

# 1, 2, 3, Representation by Enid Lakeman

Copyright © 2019: Eric Syddique, the Executor and Trustee of the Enid Lakeman Estate, kindly gave permission (by phone, confirmed in writing to Anthony Tuffin) to publish uncollected writings of Enid Lakeman, former director of The Electoral Reform Society; Michael Meadowcroft (text and pictures); Richard Lung.

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The practical invention of modern democratic elections, by Carl Andrae, and also Thomas Hare, is over one and a half centuries old, as is the organised resistance to their implementation. The Andrae system, as it is called in Scandinavia, by now, is really no more than a name. The Hare system, which its author called a Single Transferable Vote (STV), endures, mainly on the fringes of English-speaking countries. And in more or less diluted form.

This is because the electoral system, that gives most power to voters, gives least job security to political incumbents.   
The question is how to enable the public to see thru the booming fog of obscurity and illusion that protects the vested interests of the political class in ineffective elections. This state careerism has out-matched the unorganised common man.

Some of the best writings on electoral reform have remained unorganised, and therefore less effective in changing public opinion. This editor organised uncollected writings of two of its greatest exponents, John Stuart Mill and H. G. Wells, for popular presentation of the truth about elections.   
Even then, with such formidable protagonists, brought to bear directly on the problem of democracy versus incumbency, I remained vaguely dissatisfied.

There was another British writer, who was a world authority on electoral systems. Mill and Wells are wonderful informants but history condemned them to go without that vital ingredient where Lakeman excels: evidence!   
Moreover, her exertions were legendary, on spreading the good news about the people power of transferable voting. Hopefully, books of the complete collected writings of Enid Lakeman will be published, without further delay.   
Meanwhile, this collection has been permitted, by the Executor of the Enid Lakeman Estate, thru the good offices of former colleagues.

As a foot-note, it is to be hoped that the largely forgotten original research of our brothers in reform, the heroic North American progressives, like Clarence Hoag and George Hallett and their colleagues, will also be liberated in systematically collected and easily accessible form. I have seen more or less century-old resources, languishing behind publishers pay-walls.

_Editor._

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## Table of Contents

#### Discussions

The First Lakeman Lecture

Learning by phone-in

The whole case.

To whom the decision?

Commons and Lords consider reform.

Realignment?

Dodging the issue

Fission and fusion.

Nations in conference.

The tyranny of lists.

The grass is greener in the STV meadow.

#### Districts

Those boundaries

Perverse verdict

An unwanted encore

Distorted districts

Plumping

Affirmative gerrymandering - an exercise in futility

#### Elections

Quiet upheaval in the Netherlands

Federal Republic of Germany

Federal Republic of Germany - Credits and Debits.

Canada begins to move

Ireland's general election, 1981.

Malta's anomaly

Malta - continued

Belize.

#### Reviews

Women in the House.

Power and Parliament.

Enid Lakeman 1903-1995.

Explanatory note.

Catalog.

Other collected writings, on electoral reform, by the editor..

# Discussions

## The First Lakeman Lecture

#### (endowed by the Electoral Reform Society. Delivered by Enid Lakeman at Bedford College, on 4th november 1982.)

(A summary.)

Table of contents

The British political system is geared to disagreement. Government and Opposition face each other, separated by two swords' length. Fair enough, in a debate on any one question, but the pretence that there are two groups of people ranged one against the other on every question does not accord with reality. Research in the University of Essex has shown to what a large extent opinions on political questions cross party lines. There are, for instance, nearly as many Labour voters as Conservative ones who think the trade unions have too much power. Yet MPs are expected to behave as if they disagreed totally with the party opposite. We may think there is more civilised sense shown by Africans who support a one-party state on the ground that they dislike the idea of an opposition party whose duty is to oppose.

Opposition for the sake of opposition diminishes parliament in the eyes of the electors. They see their MPs expected to vote automatically with their own party and against another, uninfluenced by what has been said in debate. Subjects on which Members are allowed to vote according to their own opinions are said to be 'above politics'; an unfortunate expression implying that they belong to the clear air of high morality and politics to the gutter. Government is an important and honourable concern, which does not deserve to be debased in this way.

