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First Past the Post?
We don’t have a sovereign and a prime minister, but the one thing we do have in common with our British cousins is the concept of “first past the post,” that is the candidate with the largest vote count in any constituency wins.
This leads to some grumbling among the losers. For example, in the late UK election, the Scottish National Party received 1,454,436 votes or 4% of the total cast. The United Kingdom Independence Party received 3,881,129, or almost 13%. Guess which party got 56 MPs and which one got just one?
Which led to this Tweet this morning:
How many votes it took to elect each MP last Thursday UKIP: 3.86m Greens: 1.15m LD: 299,000 Lab: 40,000 Con: 34,000 SNP: 26,000 DUP: 23,000
— Electoral Reform Soc (@electoralreform) May 11, 2015
“PR” stands for “Proportional Representation.” Under this type of system, voting districts are ignored. Large blocks of urban votes are used to wipe out the voices of suburban and rural voters out of “fairness.”
If you were listening, you could hear the same high-pitched whine on these shores last fall when the GOP took 57% of the House seats with approximately 52% of the national vote. A progressive, liberal Democrat front group, FairVote.org started complaining in every media outlet that would give them a platform. And the whine about the Senate was even worse as the media latched on to FairVote’s myth of a 20 million vote majority for the new Democrat minority (subsequently debunked by Sean Trende).
Of course all of these arguments are made using results where parties were using different rules, the very knowledge of which effects the outcome. The idea is to make every election a national election.
And if FairVote and other progressive organizations had their way they would do away with the entire Senate since small states like Delaware get equal representation to a state the size of California. That’s, you know, not fair.
Other things that they think are not fair include anything more than a signature to vote, losing one’s right to vote through committing a felony on your fellow citizens, and well, actually being a citizen.
The idea of any electoral reform is to rig the game for your fellow ideologues. The husband and wife team that runs FairVote — Rob Ritchie and Cynthia Terrell — are longtime Dem operatives (she worked for both Tom Harkin and Douglas Wilder).
All proposals of this type are enthusiastically supported until the moment that they don’t work. Peruse the Twitter feed of UK leftists this morning. Had someone granted their wish before last Thursday, not only would they have awoken to another five years of a coalition government under David Cameron, they would be looking at Nigel Farage of UKIP as Deputy Prime Minister.
Now who’s the swivel-eyed loon?
Published in Elections, Politics
Scotland has a problem – they are overpaid and over-represented. In the 1970s Lord Barnett, the Labour chief secretary in the Treasury devised what was supposed to be a temporary formula to deal with poverty in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Thirty years on Cameron, Clegg and Milliband were all basing their “No” campaign against Scottish independence on its indefinite continuation.
Put simply, it guarantees Scotland an extra £1,623 (around $2,500) per person expenditure over England. So for every dollar spent in England, $1.19 must be spent north of the border. During the referendum last fall it was estimated than an independent Scotland would not only have to keep the tax rates of the UK but increase them by 11%, and that’s just to maintain the current level of government funding.
Alex Salmond, then leader of the SNP, created a document that claimed North Sea oil revenues would cover that. But then the oil market collapsed and put his number in the hole by about $23B over three years, which I suppose is close enough for government work.
Proving that on both sides of the Atlantic, there’s no such thing as a temporary government program. If you start it, you’ll never be rid of it.
But if Bush I were reelected, Gore would have never been Vice President in the first place.
For the record, I’ve been an advocate of the Australian system for years now. It’s pretty much the only way I’ve found to break the two party system without handing government over to the greater of two evils.
You either have a two-party system or a system with endless coalitions that can hardly be elected or unelected.
In the latter case, you can end up with the supposedly conflicting parties in coalition–like in Germany now.
In the former case, you’re always looking at two-party systems. Everything else is just a problem.
Voting can only elect or unelect someone. Politics only works on a partisan basis if opposing principles fight it out in elections. This all points to a two-party system. I do not see how there is any escape from this.
Mr. Abbot in Australia either rules a coalition that is almost like a party or is not really ruling. If he does rule, everyone who did not vote for his party may be annoyed. If he does not, everyone who did vote for his party is annoyed. The latter possibility is far worse–it suggests voting is useless.
