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

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Similar proportion of the vote to UKIP, the Greens and the BNP.

Free Cornwall now, with every Pasty (limited offer, only one Cornwall per family for a limited time only).

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Based on what population?

Total population?

Adults?

Registered voters?

Actual voters?

What about constituencies with large amounts of EU national who are able to vote in Euro and local elections?

What would you do if the population changed? (Over a ten year period the population of Swindon increased by 10%, or by thousands of voters a year.)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you'd have to pick what measure you'd use, and whatever you picked someone would moan that it didn't perfectly come up with the number they think would be best. Whatever you picked it'd still be a lot better than a system where there is a wild difference between how many people is represented by each MP as in the current system.

You'd also need to periodically update your measure. I'm ... not really sure why you listed that as if it'd be a problem.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I'm concerned about the practical workability of a system where MP's votes were weighted rather than simply having roughly equal constituencies.

I do think there are genuine issues of representation to be discussed when setting the measure. Do MP's work for citizens or tax payers? Are they responsible to voters, registered voters or the wider population.

(Not that these issues don't also affect how you size constituencies but they come out into the open more).

It's not so much the updating of the measure s the timing of the update. Should you change the weighting if a large housing development is built in a constituency or a large factory closes and everyone moves away mid way through a Parliament?

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I think issues of what do you do when a factory closes or more people move in to an area aren't all that significant. It's not common for a population (that would be represented by an MP) to change by a very significant amount (like 50%) in a short period like 4 years.

I think constituencies with roughly equal numbers of people are probably better, and that's still how you'd carve things up, but in some cases you can't easily do that as others have mentioned in the threads here, and in those cases this system resolves those problems.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think the legitimate concern that leads to concern over gerrymandering is the number of unregistered voters in urban areas.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I’m not sure that this is a gerrymander either by design or inadvertently. I do think that political parties should be very cautious about doing anything that looks like biasing the system in their favour as it creates a culture where being good at biasing systems is seen as a good thing and encourages parties to get their retaliation in first.

I grew up in Queensland. Whilst I was there the Australian Labour Party (ALP) won the first state election for decades in the face of a gerrymander operated by the Country National Party (think UKIP with cowboy hats). The irony was that the tools used to set up the gerrymander had been put in place by a 1949 Labour government, who then went on to hold power for decades. As you can imagine the upshot of two long running electorally unassailable governments the whole apparatus of the state was deeply corrupted. The breech in the dam was the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption. In essence the Queensland police was so corrupt they were bribing politicians to turn a blind eye to the organised criminal activities of the police commissioner.

So, I’m instinctively wary of gerrymanders. I’m not sure if the current boundary changes are a gerrymander, or an attempt to unwind an existing gerrymander, or if they genuinely reflect changing demographics but I worry that once you start tinkering with boundaries for what look like they might be partisan reasons, even if your hands are clean, you open to door to the other side doing it better and harder than you did and the end result is deputy-commissioners of the police roaming hotel rooms naked with a bag full of used banknotes and a revolver.

My personal interest in this is that before I moved to Queensland I lived in Darwin, where the same bunch of crooks were taking bribes from the doctor who owned the radiological practise who were sub-contracting for the NT hospital service when my mum was director of radiology. When mum blew the whistle they threatened to kill my sister.

I suggest this kind of behaviour is not good for democracy.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

It's not that uncommon that it doesn't need to be considered in the set up and when it happens it immediately creates a case of transparent unfairness.


A similar refinement would be to weight MP votes in proportion to the size of the their majority.

There are some issues in Scotland with Top-Up MSP's being a different class. They often have safer seats, have less case work but lack moral authority. I think a weighting system in Parliament might lead to some of those issues.

Given some of the practical difficulties I'd rather the time and effort went in to enacting PR.

[andrewducker]

I agree. But I also think that this attempt is an attempt to prevent gerrymandering, by removing any level of partiality from the way that districts are made. It means that there's no input from any politicians or local people - they are (basically) purely mathematical in nature.

Can you think of a way of removing gerrymandering without making it look partial?

I guess there could be a commission with people on it from all sides which hammered out a compromise. That might be nice :->

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Would you let people chose the size of their constituency?

Might I be allowed to have a small, very culturally and politically homogenous constituency if I wanted with one, low geared MP or opt for a larger constituency with a more powerful MP?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Take this back one step from a discussion of geographic boundary changes.

Why have geographic constituencies?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

The removal of partiallity and personal influence is a strength of the proposals. As always with complex things and people what one person values highly in a system (say constituencies rooted in a geographically based strong community) might not be valued by others who might more heavily weight other aspects (say fairness in representation by number).

I can't think of a way to remove gerrymander without making it look partial except in special cases so I think it wiser for the G word not to be used at all.

