in it. That would be just the same as the ideal system; perfectly proportional but perfectly non-local.

So what happens if you go to the opposite extreme, and have very many constituencies with only one seat each? That way you get a version that might be highly local, but it would be so badly proportional as to be unworthy of the name of PR.

So I guess that’s why they call it Alternative Vote. It’s really just FPTP with the corners knocked off, its only difference being that voters order their candidates like we do rather than put it all on one. This will help a little, but it is still a very long way from actually being, you know, accurate. Yet that’s all the LibDems won. (Or will win, if they can defeat both Labour and their own government partners in a referendum campaign.) I can only imagine that they look on it as freedom to win freedom.

We’ll see how that works out for them.

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