Besides fictitious opposition we have fictitious unity. Each party is committed to its entire manifesto, and when in power claims a 'mandate' for every item in this, although it is obvious nonsense to say that every one of some ten million people agrees with them all.

People wishing to promote legislation on a particular matter have to try to get their cause adopted by a political party; if that party achieves power, the desired legislation will follow, and if a different party takes over it may be repealed — without any evidence that either is the course desired by the majority of the voters.

Our X-vote is a quite inadequate expression of the voter's wishes. It implies total support for one candidate (and his party) and total opposition to all others, while the reality is that we agree with much that the candidate stands for but on some matters prefer one of his opponents. There is no way in which a voter can show which of a party's policies he supports and which not, and no way in which supporters of a cause that cuts across the party lines can combine forces.   
Recent developments have shown up the powerlessness of Labour voters to discriminate between Left and Right, and the difficulties of Liberals and Social Democrats trying to work together for what they have in common.

To vote X for a candidate merely shows that, because of some things and in spite of others, which he cannot specify, the voter finds that candidate the most desirable (or the least undesirable) of the limited selection presented to him. A somewhat more meaningful vote can be obtained by replacing X by numbers. This enables the voter to say, 'l want candidate 1,but if I can't have him l should be content with 2. Failing him, l prefer 3 to any of the others, whom I don't like at all'.

SeveraI things follow. First, the first-preference votes will be a truer indication of the voter's real opinion than X can be, since he can safely vote '1' for the candidate he really prefers, without worrying about whether that candidate is likely to get many votes or few. Second, it would no longer be possible for the one MP 'representing' a constituency to be elected against the wishes of the majority of his constituencies. Third, it would be possible for voters to have a choice between, say, left- and right-wing candidates of the same party or between Liberal and Social Democrat, without risk of splitting the vote of the party or of the alliance.

However, if only one MP is elected from each constituency, anything up to half the voters could still be required to treat as their representative a person they thoroughly disapproved of. Anything up to half the votes could still be without effect, so the countrywide result of an election could still be very different from what the voters wanted. Moreover, though choice between different candidates of the same party or alliance would become possible, experience of this system in Australia suggests that it would be very rare.

If several MPs are elected together, by numbers, a far larger proportion of the votes will be effective, and choice between candidates will become normal. Suppose that the London borough of Barnet, instead of being four divisions, elected its four MPs as one constituency. Any candidate receiving more than one fifth of the votes would be elected, so at least four fifths of the voters would have an MP they had chosen.   
In the last election the Conservatives polled a little over half the votes (and won all four seats), so they would certainly expect to win two seats and might hope for three; therefore they would field at least three candidates. A Conservative voter who now must vote for Mrs Thatcher if he lives in Finchley but cannot do so if he lives anywhere else in the borough will be able in either case to show his admiration by voting '1' for her or give preference to a different Conservative candidate as the case may be. This choice between candidates will become normal, even probably in a party with no realistic prospect of more than one seat. Certainly there will be a choice between allied parties.

Even if a voter gives full support to one party by numbering all its candidates before considering any others, he is forced to recognise that not all of that party's candidates are of equal merit. He is also invited to go on to show with which of the other candidates he feels some agreement. Thus, the voters will have their co-operative instincts encouraged, their hostilities toned down. The parties also are likely to begin behaving differently. In a single-member constituency an election is a matter of kill or be killed; when several seats have to be shared, the atmosphere changes. If any one party wins the support of at least half the voters, it will form the government; if not, it will have to co-operate with people of other parties, and the voters will have shown on what lines they wish this to take place. And when a government has demonstrably been placed in power by the majority, there are likely to be far fewer 'days of action' designed to frustrate it.

lt has been said that politics needs the best people but attracts the worst. We shall have some hope of reversing that position when we modify our institutions so as to give less scope for the ambitious who seek more power than the people are willing to give them, and more scope for all men and women to choose those they consider the best people to govern. The means to achieve this end are known. The essential is that all who are aware of the need shall now co-operate in insisting that those means be used.

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### LEARNING BY PHONE-IN

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

In October 1981 one of our members, John Matthew, organised in Winchester a mock election and a public meeting at which I presented the result of that election. Jonathan Copus, of Radio Solent, got wind of this and asked to interview me; then suggested that it might be possible to hold a mock election by phone-in. We were doubtful of this, thinking it would take too long to explain to callers what they had to do, but agreed to try.