Having grown up in a realy gerrymander the UK is not one and I don't think the current proposals make it so.

As I recall what happened in Queensland was that the ALP had such moral authority after winning the election that it could do what it wanted so long as what it wanted to do was the right thing. I was only very young when it happened so my memories are very hazy but I recall it as very similar to Obama's election.

Numerical fairness and explicity arbitrariness aside I do quite like the idea of a commission but I'd make sure the people were not from all sides but were more often from none. Bit of Greek democracy, lets draw lots and let a citizen jury sort it out.

[elmyra.livejournal.com]

Algorithm is here: http://bit.ly/fO7cjI (if I've picked up the right link ;-)

You ask a good question re why the rural/urban split is more valid than any other split. My answer is geography and infrastructure, which in turn influence access to your MP and how much they can do for you. If you have a constituency that comprises part of Newcastle and part of the middle of nowhere in Northumberland, chances are the constituency office will be in Newcastle, and the MP will spend most of their time in the constituency there, and probably not make much of an effort to make themselves accessible to their rural constituents. That's simply how the numbers work out: it pays for them to spend their effort int he population centre rather than outside it. If they have a purely rural constituency that temptation isn't there and they *have* to put the effort in to represent all their constituents. Yes, the office might still be in a town, but they're going to think differently about how they approach their work from the start.

My bigger problem is how unstable constituency boundaries will be. Any change in the population of a couple of areas, and you start from scratch - the way the formula is designed, it just has a knock-on impact on the rest of the country if one or two constituencies need to be adjusted. In my mind (I might have said this already), this pretty much breaks the constituency link anyway.

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

I agree about these issues being currently present, but less obvious in most countries. Check the number of actual votes required to become a MP in a Maori electorate vs a General one in NZ. Low turnout in the Maori seats is just one contributing factor.

Re timing, look up the Australian federal system for triggering re-districting. BTW, they have the advantage of a high degree of compliance to compulsory registration and voting.

[nwhyte]

The boundaries aren't going to be based on census data but on the electoral register.

As indeed is the case at present.

[andrewducker]

Personally, I wouldn't. My ideal system:

500 MPs, from party lists. Each party would get to add one MP per 0.2% of the vote they got. You could vote Labour if you wanted, and then rely on them to put together a decent list. Or if your favourite MP had left Labour because they were fed up with their anti-pigeon propaganda, they could form their own party, and you could vote directly for them (they'd probably want to have a second/third/fourth person lined up after them, in case they got a lot of votes.)

There would be a variety of votes left over after everyone was elected (due to fractions of the percentages needed being produced in the results), and they would be allocated in the same way that top-ups are done in Scotland at the moment - the party with the largest negative difference between "percentage of vote" and "percentage of MPs" would get one, and then the calculation would be repeated until there were 500 MPs.

That way everyone who isn't so massively on the fringe that they can't find 0.2% of the population to agree with them ends up represented. And nobody gets to complain that there are no politicians who believe the same thing they do.

I don't expect said solution to ever transpire, but it would make me happy.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

In my mind (I might have said this already), this pretty much breaks the constituency link anyway.

This is my issue. If the aim is to eventually have a system of PR that doesn't have single MP constituencies, then fine, go ahead. I just don't see that happening. If we're aiming for a system like AV+ or AMS, then there wouldn't be any harm in taking geographical concerns into account when drawing boundaries, or at least, any imbalance would be temporary.

Mind you, PR is still pretty much a pipe dream, so I suppose we take what we get.

[andrewducker]

Thinking further about what you (and elmyra) have been saying, how much of a compromise would work, do you think?

I know that Labour are talking about a 10% variance making them a lot happier- do you think that would be enough to allow communities to be kept together in a useful manner, while keeping the value of votes fairly close?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think if I were going for the whole country as a multi-member constituency I’d be tempted to go for open party lists. I just don’t like the idea a party head office telling me who is going to be an MP.

Whilst your 0.2% threshold suggestion gets round this if the candidates for MP disagree between themselves about who should get on the list and be given priority I wonder if it does enough for me, the voter, if I think that candidate turquoise 10 is better than turquoise 6 even if the turquoise party as a whole are happy enough with the situation or the situation where I prefer Lilac 1 to turquoise 11 on some fairly narrow grounds that mean a lot to me.

My suggestion does of course create a huge ballot paper which may, in fact, be unworkable.

However, if you used electronic voting you could manage the ballot as an on line questionnaire.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Personally I'm a big fan of compulory voting so long as the ballot included a "none of these" option and something happened if there were a lot of "none of these" votes cast.

[andrewducker]

It has to be a reasonably sized change though - there's a 10% leeway (from 95% to 105% of the mean), so the changes would have to be quite large to need a total redesign, rather than just shaving 2% off of one constituency and giving it to another.