Like in Germany: Vote for Frau Merkel or for her main opponent, get the same thing.
I especially like this for primaries. As it stands now, if one faction has coalesced around one candidate, all other factions are at a disadvantage.
In this upcoming primary there’s again the possibility that mainstream Republicans will all vote for Bush and the conservative vote will split 6-7 ways, meaning Bush wins. However, under this system you could vote for the candidate you really hope wins (instead of worrying about “wasting your vote”), and if he turns out to do poorly, you’ll be voting for your next big choice.
Also as it stands now, everybody’s second choice (who might in fact be the best man/woman to unite the party) gets no votes whatsoever.
Moreover, under the Aussie system, candidates could focus more of their ire against the opponents they actually oppose the most. Coming soon we’ll see Huckabee vs. Santorum for the SoCons, Paul vs. Cruz vs. Rubio for the Tea Party, etc. They’ll all have to tear down the candidates who are most like them in order to capture the mantle for that particular faction or wing.
Under the Aussie system, Cruz wouldn’t be so worried about making sure Paul supporters go for him or vice versa. Sure, Cruz would prefer somebody votes Cruz 1, Paul 2, but such a person would still be indicating he supports Paul. If somebody prefers a non-politician, they wouldn’t have to vote Carson 1, Fiorina 0, it could be Carson first preference, Fiorina second.
I think this would solve a lot of problems.
My problem with PR is that you’re basically voting for a party to represent you and not the individual. I’m not voting for John Smith because I think he’s a good person with strong character, I’m voting for person X from Party Y.
I like voting for individuals rather than a collective. Then that person owes his station to my vote, and not his status as a member of the party. It also means dissent among party members. And I’m all for dissent.
Also, that 4% figure for the SNP is of the total of the UK. People in Sussex aren’t voting for the Scottish National Party.
They did, however, get something like 40% of the vote in Scotland.
Yeah, but the MPs will be going to London…
Why? How is it “flawed”? Why is it “bad”? Why is your preferred system “best”?
Should a legislature be a statistically-perfect microcosm of a nation’s populace? What are the goals of an electoral system? How does one define “democracy”?
Etc, etc…
I agree with Fred (local papers please copy) in that PR strengthens the party bosses, not weakens them.
And because we have no history in PR you can bet any system that the Progressives would come up with with have racial, gender and sexual preference quotas. Black Lesbian Transgender Trade Unionists form a line to the left.
…to represent the people who elected them in their local constituencies.
That doesn’t sound much like Scotland’s problem…
Of course it would. Collectivists turning voting into collectives, ruled by the leaders of collectives.
It does because it has presented them with an illusion. They believe that they have it good and independence will make it better. What they don’t stop and ask is, “Just why are things as good as they are?”
When you make decisions based on illusions, that’s a problem.
Mis, there are far too many Scots in London. Electoral reform is the solution in these latter days. Mankind is peaceful now. There was some work done ten years ago; more will be done in the next three. The number of Scots will dwindle, as God & nature intended.
I don’t think it’s that simple. In Germany, there are certainly differences between the parties – however, at the moment, the fractures are less left vs. right than hard left vs. center vs. hard(er) right. That still leaves quite a bit of room for debate and variation in policy.
And the alternative we witness in America are the violent swings back and forth when one party takes control of all of the reigns of power. One reason Obamacare is such an abomination is because the Democrats knew they had the internal support for health care reform, but would only have a vanishingly short time frame to pass it, so they cobbled together a complex and contradictory law they didn’t understand and forced it through the system.
So far as I know, the UK has had incredibly strong parties for the longest time, with no use of PR. A party leader–bosses are American, like in Mark Twain–who is his own separation of powers does that… Not to say PR could not make the situation worse–of course it could, that’s the charm of PR.
This is far and away the best reason not to use PR.
Even though our political parties are de facto entrenched in our system, we should not be enshrining their power into law, ever.
I do wonder, though, whether there are alternatives. For example, combining 4 districts into one district represented by 4 people could allow the “minority” in the district to be represented while still having voters choose people, not parties.
