Difficulty in using your vote - little sympathy from me. Non-political General Election thought

[Peter Gillson]

Hi all, especially those of you in the UK.

i apologise that this is similar to a 2020 post of mine but those of you who, like some friends of mine, who are pondering upon who to vote for may find it easier than the voting decisions We have to make.

Being in Guernsey I do not take part in the UK election since we have our own parliament, theStates of Deliberation, with our own members called Deputies - 38 of them. We have a population of about 62,000 on an island measuring 24 square miles it is not practical to have 38 separate constituencies so the Island was split into 7 districts, each returning either 5 of 6 Deputies. In each district the electorate had the same number of vote as seat - so in my parish i had 6 votes to use.

you can use as many or as few votes, a complication is we do not have political parties so I had to choose up to 6 independent Deputies. The additional complication is that if you use more than 1 vote you are voting for some candidates but also voting against them. For this reason I rarely used all votes.

sounds fun?

Things got more complicated in 2020 when it was decided that the Island would become a single constituency which would elect all 38 Deputies. To do this we were all given 38 votes to use, as many or as few as we wanted to use, to select 38 out of over 90 candidates.

You may like this photo of the voting ballot paper:


Deciding how to use one vote? Easy peasy!!!

Peter

[Airborne01]

Interestink ...But not clever I think!
Steve

[stillp]

Wow! Do you get "doorstepped" by all 90 candidates?
I like the idea of not having political parties though.
Pete

[Guest]

it is not practical to have 38 separate constituencies

You don’t need constituencies at all. I don’t know the history of them, but they come across to me as nothing more than a practical way of organising elections in an era without easy ways to quickly add up votes and fast long-distance communications. By the 20th century, they were basically obsolete, IMHO, but many countries stick with them nonetheless. It seems that Guernsey also felt that way in 2020, but getting 38 votes seems a little odd. Why not just one vote per voter? That works fine to elect councils in towns with a similar population, after all.

As for ballot paper size, I give you the 2023 Dutch one …


(source)

[Jim R]

Some people just like to complicate things!

[Peter Gillson]

You don’t need constituencies at all. I don’t know the history of them, but they come across to me as nothing more than a practical way of organising elections in an era without easy ways to quickly add up votes and fast long-distance communications. By the 20th century, they were basically obsolete, IMHO, but many countries stick with them nonetheless. It seems that Guernsey also felt that way in 2020, but getting 38 votes seems a little odd. Why not just one vote per voter? That works fine to elect councils in towns with a similar population, after all.

As for ballot paper size, I give you the 2023 Dutch one …


(source)

Wow!

[Guest]

According to the caption on Wikipedia, there are two more columns than you can see in the photo …

What it is, is one column per party, each listing all of that party’s candidates by name, in the order the party wants to put them in. This is for parliamentary elections, BTW. You vote by colouring in (with the red pencil provided) one box, in front of the name of the candidate of your choice. This counts as a vote for that person, but also as one for the party he or she represents.

[Ian M]

In Denmark the ballot is in the long format. Like a loo roll, with the candidates listed under the group they belong to. You have ONE vote and can either vote for the party OR a member. The last vote we held here the ballot paper was over a meter long! And it is punishable to take a photo of.

[Gern]

Strange the different ways we have devised to pick our leaders! One day maybe we'll find a way to pick good ones - but I'm not holding my breath.

[Peter Gillson]

I had no idea so many other places had even larger ballot papers.

realistically, I doubt if the method of voting makes a lot of difference. i think that Had we stayed with the old system the difference in the composition of our parliament would have been only 2 or 3 people who were not elected many have been elected.

Peter

[Guest]

realistically, I doubt if the method of voting makes a lot of difference.

Oh, but it does. With a constituency system, you get a few big parties who form every government, usually with a single party in government or possibly a coalition of two, while all the remaining smaller parties never accomplish anything. With proportional representation, over time you get an ever larger number of parties that all get elected, and coalitions are the norm because none of them will ever gain a simple majority alone.

Compare, say, the UK to the Netherlands (which I pick mostly because I’m reasonably familiar with both).

• The UK has 650 constituencies, and in the 2019 general election, 47 parties took part. Only ten parties (21%) actually won any seats, though: 365 for the Conservatives (56%), 202 for Labour (32%), and everybody else shared the leftovers or got none at all.
• The Netherlands has a 150-seat parliament with proportional representation, and in the 2023 parliamentary election, 26 parties took part. Fifteen of these parties (58%) won seats: 37 for the PVV (25%), 25 for GroenLinks–PvdA (17%), 24 for VVD (16%), 20 for NSC (13%), and 1 through 9 seats for the remaining eleven parties.

In the UK, the largest party has a decent majority in parliament. On the other hand, the biggest party in the Netherlands holds a fraction under a quarter of all available seats, and needs a coalition with at least two others to form a majority (in the end it took about seven months of negotiations to form a four-party coalition whose cabinet will be sworn in any day now).

The main advantage of a constituency system is that you get big parties that can pursue their goals on their own. The main disadvantage of a constituency system is that people who don’t feel themselves represented by a big party, are basically not represented at all.

The main advantage of a proportional representation system is that almost everybody can be represented by a party that fits their world view. The main disadvantage of a proportional representation system is that voters will feel like the parties they voted for, don’t accomplish much because the parties will have to compromise to get anything done.

[Peter Gillson]

realistically, I doubt if the method of voting makes a lot of difference.

Jakko - when I wrote the above i was referring specifically to the two systems in Guernsey; the seven -constituency or the single constituency systems.
I sgree the difference between the first past the post and the proportional representation systems produce very different results.

Peter

[Guest]

What you have now, though, is essentially proportional representation, except you can vote for everyone you want in parliament instead of only a single person. I kind of suspect it would lead to similar situations as in other countries, except as you say, you have no political parties, so you’re probably better off

[Ian M]

And we are starting to get into political debate...

[Guest]

Are we? We’re talking about the differences between systems, not actual politics.