Free and fair elections

Elections in Great Britain are free and fair, they lead to a clear outcome and are generally well understood by the electorate.

Well they are certainly free, with some notable and well documented exceptions, everyone over the age of eighteen is able to cast their vote in a whole range of elections.  They also result in a clear outcome, with a councillor, or a member of parliament, or a member of the European parliament being elected using a simple first past the post method.  One more vote than your rival and you get in, one less vote and you don’t.  But what about the other two claims, are they fair and generally well understood?

They are fair in that everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s vote has the same value but it is well known and accepted that the wishes of those people who don’t vote don’t count.  This often gives rise, especially in local elections, to candidates being elected by less than the majority of the constituency because the majority of people have not turned out to vote.  It is also the case however that candidates can be and are elected even though the majority of people who have voted have noted voted for them.  This is when an individual gets more votes than any other candidate but the number of votes cast for their opponents was greater than their total.  It could be argued that it is fair to not consider the wishes of those who haven’t voted, as long as the voting system was as accessible as possible but is it fair that an individual who does not carry the popular majority in their constituency is elected to represent it?  This is reasonably well understood and documented and strays into the area of proportional representation which for most people has been an unconvincing argument for a change in the political system.

What is less well understood however is the bias that the political party system lends to the process in that it suggests candidates to an undecided or wavering electorate.  Imagine that there are several political parties in play at an election.  We’ll go with three to make a point, the lemon party, the lime party and the orange party. In this example the lemon and lime parties are large and have been in government for the majority of the recent past and the orange party is somewhat smaller.  All three parties are putting up a candidate at the election and the party that they are aligned to is clearly stated on the ballot sheet, not only in writing but also in a pictorial form just to make sure that it is clear.

Because of this clear alignment between candidate and party, a voter can enter the booth knowing nothing about the candidate, not even their name and can choose based entirely upon the national policies and profile of the party in question.  Fair enough but the system is supposed to deliver candidates to represent the constituency and so should be based upon local issues and local knowledge.  Secondly a voter who is opposed to the policies of one party can choose a candidate under the brand of an opposing party, again without any knowledge of their individual policies in relation to the constituency for which they stand.  In this way if you are a lemon the you are most likely to vote lemon but of you don’t want the lemon party to win then you will pick the candidate most likely to beat that candidate, which in this case is the lime.  The orange candidate is only likely to get the votes of die hard oranges or in areas where they have the greatest chance of doing well.

Imagine then that there is a fourth candidate, unaligned to any particular party.  They are standing on a very local issue. They have to work much harder than any of the other candidates as the only thing that the electorate has at their disposal to choose them is knowledge of their individual policies.

This means that the best way to get elected is not to spend time espousing your policies targeted specifically at the constituency but rather to align yourself to a political party with all of its advertising budgets and media coverage.  Only by removing the party of the candidates on the ballot paper can this bias be removed.  Then, at least at the point of election they would be free, fair and generally well understood.