Political Question

[andrewducker]

At the moment the House of Lords are debating the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill.

I've heard numerous claims that this bill is incredibly unfair, and blatant gerrymandering by the Conservative Party.

Looking at the details, I'm feeling baffled. I can see a claim that the exemption for the three Scottish constituencies (Two Liberal Democrat, on Scottish National Party) are biased in their favour. But I can't see how a system whereby people are grouped together in what's going to be a massively arbitrary manner (each area must be within 5% of the national average, and are set up by independent bodies - the Boundary Commissions).

I don't really have a stake in this one - I'd just like someone to explain how this system would give an advantage to any one party. I can see that it could _remove_ advantage from a party if the old system with much less equal constituency sizes gave that party an advantage, but I'm totally failing to see how it's anything like gerrymandering.

Am I missing something obvious?

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Yes. I think it is easy (perhaps normal) for people who belong to a particular section of society - geographically mobile, no strong links, privileged - to build models which reflect their own experiences.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

.. and neither is objectively right or wrong.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I think both, because it is such a massive problem, and a growing one

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Agreed. And unfortunately there are many people in our society who don't have that basic right, such as my wife. Voting is still a privilege, not a right, in this country.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

because right and wrong are not objective issues, this is the argument I am making. People are not being objective, they are arguing from a social position.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Well, the simple answer is that we've only got a choice between two systems in the referendum anyway. I (and the Lib Dems) may prefer STV, Andrew (and the Greens) may prefer AMS, Roz (and Labour reformists) may prefer AV+, but we've all got to choose between just AV and FPTP. And AV itself is a very, very simple system - see my explanation at http://andrewhickey.info/2010/08/22/the-alternative-vote-system

[andrewducker]

You don't have to. You could use AV for local constituents and then top-up.

[andrewducker]

Aaah. I don't see the objection to an MP covering constituents of multiple types. Any MP is going to have people who fall into all sorts of different categories, and have different needs.

The large size of the constituency, and the need to be available to people in it is something I can see needs to be compromised over.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it should be phrased as "entitled to register, but not registered". Should they be counted?

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure this is generalisable.

Say your country has 10 million people in the hinterland and 10 million in the city, that hinterland voters always vote for party A and city voters always vote for party B, and that population density in the hinterland is basically consistent everywhere, but much lower than in the city. In that case, a north/south split will get you just over half the hinterland people returning a member of party A, and just under half the hinterland people plus all the city people returning a member of party B. So the north/south split and the rural/urban split return the same results.

With a sufficiently large hinterland population you can get the result you describe. But I'm not sure that giving the minority population 50% of the political representation is the ideal solution...

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Actually a whole range of non-citizens who are resident in Britain can vote in local, national and European elections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote#United_Kingdom

The only thing they need to do is to put themselves on the Electoral Register.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I would say not - assuming that we put more effort into electoral registration than we currently do. If we don't count them, then we're counting every actual vote as equal to every other vote. If we *do* count them, then we're weighting votes so that the votes of those who live in areas where more people don't register count more than the votes of those who live in areas where people *do* register.
That would make a kind of sense - *if* we could assume that the people who do register are an accurate representation of those who don't. I think the mere fact of them having registers makes that an inappropriate assumption. For a start, I know some (not many) people who refuse to register to vote because they object to the whole concept of parliamentary democracy. Their refusal is an active political gesture (in their eyes) and they would probably object to 'their vote' being distributed among the other people in their area who don't share their views.

Fundamentally, if your concern is that, for example, teenagers aren't being fairly represented because they don't register to vote, the solution to that *isn't* to count the votes of adults who live in an area with lots of teenagers. If poor people don't register, then counting the votes of rich people who live in poor areas as more important might actually end up further *dis*enfranchising them. And so on.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

(Andy, this is partly in answer to your comment above too)

I just remember the year our high school of 300-odd had an unusually small first year intake and an unusually large fifth year departure. We had to lose a staff member, and consequently a whole subject, from our curriculum, because the staff:pupil ratio was now considered too high, even though some exceptions are made for smaller schools. Cry me a river, you might say, your Standard Grade classes were 25-strong at the largest, and mostly under 20. But being on an island we had no choice but to either take what we were given, or be sent to private school on the mainland (not really an option for most people). That meant French or German, no Spanish, no Latin, no Gaelic even until after I'd already left. That meant me having to choose between Music or Art because not enough people wanted to take both to justify having a second class not running at the same time. That meant not actually having scheduled classes for CSYS English because only two of us were doing it and the teacher was basically helping us as a favour in her spare time.