It was a great success — in spite of the preliminary explanation having to be done by John Matthew at a moment's notice because my train was cancelled. The lines were jammed the whole time with listeners eager to take part, and (instead of the 50 votes we reckoned would be enough to provide a reasonable election) we had 124, with more still coming in when it was necessary to start the count.

The Solent region was divided into three imaginary single-member constituencies, based on Southampton, Bournemouth and Winchester, with one Conservative, one Labour and one Liberal or Social Democrat in each. Callers were asked to say which one of the three candidates they wished to vote for. They were then asked to imagine that all nine candidates were standing in Solent as one 3-member constituency and to say which one of them they wanted most. Then if they would like to give a second choice, and so on. Many callers went right through the nine.

The results showed everything that they should! In the single-member constituencies the Alliance took all three seats for 62.5% of the votes. In the STV election, the Alliance, with 73% of the 124 first-preference votes (59%), won two seats, the Conservatives, with 35, one. 79.0% of the voters contributed to the election of a candidate they wanted; the 12.1% whose votes ended up with Jenkins, the runner up, are presumably happy to accept Williams as their member, and only the 8.9% of Labour supporters are unrepresented.   
ln the single-member elections there is nothing to show which of any one party's candidates the voters most favoured; in the STV election it is obvious. The 19 frustrated Conservatives who voted in vain for Whitelaw and Heath were, in the 3-member constituency, able to show that they really preferred Thatcher \-- and to elect her.

It is hoped that other stations will follow Solent's example. Why not ask your own local radio or tv?

[This mock election gives a good idea of the rudiments of a Single Transferable vote compared to simple plurality (First Past the Post). Plans for STV would have, on average, more proportional five member constituencies. And, of course, an STV general election would proportionally represent the state of public opinion, and not only the views of an unrepresentative sample of people phoning-in. _Editor_.]

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### THE WHOLE CASE

Table of contents

Part of the case for changing our present electoral system was put effectively in a television programme arranged by the National Committee for Electoral Reform; viewers were much impressed by the large number of people eminent in diverse fields who were shown as demanding change.

However, these people are by no means agreed on what system should be substituted and NCER has to be neutral on this point. Therefore its attack on the present system had to be concentrated on its mis-representation of the political parties, which would be remedied by any proportional system; it was precluded from any discussion which would have shown the single transferable vote to be superior to party list systems. Of the two systems specifically mentioned (STV and the West German system, which elects half the members as in Britain and adds the other half so as to give party proportionality in the total result), the latter is certainly fair to the parties but it lays great emphasis on party and therefore if applied to local government elections would be unwelcome to the many who consider party to be out of place there, and it cannot be applied to elections where organised parties do not exist or are not wanted (e.g. in voluntary societies).

It can do nothing to meet the complaints of an elector who has an MP of the party he prefers but finds him personally unsatisfactory; who wishes to support the left wing of his party but has only a right-wing candidate (or vice versa); who resents having the MP who is supposed to represent some 70,000 electors chosen by a small fraction of that number in a closed party meeting and objects to the great power of the party organisation which results; who would like to express his agreement with some candidates in other parties (or on the contrary his objection to an arrangement with them entered into by his party leaders).

It would not remove the fears of those who foresee extremist legislation against the wishes of the majority of the nation —- for a party could come to power legitimately with the general support of the majority of voters but be dominated by the extremists in its ranks, whom the voters would not have chosen to elect had they had any choice.

Obvious injustices to the parties are one good reason for seeking to change the present system, but what the Electoral Reform Society is concerned with is the fair representation of the voters' views — not only about the parties but also about anything else that the voters consider important. A free choice and maximum assurance that the choice expressed will be effective demands STV and not any system which assumes every vote is a party vote.

EL.

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### TO WHOM THE DECISION?

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

Lord Hailsham's Dimbleby Lecture, Harold Macmillan's broadcast urging a Government of National Unity, Liberals arguing about whether their party should take part in a coalition government — all are part of a general questioning of whether our democratic institutions are functioning as they should.

