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The Electoral Reform Society (ERS), Britain’s leading campaign for electoral reform, has published a report, trailed on 30 May in the Observer, which argues that the first-past-the-post electoral system is not only producing increasingly disproportional but also more random results. In May this year, as they say, the wildly varying disproportional results of the general election were ‘splitting the union’, creating ‘artificial divides’, exaggerating political differences, perversely distorting the parties’ representation in Parliament and wasting millions of votes.
Very true. However, Katie Ghose, the Society’s CEO, takes the story further, stating in the ERS report, A voting system in crisis, that this is ‘the first study revealing what the results would have been under alternative voting systems’. This is not true. After the 1992 and 1997 general elections, a team from Democratic Audit at Essex, Birkbeck College and the LSE Public Policy Group, in which I played a part, carried out mock elections through large-scale opinion surveys asking people to vote again on the kind of ballot papers used for the three main alternative electoral systems as well as calculating three varieties of the List system. We published a major report, Making Votes Count: Replaying the 1990s General Elections under Alternative Electoral Systems (MVC), Democratic Audit Paper No.11, September 1997.