Arran's not exactly a targeted area as far as teacher quotas go. They never have trouble with class sizes, and they're one of the best schools in the district (or at least, they were ten years ago and I'd be surprised if much has changed). But kids on Arran don't care that kids in Ayr have it worse, and nor do their parents. They want their own situation to be made better. And they should be able to speak to their MP and lobby for that without being fobbed off and told "You don't know you're born - if you'll excuse me I have some real social problems to solve." They don't want an MP with divided loyalties or priorities. They want someone who represents them.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Sorry, should have said "from outside the EU and 'qualifying Commonwealth immigrants'". There are so few of the latter that they don't really impact on much.

[andrewducker]

Nobody gets that.

There are rich and poor people in every area, people who do better out of things and people who do worse.

Nobody gets a representative for just their tiny bit of the world

[skington.livejournal.com]

AV is basically the way the French do it: a majoritarian system, but if nobody gets 50% of the vote at first you eliminate candidates until someone does. The French do it by having a first ballot one weekend, and then another the week (or is it fortnight?) after with only 2 (or in some cases 3 or 4) candidates; AV does it by having people rank candidates in order.

The advantage of moving to AV is that in a few elections' time, once people have got used to voting for candidates 1, 2, 3 rather than putting a cross in a box, you can then move to a more efficient form of voting (e.g. STV in multi-member constituencies). And, of course, once the LibDems have got over the drubbing expected for any junior coalition partner, they'll be in a stronger position to have significant numbers of MPs elected.

Meanwhile the Tories don't have to worry about UKIP costing them seats by splitting the right-wing vote. Assuming they can't convert the LibDems into a long-term junior coalition partner, that is.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Of course, but there's still a critical mass in terms of diversity at which point an MP begins to be hit with strong voices from all sides wanting vastly different things at which point nothing is done anymore. A balance must be struck, or we might as well do away with constituencies altogether.

Edit: I'll add that if our eventual aim is a system of PR where we have individual constituencies represented by MPs followed by a part-list top-up to proportionality, a la AMS, then community rather than mathematically based constituencies is exactly what you want on a practical level.

[fearmeforiampink]

If they're the ones for the Shetland Isles and so forth, that the needs of the Island are quite different to that of the mainland near it, and that it'd be impractical for one person to do both.

The general argument in Scotland against it was that in low population areas you'll get massive (geographically speaking) areas, with some very different communities with different needs and/or the MP unable to properly work for them all.

[skington.livejournal.com]

It should be noted that while Labour currently has a systemic lead over other parties, this was the complete other way round in the 1980s, when the Tories racked up massive leads in the Commons. The rules didn't change, as far as I remember; it was mostly just demographics.

[andrewducker]

Yup. In some ways I'd be happy to have a "Rural Party" which people could vote for if Rural votes were their thing. If we had a proper proportional system then they'd probably have at least a few percent of the representatives.

[andrewducker]

Of course, in citites you have small geographic areas with some very different communities with different needs.

(As you can probably tell, I get the size argument, but not the different needs argument.)

[drplokta]

But do you base the top-ups on people's first preference votes, or on the votes they ended up with after their preferences were redistributed?

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I take it your 'yup' is only in agreement with the second paragraph and not the first?

[andrewducker]

In Scotland, neither. We get two votes. But that's because we have FPTP +Top-up, and the FPTP bit is recognised to have a lot of tactical voting so you need a second vote to be used to say what you _really_ think.

With AV you'd get a lot less tactical voting, so I think you'd be safe going with the original vote being the one that got used for top-up.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Hence the invention of AV+, which looks shiny but for the fact it's (a) untested and (b) not fully proportional (although the latter seems to me to be something that could be easily fixed).

(Personally I'd go for the top ups to proportionality being based on the first votes, whether or not those votes were counted in run-off.)