London Mayor and Assembly elections
How well do you think London's voters understand the complexities of the electoral system, with which they will be faced for the first time in the London Mayor and Assembly elections next month?
When they arrive at the polling station, voters will be presented with two ballot papers, one to elect the Mayor and one to elect the London Assembly. Each will have two columns of voting boxes; but the functions of the two papers and the meanings of the two boxes in each case are very different. But there is little sign that voters are aware of this, or that anybody is making much effort to explain it to them. In MORI's poll for BBC London Live at the end of last month, 44% of London electors admitted that they were unaware that in the election for mayor they would have "two votes, one for their first choice and one for their second choice"; worse still, 61% were unaware that in the Assembly election they would also have two votes "one for an individual to represent their part of London, and one to express support for the party they would like to see run London". Notice how carefully we had to distinguish in the wording of our poll question between the functions of the two votes in the Mayor election, which is a modified form of first-past-the-post, and in the Assembly election, which runs on a form of proportional representation.
Does it matter if the voters don't know in advance how the system works? Well, surely it does if the result is to prevent them from exercising their votes as they wish to the best of their ability; but here there is a clear danger of that happening if they are not aware of the subtleties of the system. Take the election which has received much the most attention, that for Mayor. Most voters, one would hope, give some thought and consideration to how they will vote before they arrive at the polling station; but if they don't even know that they have a second choice as well as a first choice vote, they are unlikely to have considered its implications.
One of those implications is that it is perfectly rational to vote for one's favourite candidate as first choice, even if he or she has no realistic chance of winning - one is not forced, as with the first-past-the-post system used in general elections, to vote tactically or waste one's vote. That is the whole point of having a transferable vote system, albeit the rather strange version that will be used in London. There must be at least a suspicion that this message has not got through. The latest ICM/Evening Standard poll shows the Green vote for the Assembly at 7% but support for the Green candidate for Mayor, Darren Johnson, at only 4%. Now it may be, of course, that there are many London Greens who for some reason are dissatisfied with Mr Johnson, or who despite their party allegiances would rather have Ken Livingstone as Mayor; but it may also be that many Greens are assuming that a vote for Mr Johnson will be wasted since he cannot win, and would deprive them of a chance to vote in the real battle, for or against Mr Livingstone.
But perhaps I do those Greens an injustice. Maybe they do understand the system, and have tumbled to the further complications posed by the present standings of the other candidates. The ICM/Evening Standard poll shows the race for second place very close between three candidates - Frank Dobson, Steve Norris and Susan Kramer. If it stays this close, it makes it very difficult for voters to use their second preferences. Suppose you are a Green, voting first preference for Darren Johnson. Realistically, you know that he is highly unlikely to be one of the leading two, and you want your second preference to count. What do you do? Easy enough if Ken Livingstone would be your second choice, since he is almost certainly going to be one of the leading two - you can give him your second preference.
But suppose you want to stop Ken - your second preference is for whoever can beat him. But who will it be? If you put Steve Norris second preference, but Frank Dobson finishes ahead of him, your second vote is as wasted as your first. The system is working out as a huge bonus to Livingstone - unless a clear second place challenger emerges, he will not need 50% support for victory, but will be a certain winner with anything much over 40%, because even if most of the supporters of candidates who finish third or worse are against him, too many of them will guess wrongly how they should cast their second preference, and will end up wasting it. Our rational Green anti-Ken voter has perhaps thought this through: he knows he prefers Dobson or Norris to Livingstone, but he doesn't know who will finish second - so he is forced back into the tactical voting that he was meant to have escaped from, voting for both Dobson and Norris with his two preferences to give himself two chances of registering a vote against Livingstone, and once again knifing poor old Mr Johnson. And, of course, if Susan Kramer slips through into second he's still wasted his vote!
(Oh, and by the way, if the ballot paper confuses him completely and he manages to mark a second preference but not a first preference by mistake, his paper will be considered void and not counted at all.)
The Assembly election is even more complicated. (It is, really.) Every voter gets two votes; but this time, just to make it difficult, they are not first and second choice but serve two different purposes. What makes it worse, what everybody is calling the "second ballot", the PR list vote, is far more important than the "first ballot" or constituency vote. The ballot papers will compound this confusion - both ballots will be cast on the same paper (unlike the Scottish Parliament last year, which used two separate ballot papers). The ballot paper is headed "You have two votes"; the list vote appears on the right hand side, clearly seeming to be in second place - on the Mayor ballot paper, of course, the right hand column is for second choice; by contrast, the columns are headed "[Constituency name] Constituency Member" and "London Member", as if the two votes were entirely separate and will not impinge on each other. Neither of these conflicting impressions is true.
The system is basically the same as the one used for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, called the Additional Member System (also sometimes called the German System or Mixed Member Proportional System). There are 14 constituencies, each consisting of 2-4 boroughs, which will elect a constituency representative by first-past-the-post; but there are also 11 additional or 'top-up' members, added on the basis of the second vote so that the overall distribution of 25 is proportional between the parties. It is this second vote that decides how many seats a party wins.
The big difference from Scotland and Wales is this: because the top up was divided into regions in those countries, there were not enough top-up seats to go round: in many regions of Scotland and Wales, Labour won so many constituency seats that the top-up seats couldn't compensate, and so Labour got more than its strictly proportionate share. The result was that, as under first-past-the-post, Labour got a bonus for being the biggest party (though not nearly so big a bonus as it would have had under first-past-the-post); and this meant that the constituency vote mattered, since it wasn't bound by the restraints of the PR vote. But that won't happen in London - no party is likely to win more of the 14 constituencies than would be its fair share of the 25 under PR. In other words, the Assembly will be elected by straight PR on the basis of the second vote (with the sole proviso that only parties or individual candidates that get at least 5% of the vote are allowed seats). Every extra constituency seat a party wins will simply mean one list seat less. The first vote doesn't do anything except decide which of a party's candidates takes up its seats.
So, for example, if Labour gets 44% of the list or "London Member" votes (excluding votes cast for parties failing to reach the 5% threshold), it will win 11 (44%) of the seats. However many constituency seats Labour has secured will be subtracted from that 11, and the remaining Labour seats will go to the highest placed candidates on Labour's list.
Any voter supporting, say, Labour with his "first" vote and the Greens with his second might think he was splitting his vote between the two, or throwing a minor sop the Greens' way. He would not be. He would be voting Green. He would also, though not having voted Labour in a meaningful sense, be voting that for however many seats Labour happened to get he would prefer his constituency Labour candidate to get one of them rather than one of the candidates from Labour's list.
Three rousing cheers for whoever devised this system. At least I, as a psephologist, am going to get some satisfaction out of it. But then I can afford to enjoy it - I don't have a vote in London.