Mr Macmillan voiced the commonly heard opinion that, at least in a time of crisis, the best brains of all parties should work together for the good of the country instead of dividing into those who govern and those whose duty it is to oppose; he favours a coalition of all the main parties on principle, not only in circumstances where no one of them has the majority needed to govern alone.   
Some share this view; others accept the idea of coalition if no one party has a parliamentary majority; others, as the Prime Minister has done, say they will not contemplate coalition in any circumstances — but do not indicate what they consider to be the right course if no one party is in a position to govern alone.

While Mr Macmillan proposes only a change in the way we use our existing parliamentary machinery, Lord Hailsham advocated drastic changes in the machinery itself. He sees a parliament in which power has passed too much into the hands of a very few, indeed into those of the Prime Minister alone, and proposes checks upon that power — a Bill of Rights, a more representative House of Lords, a limit on the power of dissolution, etc.   
Many will find his proposals, or some of them, admirable, but they have a major fault: they aim at dealing with certain defects in the working of parliament without attempting to remove their cause.

If Lord Hailsham finds that the leader of a party supported by much less than half the voters can do virtually as he likes and that this is wrong, he should give some thought to how such a position can have arisen and should seek to remove the causes of it. The first resort should be to improve the functioning of parliament, not to bring in some external body such as the law courts to undo harm arising from parliament's defects.

While it would be foolish to pretend that there is any single cause of the trouble, whose removal would put everything right, our antiquated electoral system is certainly much to blame and a suitable reform of it would go far towards making other remedies unnecessary.

Why should there be any need for Lord Hailsham's checks and balances to prevent the House of Commons or the cabinet or the prime minister from doing things that the majority of the nation do not want?   
In the first place because the Commons are elected by a system which can, and usually does, give one party a parliamentary majority over all others combined although it has secured the votes of much less than half of those who went to the poll. That must be altered.

But to correct that is, while essential, not enough. How does it come about that the governing party, even if having the general support of more than half the voters, may be controlled by a section — perhaps of extremists -— whose views are manifestly not shared by the majority of the nation and perhaps not even by the majority of those voting for that party?   
Such a thing is possible only because the British voter. has no means even of saying whether he prefers to be represented by an extreme or a moderate member of his party, let alone of giving that preference any effect in the election. In any one constituency each party is forced to select only one candidate, because otherwise it would invite defeat by splitting its vote, and anyone wishing to support that party can do nothing but vote for the one candidate so selected. Whether a particular shade of opinion predominates in the parliamentary party or not depends not on the extent to which it is shared by the party's voters but on how successful that section of the party has been in controlling the selection of candidates.

This also means that an MP tends to be unduly subservient to the wishes of his party organisation, which do not necessarily coincide with those of the people who put their X's against his name.

If we changed to the single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies, the voters would have a free choice among different candidates within each party and their preferences would determine whether the party was represented predominantly by extremists or moderates, independent-minded people or 'lobby-fodder' and so forth.

This also has great relevance to the case of those who, like Mr Macmillan, want a government of national unity or perhaps a two-party coalition, and of those who oppose the idea. On the one hand it is urged that we need all available talent in government and ought not to exclude valuable people just because they do not belong to a certain party, and that people of different parties do in fact agree about many things that ought to be done; on the other hand it is said that coalition involves sacrifice of principle, the imposition by bargaining among party leaders of a combination for which the people have not voted, indecisive government and obliteration of the smaller partner in a coalition by its larger partner.

The fears are certainly justified if election takes place under the existing British system (1931 is sufficient proof of that) or, to a less extent, under a party list system with little or no choice between candidates (including the AMS system invented by the Hansard Society's committee).

They do not apply when the single transferable vote is used. With STV, the voter not only has a choice between different candidates of his own party, he can also (without any risk of thereby harming that party) express his opinion of all the others. He can do as the lrish did in their last general election (February 1973) when the majority of them voted 1, 2, 3 for Fine Gael candidates and then went on to Labour ones or vice versa, thus making it clear that they accepted the idea of those two parties working together.   
He can give preference to those candidates of Party A who favour a coalition with Party B or to those who do not, and that preference will be reflected in the election result. There is no way in which the leaders of Parties A and B can impose a coalition between them if the voters do not want it.

