Do voting systems matter?

Britain is renowned worldwide for its tradition of representative democracy. But it is easy to overlook how seemingly uncontroversial changes to the voting system can have less to do with improving democracy and more to do with consolidating the electoral advantage of the governing party. I have argued before here and here that recent Government proposals are open to the allegation of ballot manipulation that mar voting on the other side of the Atlantic. And now the Elections Bill 2021-22, currently before Parliament, is ushering in another change which could favour the Conservatives – this time to how directly elected Mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners are elected. 

At the moment, directly elected Mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners are elected using the Supplementary Vote (SV) system, in which electors can indicate their first and second preference. Under this system, a candidate must gain more than 50 per cent of the vote on the first round to win; if they don’t, all but two candidates are eliminated and second preferences taken into account. Thus, more than 50 per cent of electors will see a candidate they supported elected, which, on the face of it, would appear to strengthen democracy and be worth the extra complexity to the electoral process. The effect of SV on the outcome of elections can be summed up as – the most liked candidate is not elected, but the least disliked. It is argued that the system mitigates against extreme candidates being elected. WC Fields once said “Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.” Usually, the winner on the first round goes on to win on the second but, as experience over the past 20  years has shown, usually is not the same as always. 

Directly elected or Executive Mayors (as opposed to the honorific mayors who preside over council meetings and perform ceremonial functions) were introduced as part of New Labour’s package of constitutional reforms after 1997, that saw devolution to London, Scotland and Wales and reform of the way councils are run. The first was the Mayor of London, in 2000, and others came later elsewhere, first Mayors and Metro-Mayors and then local authorities were also allowed to adopt the Mayoral system if they wished. 

All of the new electoral bodies created by New Labour under its devolution programme moved away from the traditional first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, either using a “preferential” system – the SV for Mayors – or a proportional system for assemblies. One of the roles of the Mayor of London was to oversee the police and the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition Government of 2010-15 rolled out that function, where there were not Mayors, in the form of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). 

Surprisingly, when the coalition Government introduced PPCs, it also adopted the SV system for their election; surprising, because for the Conservative Party, the FPTP system has always been an article of faith. Here, however, they seem to have been swayed by their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrat’s, who have always been equally committed, but to reformed voting systems. 

Freed of coalition partners after 2015, the Conservative Party included scrapping SV in its 2017 manifesto, but didn’t get round to doing it. This pledge was not made explicit in the 2019 manifesto and interest appeared to wane.

Although the Home Secretary reiterated the commitment in March this year, by the time the Elections Bill 2021-22, long in the gestation, came to be published in July, scrapping SV was not included in a packed table of contents. Instead, the Government have just been forced to use an unusual parliamentary procedure to add the proposal to the Bill at a very late stage. An election result earlier this year might suggest the reason for the Government’s haste to catch up with themselves.

As pointed out earlier, it is rare for the candidate who wins on the first round not to go on to win on the second; it has not happened in six elections for the Mayor of London, just once in 15 Metro Mayor elections, 10 times in 120 PCC elections (which have always been typified by low turnout) and in a handful of cases among local authority Mayors. In one of those cases, in North Tyneside, a very tight race between Labour and the Conservatives saw the Conservatives come out 1.6 per cent ahead on the first round, only for Labour to win the run-off by 1.2 per cent. But a lot of run-off victories involved a major party and an independent: these were clearly a case of the second preferences of all the other major parties’ supporters swinging it for the independent in a case of “anyone but…”

Thus far, the Labour Party has been the biggest loser under SV — its candidates lost on second preferences to an independent, once in Stoke-on-Trent and twice in Mansfield, although this is largely because most mayoralties cover Labour-leaning urban areas. But it was the result in the first major election to be decided on second preferences — last May’s Mayoralty of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough — that could explain the Government’s sudden urgency in getting round to scrapping SV. 

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Mayor covers a population of 855,796 and has a 30-year investment fund of £600 million. It was first elected in 2017 and won by the Conservatives, unsurprisingly in a predominantly rural area in the south of England. Equally unsurprising was a run-off against the Liberal Democrats, in which the Liberal Democrats gained more second preference votes, but they had been nearly 15 points behind on the first round and so it was not enough to catch up. 

In 2017, a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party was languishing in the polls, but by 2021 there had been an upswing in Labour’s electoral fortunes. This year, the Conservative incumbent’s run-off was against the Labour candidate and the second preferences were more than enough to overcome an eight-point deficit from the first round and cause a shock Labour victory in a Conservative heartland. Liberal Democrat second preferences went to Labour by a factor of three to one in their Cambridge city and South Cambridgeshire strongholds. 

The conventional wisdom of latter-day British politics has always been that two parties, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have vied for “progressive” vote, while Conservative voters have only had one place to go. It is this divide that has kept the Conservative Party in power for so long. The Left-of-centre lament has been “if only we were be united, we would win”. 

The 2021 Cambridgeshire and Peterborough result showed that there is, perhaps, an alternative route to success for the anti-Conservative cause: the SV system. And that realisation looks like heralding its demise. The introduction of Photo ID in the Elections Bill 2021-22 provoked an outcry. It remains to be seen whether the late addition of scrapping SV to the Bill will be little noticed and much unlamented. Or is it possible that more people than the Government bargained for have, over the past twenty years, become attached to one extra element of choice in addition to just marking an “X” in a box at the polling station? People are beginning to realise that voting systems do matter. 

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