Democracy in action, this isn’t
They are still picking up the pieces after the British election. While the Conservatives celebrated their surprise majority win, elsewhere the carnage was horrific: to the country, racked by ethnic and regional divisions; to the main opposition parties, three of whom lost their leaders (though one has since “unresigned”); to the pollsters, their reputations in tatters after failing to call the result. But the biggest casualty may prove to be the electoral system.
First past the post, as it is called — where the winner is not the party or candidate with a majority, but just the one with the most votes — often yields odd results, a division of the seats in Parliament bearing little resemblance to the division of votes among the population. But seldom has it been quite as stark as this. Never mind that the Conservative “majority” was won with less than 37 per cent of the vote: that’s commonplace nowadays. It’s when you scan across the results for the other parties that the anomalies really stand out.
The Scottish National Party (SNP), with 4.7 per cent of the vote, won 56 seats. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), with 12.6 per cent of the vote — 3.7 million voters who took the time and trouble to go to the polls and mark their ballots for their party of choice — got just one seat. The Liberal Democrats fared scarcely better: 7.9 per cent of the vote, eight seats. Neither did the Greens: 3.8 per cent of the vote, one seat. All told, these three parties, with nearly a quarter of the popular vote between them, won 10 seats in a 650-seat House.
This discrepancy is not coincidental, random or unusual. It happens nearly every election, and in much the same way: parties whose support is bunched regionally, like the SNP, are hugely favoured, at the expense of broadly based parties like UKIP or the Lib-Dems. We’ve seen much the same phenomenon here, notably in the success of the Bloc Québécois: parties that emphasize ethnic and regional grievances and insist on the irreconcilable differences between themselves and their compatriots of other tribes are rewarded for their belligerence. While those grievances and differences may be real, the electoral map exaggerates them, painting a false and distorted picture of the country.
Well, that much you are probably aware of. Nearly everyone can agree that’s a problem. What’s more insidious about first past the post are the many other of its bizarre aspects we take for granted, as part of the normal operations of democracy — or at worst as endearing quirks — that are in fact simply a function of the electoral system. As we prepare for the federal election, for example, my media colleagues are gearing up to report on the socalled “battleground” ridings or provinces, the ones — often a small handful — where the election will actually be decided. How’s that again? Don’t they all count in the final result? Isn’t every riding a “battleground”?
Not really. Given that it only takes a plurality to win a riding, and given the tendency for parties to bunch their vote in regional strongholds — since that’s what the system rewards — then a great many ridings are written off from the start as “safe seats.” If party standings were more closely related to their popular vote, as under proportional representation, parties would have equal incentive to compete for votes in every part of the country, as voters in all parts would have the same incentive to turn out to support them. But as it is, it’s a wonder why anyone bothers.
Likewise, we have al l grown used to being urged to vote “strategically,” for fear of “splitting the vote” — that is, voting for a party we don’t much care for, in preference to the party we actually support, in order to prevent a party we detest from getting in. We think of this as “normal,” when it’s anything but — again, it’s just a trick of first past the post. Under a proportional system, there’s no such thing as vote splitting: since the number of seats a party gets is in proportion to the number of votes it gets, there’s no way for one party to benefit because the others were divided.
Strategic voting was a big part of the U.K. result, again driven in part by the regional skewing of the results. Voters who might have preferred Labour or the Lib-Dems instead voted Tory, alarmed as they were at the prospect of a Labour government dependent for its survival on the support of the SNP. That’s troubling enough. But when one recalls that, in fact, there was little danger of Labour forming a government — contrary to what the polls were saying, the Tories were comfortably ahead — things become faintly ludicrous. People voted based on a fiction, electing a majority government more or less by accident.
Oh, well — the pollsters got it wrong. Except they didn’t get it all that wrong: they misstated the Tory and Labour vote, on average, by roughly three percentage points each way, or about the margin of error. The only reason the result looked so far off was — are you sensing a pattern here? — first past the post: as is typically the case, a difference of three percentage points was enough to give the Tories another 50 or 60 seats.
Get used to it. Even if their errors are not as great as made out, it is true that pollsters are having more and more difficulty producing accurate forecasts, as they will in future. Run these through the funhouse mirrors of first past the post, filter the results through the strategic voting calculus, and more such accidents are likely. We are getting further and further from anything resembling majority rule.
Just back to Canada for a minute. If the polls are even approximately accurate, this election is shaping up as a closely fought three-way affair — even four-way in some areas, where the Greens are strong. That means we may well see some spectacular splits, with several ridings being won with less than 30 per cent of the vote. Just so long as nobody calls it democracy.