In short, people do not have political disagreements in the EU crisis–they do have vigorous party politics if there is no reason to worry, though. This ain’t kids in the playground. Every man, woman, & opinion that disagrees with Frau Merkel has effectively been thrown out of politics when it matters.
I rather agree about Obamacare. But the swings you lament allow voters political change. Without that, there is no politics. There is just a political class deciding & figuring out ways to tell the people they have had a say–& they agreed don’cha know.
Under a PR scheme, party bosses draw up the lists. If you think there are not enough reliable party hacks, entrenched ideologues and lifers in Parliament or Congress now, just wait until PR. It’s hard to see how an Eric Cantor, for example, would be knocked off under PR. He would be high enough on the party list to secure a seat, even if his party suffered a devastating lost nationally. And I rather like that there is no “national election” per se in the US. There are 50 state elections and 435 congressional district elections that happen to be held–or that conclude, thanks to early voting and vote-by-mail–on the same day.
The two things I dislike the most about proportional representation are (1) that you’re voting explicitly for a party to represent you, rather than a man, and (2) that your “representative” isn’t necessarily from your district.
I much prefer our ideal (sadly withered in practice, but still a guiding principle), where in each district, we are electing one of us to represent us in Congress. Everything else flows from that. It preserves the idea that each region is composed of my neighbors and me, and we choose one of our own to represent us. We take the candidate with the most votes and send him to Congress, regardless of which party he happens to be associated with.
Under proportional representation as I understand it, they could just as well abolish regional districts and instead just have voting blocks defined by “identity” (Heaven help us!), like E.J. joked about.
PR requires a list. How the list is made is open to discussion. Closed lists are party made; open lists can be decided by primary votes or what have you. Or some combination thereof–there is a lot of variation in PR…
The solution isn’t going to be any kind of system. It’s devolving power and protecting individual rights. (Or combine the two and just devolve power down to individuals.)
While true, there is a point at which these swings become too extreme and counterproductive.
Let’s assume (and hope like heck) that Obamacare gets repealed after 2016. Even if we revert back to the status quo, the process will have enacted a huge cost to get us nowhere. And of course, Democrats would never give up the fight, so the next time they regain enough power, we can expect to see another type of healthcare reform enacted, throwing the system in havoc once again. At some point, the whiplash between good and bad policies may be more destructive than simply having the bad one.
In short, our binary system makes compromise on big issues with big divides nearly impossible. Obviously no electoral system can smooth over such huge ideological differences, but our current system has resulted in numerous huge liberal programs being enacted very rapidly.
This is something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma, though: our current system keeps perpetuating the centralization of power.
The key factor is our human nature. When large groups of voters feel “disenfranchised” in national elections due to our winner-take-all system, their natural reaction isn’t to ask for power to be taken away from the national government, it’s to exact revenge by winning the next national election and shoving everything back in the other side’s face.
This tit-for-tat is why conservatives – who should always be in favor of more local governance – nonetheless seem to focus the majority of their attention, money, and energy on national politics. It’s a vicious cycle.
Civil war is the name for that point–let’s not mince words.
Let’s not assume the status quo ante is the likely result in our scenario, nor that it’s a waste of time & money. Partisanship is its own reward, my good man.
That’s the reward of GOP fecklessness.
Yes, bad laws enforced are preferable to good laws unenforced.
Compromise on big issues with big divides is not a good idea.
If you recall the FDR-LBJ majorities, you might learn why.
FPTP flawed? Yes. You have two conservative candidates and one liberal in an electorate. The major conservative gets 40%, the liberal 41%, the other conservative 19%. The liberal gets elected, even though it’s likely that those voting for Con2 would have preferred the other conservative to win. I gave the Clinton/Bush/Perot and Bush/Gore/Nader examples to illustrate.
Is preferential voting perfect? Of course not, but it does tend to yield results which leave the electorate more grudgingly accepting than FPTP.
I think a useful goal for an electoral system is to yield a balance between officials who reasonably acceptable to their local electorate, and a system of government that is reasonably stable and effective. There’s a great deal of wiggle room within those constraints, although PR would be pushing the boundaries.
Democracy? I’m a democratic minimalist: its main usefulness is in allowing bad governments to be ended periodically.