Democracy from First Principles: The Delegated Vote
(Note: This essay is now super-seeded by the version of the system available at www.alexparsons.co.uk/delegatedvote )
At the birth of democracy in Ancient Athens, there were no MPs or representatives; a form of direct democracy was practiced where citizens represented themselves. Since democracy’s revival in recent centuries it’s been recognised that direct democracy would not scale well to the requirements of governing a nation, so instead we settled on representative democracies where people elect representatives to act in their stead. Whilst a good theory, it’s hard to argue it’s ever been well implemented in practice. Plenty of democracies exist, but almost none come close to the perfect symmetry of nation and chamber that the ideal representative democracy would produce and our own is certainly not one of them.
The UK’s current First Past the Post (FPTP) system is perfectly simple: the country is divided into 646 constituencies, in each constituency various candidates will stand for election, the people will vote and the candidate who received the greatest share of the vote will become a Member of Parliament. Whilst perfectly simple and straightforward, it’s utterly useless in terms of producing a truly representative assembly.
Votes received by failed candidates have no effect on the make up of Parliament - if you didn’t vote for the winner you might as well not have turned up. In the 2005 election, only 34% of MPs could claim a majority in their constituency. Not only can the current Labour government not claim a mandate of 50% of the vote to govern, Parliament as a whole cannot - only 47.6% of the total vote went to candidates who won their constituencies; the majority of voters did not get their preferred representative. In the strictest sense, FPTP has failed to provide political representation for the majority of citizens.
If trying to sum up the principle of the universal franchise, there’s little better one could do than ‘One Man, One Vote’ or, to be technically correct, ‘One Man or Woman of Legal Age, One Vote’. FPTP makes a mockery of this principle. If we were to adapt the saying to suit our current system it would become ‘One Man or Woman of Legal Age, A Vote of Variable Value Depending On Turnout’, which isn’t a sentiment that will have people marching in the streets anytime soon.
FPTP doesn’t regard how many people voted, all that matters is the distribution of votes among the candidates. This means that differences in constituency size and turnout can dramatically change the value of a vote. An MP elected with a majority of one vote when just 1000 people voted has just as much power and status as an MP with a majority of 10,000 votes when 50,000 people voted. Our system is still routed in the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty: all power is vested in Parliament and cannot be controlled or varied by outside means. Indeed, many politicians still consider forms of direct democracy such as referenda to be thoroughly ‘un-British’. Whilst we technically have the ability to choose who sits in it (It should again be stated that the majority of those who voted in the last election were ineffectual in this regard), we legally possess no other means to alter its behaviour. As a people, we are not sovereign.
A system that truly incorporated popular sovereignty would result in a far clearer connection between the number of votes a candidate received and the chance of a candidate’s election. If we look at Internet commentator Iain Dale who stood for a seat in Norfolk North in the 2005 election no such pattern is clear. He received 20,909 votes and lost, yet 394 candidates received less than that but still had the highest in their constituency and so received seats in Parliament. The result of this is that 61% of currently sitting MPs received fewer votes than Iain Dale. One can only wonder how the 25,191 people who voted for Adrian Flook felt about having quadrupling Angus MacNeil‘s number of votes (6,213), besting Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and 91% of currently sitting MPs but still not having their politics represented in Parliament. FPTP is a cruel and arbitrary system for candidates and voters.
Numerous alternatives to FPTP exist, the current favourite of reform groups being Multi-Member STV, where candidates are given in an order of preference and are then elected according a quota and votes reallocated until all vacancies are filled. Whilst this is certainly a major improvement over FPTP and achieves far more proportional results than other non-party list based systems, it is far from the 100% symmetry that the hypothetical perfect system would create. It suffers from the problem of all constituency-based systems - whilst constituencies are essential for keeping politics based on people rather than parties as closed islands they are responsible for the variable value of votes and trap minority voters who will always be outvoted locally but might scrap representation at a national level.
Whilst sharing certain aspects in common (multi-member constituencies and a ranked preference of candidates) the Delegated Vote (DV) avoids these problems by maintaining a universal value for the vote. This allows parties to only field one candidate per constituency and lets votes be transferred between constituencies to collect small pockets of votes into a single representative.