The voters will decide also the general lines of the coalition's policy — where there is disagreement on some major question it is the voters who will decide whether candidates taking the one view or the other are elected. A 'GNU' will not mean the absence of an alternative government, for in the next election the voters will be free, if they so wish, to retain the government of national unity but to modify its policy, shifting their support perhaps from a minister whose policy they think has been mistaken to someone who will change it.   
Neither the coalition as a whole nor any of its component parties could win seats grossly out of proportion to its popular support, so it would not be possible, as happened in 1931, for a genuine coalition to be transformed rapidly into an 'elective dictatorship' of one party.

Whatever other reforms may be needed, the first essential is to give much more power to the people.

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### COMMONS AND LORDS CONSIDER REFORM

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

#### Devolution Bill

Eleven hours of debate on electoral reform is something the House of Commons had not experienced for many years. It took place during the night of 25 January 1977 on one of the innumerable amendments to The Scotland and Wales Bill, an amendment by John Mackintosh (Labour) and Anthony Kershaw (Conservative) to have the Scottish and Welsh assemblies elected by the additional members system (see Representation, no. 64, p.24 and no. 66, p.2). While the Electoral Reform Society finds AMS a very inadequate reform, it at least welcomes unreservedly the growing realisation that our present electoral system has got to be changed. It is a very good sign that almost half the House were willing to stay until after 4 am to debate and vote on the amendment.

Perhaps even more welcome is the all-party (except for the UUUC) support for reform. The Conservatives were allowed a free vote and backed the amendment by 35 to 16; voting with them were all the Liberals and Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, one Scottish Labour Party member and, in addition to Mr. Mackintosh, two Labour members, Tom Ellis and Stan Thorne, who defied a 3-line whip. We should like particularly to thank Mr. Thorne for a thoroughly democratic speech, stressing that what matters in an electoral system is not whether it will help this party or that but whether it will or will not give effect to the will of the voters. He also expressed a preference for STV rather than AMS.

The Noes won by 244 to 62, but as most of them were Labour members obeying the whip we do not know to what extent that reflects the real opinions of MPs.

We also have no means of knowing what the voting would have been if the Liberal amendment for STV had been called instead of (or as well as) that for AMS, but the debate gave little support to the theory that AMS would be more readily accepted by MPs on account of its retention of single-member constituencies. Most of the objections raised against AMS do not apply at all to STV — the introduction of 'second class MPs', multiplication of parties, coalitions formed by party bargaining without reference to the voters' wishes.   
Neil Kinnock spotted one respect in which AMS is inferior even to the present system: while an MP who neglects his constituents may be dismissed by them at the next election if his majority is smaller than the number of people who desert him for personal reasons, under AMS he would be likely to get one of the additional seats.

The debate showed up all the usual misconceptions, such as failure to distinguish between list systems and STV. Even some who supported the amendment showed an imperfect understanding of the subject, saying that the existing British system is all right if there are only two parties, or that where one party has an overall majority of the voters, as in Northern Ireland, "it does not matter what electoral system is applied".   
Much more discussion is needed to make up for many years of misinformation. Its ultimate fate is at the time of writing still uncertain. David Steel has said that his party's co-operation will be conditional on the inclusion of a proportional system of election.

#### Supply Day Motion

The Liberals used their supply day, 23 February 1977, for a debate on the motion: 'That this House believes that Great Britain's economic performance is gravely hindered by a system of government which grants majority power to alternating minority parties; and calls for the reform of the voting system so that Parliament can represent and give effect to the wishes of the people'.

In contrast to the Mackintosh amendment, this motion specifies the object to be sought but not the particular system to be used for its attainment.

Much of what was said (concerning, for example, undue power of the whips, or domination of a party by a section) implied STV as the necessary reform, but the point was not clearly made. Since the motion was not pressed to a division, we have no measure of the number of MPs on either side but there was little unqualified opposition. In addition to the four Liberals speaking for their own motion, two Labout MPs and one Conservative gave it general support, while three Conservatives and two Labour members were critical or hostile. Much of the opposition was to something nobody had suggested — that reforming the electoral system would suffice to transform political life.

