Time to end guessing games and reform our flawed voting system
Whatever happens in today’s Senedd election, it must be the last fought under our crazy electoral system, argues Political editor-at -large Martin Shipton
THIS must definitely be the last time we use the current electoral system in Wales. It’s a failure in so many ways. Introduced when democratic devolution began, it created division from the outset.
It may be an improvement on the distortions of “first past the post”(FPTP), but we are still lumbered with it anyway as the means to elect two-thirds of Senedd Members.
When the Additional Member System (AMS) was chosen, it was meant to provide an element of proportionality to the then-National Assembly.
While 40 of the 60 Members would be elected in constituencies by FPTP, the remaining 20 regional seats would be allocated to parties that had failed to win a fair share of constituency seats based on their overall vote.
Rhodri Morgan always used to say that it was designed in the late 1990s so that Labour had a chance of winning an overall majority but that such an outcome wasn’t a certainty.
What’s certainly the case is that if the Assembly had been elected entirely on the basis of FPTP, the likelihood is that it would have had a permanent Labour majority – the dreaded “Glamorgan County Council on stilts”, as the notion was described.
The opposition parties would never have agreed to that anyway, making the institution a dead duck with no credibility from the outset.
The Assembly should have used an electoral system based on proper proportional representation – the Single Transferable Vote (STV) – but that was seen by Labour as against its interests.
So we were stuck with AMS, which has its own serious anomalies.
Many found it – and continue to find it – difficult to understand.
One constituency result from 2003 led to the system being dubbed a loser’s charter.
While Labour’s Alun Pugh won in Clwyd West, his rivals from what were then the three other main parties also found themselves elected to the Assembly.
As well as standing in the constituency, the Conservative, Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrat candidates also headed their respective party lists in the North Wales region.
All of them were successful – but many people couldn’t get their heads round the fact that the top four candidates in Clwyd West all found their way to Cardiff Bay.
Part of it was resentment by Labour supporters who would have preferred the entire Assembly to be elected by FPTP, but there were wider concerns about the creation of a two-tier institution with different classes of Members.
Since the beginning, there has been criticism of regional list Members on the basis that some of them are perceived as muscling their way in on work that constituency Members see as their preserve.
What particularly riled constituency members was when regional AMs (as they were) described themselves as “local” AMs.
But there’s a whole area of concerns that take the shortcomings of AMS to another level.
In the run-up to today’s election there has been much discussion on social media about the voting percolations people of a particular political cast of mind should adopt.
Tactical voting has long been undertaken, but it’s even more significant in the context of a two-tier electoral system.
In seats all over Wales, people are not voting for their preferred party of choice, but for the party they think has the best chance of defeating candidates they have a particular dislike for.
Thus in Brecon and Radnorshire, for example, many Labour supporters voted for the Liberal Democrat Kirsty Williams because they knew their own candidate couldn’t win but that she could beat whoever was standing for the Tories.
Whether this practice continues to the same extent today, when Ms Williams has stood down and a new Lib Dem candidate is seeking to take over from her, we shall soon find out.
But the most complicated set of calculations are being carried out in relation to the regional lists.
Voters across Wales are secondguessing the behaviour of others and speculating on the best way to ensure, for example, that the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party does not get elected in their region.
This involves studying opinion polls, but also factoring in the implications of various constituency results in the region and how they would impact on the regional lists.
Everyone has to become a pollster, possibly with the doyen of Welsh psephologists, Professor Roger Awan-Scully, of Cardiff University, as their role model.
As if this wasn’t ludicrous enough, there’s another layer of absurdity too.
Because Labour does disproportionately well in constituency seats, it has only ever been entitled to regional seats in one of the five regions into which the country is split: Mid and West Wales.
Yet in 2016, across the other four regions – North Wales, South Wales Central, South Wales East and South Wales West – the party piled up a total of 277,221 votes.
All these votes were wasted. Some people realise they’re wasted, but vote Labour anyway out of tribal loyalty, while many others don’t understand the system and think they’re helping their party of preference.
In fact, by voting this way these people are actually helping other parties to win seats that they otherwise might not qualify for.
It’s time to end the guessing games and have a new voting system that everyone can have faith in.
No more two-tier Senedd Members, but all on an equal footing.
The next Welsh Government should legislate for the introduction of STV.
Jess Blair, director of the Electoral Reform Society in Wales, put it like this: “With STV everyone could vote for the parties they want to in order of preference. It could be brought in alongside the necessary increase in the number of Members, so we no longer have a Senedd that is no bigger than Pembrokeshire County Council.”
Whatever complexion the new Welsh Government has, this reform should be a priority.