In many corporations, shareholders hold a different number of votes depending on the number of shares they own, DV works under a similar principles, replacing shares with people. The more people who vote for a candidate, the greater their eventual voting power in Parliament; Instead of a representative’s vote having a value of one, its value is equal to the number of votes they’ve received at the last election. If you had a constituency of 1000 people; 700 vote for party A and 300 vote for Party B. The constituency would then return two representatives, one whose vote was worth 700 and one whose vote was worth 300. However, the effect is far more useful than providing a voice to the losing minority, it would break open the system for third-parties and hence would have a similar levelling effect to PR (but with a number of useful differences), resulting the vote being split up far more amongst parties.
Candidates who receive votes but not a seat can
redirect their votes to a candidate in another constituency. Candidates can
deed their voters to another candidate elsewhere e.g. A Green with x votes
could deed it to a Green in a different constituency to give them enough votes
to cross the threshold. The candidate would declare who their votes would go to
before the election so it could be declared on the ballot (along with an
opt-out for voters to prevent their votes moving elsewhere without consent).
Depending on voting technology, more complex methods of redirection could be
practiced.
The threshold for a candidate to be elected through redirected votes could be tied to the lowest number of votes that successfully elected a representative that cycle (or to prevent a fluke result throwing the system, the average of the lowest ten). There would likewise be a cap to the maximum number of votes a candidate could be topped-up to (an average of the highest ten results). As constituencies would now be returning multiple representatives, their size would need to be increased. If each constituency returned two representatives, constituencies would have to be around 2.5 times the current size in order to accommodate the additional representatives vote redirection would create. However, these would still be smaller than the constituencies other multi-member systems need to achieve proportionality (which works out best between 3 and 5 reps per constituency). To keep MPs as close to their votes as possible and the redirect process simple, the re-directs would always pass to a neighbouring constituency. Even once a candidate crosses the threshold they’d continue to receive more votes until they reach the cap, after which it flows on to the next in the sequence.
To aid organisation for the small parties and provide greater transparency to the voters, the same candidate could stand in multiple constituencies. For example, a candidate could stand in four neighbouring constituencies, with three constituencies redirecting to the fourth which contains a ‘vent’ redirect to a candidate elsewhere. Naturally, a candidate could only be elected in one constituency and all remaining votes redirected onwards.
In the event that an entire party could not accumulate enough votes to create a single representative or a party had excess votes that could not be absorbed due to the vote cap, rather than passing on the entire party vote, the votes would ideally pass back to a local candidate in each constituency. This would require additional preferences on the voting form for people to rank local candidates.
There are a number of potential benefits for political culture. Greater choice leads to greater engagement. DV frees people from having to vote tactically and let’s them vote for the candidate who is genuinely closest to their views. Instead of voting for the 'least-bad' candidate, they will have a choice for a range of candidates and their vote would have a direct and observable result. The two-party system creates an image of a country far more polarized than it really is; systems that allow for more parties create a truer reflection of the politics of the nation. DV would create a situation where consensus between parties is more advantageous than confrontation. Negative campaigning works by reducing your opponents turn-out, but also negatively affects your own (even if the mud thrown is true, few people appreciate those that throw it). If all candidates take part, then the most likely effect is that the overall turnout will decrease. In a FPTP system, it doesn’t matter if half the voters stay home as long as you obtain a majority but under DV there is an incentive for all candidates that the turnout be as high as possible: Candidates with an engaged constituency have a greater voting power.
In short, the Delegated Vote while avoiding many of the pitfalls of other systems succeeds at creating proportional representation (with a theoretical 100% symmetry). The constituency link is preserved, elections are kept candidate-based and the use of parties is not written into the system. Symbolically, as every representative would be casting an exact number of votes, it would be a constant reminder that although they might cast the votes, the people remain sovereign and the resulting system would be far friendlier to direct democracy as the votes would simply be returning to their source. Safe-seats would not exist, genuine choice would be presented at each election and uniquely MPs would be rewarded or punished in voting power by the engagement of their constituency. Whilst there are predicable objections, these would be no different than the objections presented against over proposed alternate systems and their validity depends on exactly what kind of system is desired. For accurately reflecting the politics of the nation DV has advantages, but it does not encourage moderate politicians the way system like STV or AV do, it likewise would not result in strong one party rule the way FPTP does. The appropriateness of any particular system depends on which of these factors are seen to be most attractive.