#### STV Bill in the Lords

On 7 March 1977 we returned to specific proposals with the introduction by Lord Banks of the Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill which (besides other provisions such as votes for British subjects in other EEC countries) provided for the 81 British members of the European parliament to be elected by STV in 12 regional constituencies similar to those suggested in the ER Society's suggested schedule. 'In normal circumstances one would expect the necessary legislation to be introduced by the government of the day' but as the government had delayed so long the Liberal peers felt it necessary to introduce their own bill.

The delay was itself a reason for not using 81 single-member constituencies: the drawing of these, with many disputes over which party the proposed boundaries might favour, would take too long for the June 1978 date of elections to be met. More important is fair representation; for instance it is not possible to draw three Northern Ireland constituencies in such a way as to fulfil the Prime Minister's intention that the large Catholic minority shall elect a representative.

Besides Lord Banks, five other peers spoke to the bill and welcomed its introduction even then when they criticised it. Lord Shinwell declared himself a supporter of proportional representation while opposing direct elections to the European parliament. Lord Mansfield was troubled by the wide variety of proportional systems; this is another indication that more attention needs to be directed to the question of what an election is intended to achieve. When that is decided it is relatively simple to find out which systems will and will not achieve the desired objects. This Society believes that the function of an election is to give the electors the maximum opportunity of saying freely what they want and the maximum assurance that the wishes which they express will be effective, and that STV fulfils these conditions much better than any other system yet devised.

Lord Banks' bill was given an unopposed second reading and now goes to a committee of the whole House.

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### REALIGNMENT?

Table of contents

January 1980

Enid Lakeman

The 1979 Dimbleby lecture by Roy Jenkins, President of the European Commission, attracted much attention and was warmly welcomed by supporters of proportional representation, but with one reservation: Mr Jenkins, while saying that the case for PR was now overwhelming. did not specify any particular proportional system but made passing reference to West Germany whose system is, compared with STV, quite inadequate to meet his object.

Mr Jenkins complained of the rigidity of British politics, our failure to adapt to changing circumstances; the selection of candidates by small groups of activists, who also decide the contents of the manifesto, which could be 'one on which the majority of those now elected by the people would not wish to fight and on which they did not believe they could govern even if elected'. He wants our political institutions to be 'more representative of and more responsible to the aspirations of the public' and he sees much of the reason for Britain's present poor showing in the world as being the continual reversals of policy with a change of government and the tendency of each party to blame the other side for anything that goes wrong.   
'If, on the House of Commons floor, it was always the fault of the other side, how could politicians preach convincingly against the prevalence of such a mood on the shop floor?' We need both more change and more stability; the two are not incompatible if change is brought about with the consent of the majority and is not liable to be reversed by a minority.

Unfortunately, Mr Jenkins did not propose any adequate remedy. The feature of his lecture which attracted most comment was his plea for people of the 'radical centre' to combine, a development which 'could bring into political commitment the energies of many people of talent and goodwill who, although perhaps active in many other voluntary ways, are at present alienated from the business of government, whether national or local, by the sterility and formalism of much of the political game'.

Yes, but how? For such people to form a new centre party would certainly be a more hopeful undertaking if such a party were guaranteed its proportional share of the seats, but if this were done by a party list system (e.g. the German) there is no guarantee that the new party would not share the defects of the old ones. We heartily agree that it is undesirable to 'hand over still greater power to an unrepresentative party machine', but the remedy for that is to transfer from the party machine to its rank and file supporters the power to decide who shall and shall not become or remain an MP.   
As a step towards this Mr Jenkins proposes primary elections, but experience of these in the only country where they are used extensively, the USA, is not very encouraging. They are a costly and far less effective way of achieving what the single tranferable vote does in the actual election. Also, in the multi-member constituencies which are unavoidable with any proportional system, how would the primary voting be done? Surely it would have to be done by STV.

STV does make the MP responsible directly to the electors. They elect him in preference to others of the same party, and in the next election they can reaffirm their confidence in him or replace him by another individual according to whether they consider him to have served them well or ill. Their choice is not confined within any one party, and they are encouraged not to think of another party as an enemy to be blamed for every-thing but to recognise that in some respects they agree with it or with some of its candidates.

With STV, voters inclining to the 'centre' would no longer be faced with an either/or choice between the new party and the one they have usually supported. They can give preference to candidates of the new party and then go on to their old one, or they can pick out the most centrist of those they are accustomed to support and then go on to centre party candidates in preference to the more extreme ones of their usual party. And all this without any need to consider whether any party or candidate has much or little chance of success.

lndeed it might well be found that there was no need to organise a separate party, for a given number of voters giving preference to 'centre' candidates would secure the election of a corresponding number of them, whether they all stood as one party or were scattered over several, and those preferences would also reflect whatever public support there might be for a coalition, or some other form of co-operation, between parties.

There can be no abuse of a spurious 'mandate', since the voters will have been able to make clear which lines of policy have general support and which have not. There can be no unduly inflated power for the Executive or for the party machines, since each MP becomes responsible directly to his constituents and cannot be deprived of his seat except by them. The House of Commons will become, as Mr Jenkins wishes it to be, the free forum of the people.

* * *

### DODGING THE ISSUE

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

Why do we ERS members want to change the British electoral system? Because we believe an election should give the voters the maximum freedom to say what they want and the greatest possible assurance that they will get it. The voter is all-important. The single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies is the only system yet invented which fulfils both these requirements; that is why we support it.

Other reformers, however, have started not from the voter but from the party. They are disturbed by such anomalies as that the present government came to power with the support [in 1979] of only 44% of those voting, and its predecessor with only 39%, or that smaller parties get only a fraction of the seats proportional to their votes. The largest wave of demand for a change was set-off by the February 1974 election, in which the Liberals polled more than half as many votes as either of the two larger parties but won only 14 seats compared with their 301 and 297.

Most of the people concerned to prevent such things have little knowledge of possible remedies (because for half a century our two largest parties have published little or no reliable information on the subject). Their attention has naturally been caught by the most numerous class of countries using different systems. These are all the continental European countries except France, whose systems are all based on counting votes for a party.

Hence, while 'PR' in this country has always meant STV, and this has long been widely used by all sorts of organisations from the Church of England to little local societies, in recent years there has been an intrusion of the party list idea, which has never been seen in practice in the UK. First we had advocacy of the West German system or something like it — half the Bundestag being elected exactly like the House of Commons and the distortions of party representation being corrected by adding to each party enough seats to make its total representation proportional to its votes.

Support for this system rests on the belief that having only one MP for a constituency creates a special relationship between him and his constituents. We are asked to believe that the many Socialists in Margaret Thatcher's constituency and Conservatives in Tony Benn's feel that person to be really their MP. Moreover, since with single-member constituencies alone it is impossible to ensure even that the party with the most votes wins the most seats, there have to be added a number of other MPs for whom that unique link, whatever it may be worth, cannot exist.

With STV, on the contrary, nearly every voter will find one among the several members for his constituency who is broadly of his own way of thinking; we maintain that in those circumstances the link between MP and constituent will be much closer.

There are, however, many (MPs rather than electors) who resist the idea of a constituency several times the size of their present one, and from some of them has come a proposal to have STV constituencies each returning only two or three members, and additional members to make each party's total representation proportional to the first-preference votes of its candidates. The authors of this proposal are clearly aware that the accuracy with which proportional representation is achieved depends on how many members are elected from each constituency. It will be quite high with five members, relatively low with three, and much lower still with two. Never mind, they say, we will correct this by topping-up. But that will put things right only as far as the number of MPs per party is concerned.

The great merit of STV is that it gives proportional representation (within whatever limit is set by the number elected together) not only of parties but equally of any other groups into which the voters may choose to divide themselves. Those other groups can be as important as the parties or even more so. They certainly are in the context of recent movements to 'break the mould' of the present party structure. Why do people want to break the mould? Because it is too rigid. We are obliged to vote as if we agreed totally with candidate X and disagreed totally with all others. Moreover, our vote for X, even if given for purely personal reasons, is claimed as a 'mandate' for every item in X's party, and those who later express opposition to some of those items are liable to be treated by that party as traitors.

STV opens the way for expression of different opinions within any party and agreement across party lines. The topping-up scheme would water down this power for the voters in the small constituencies, and in the topping-up would destroy it altogether, counting each '1' as a vote for that candidate's party regardless of the voter's wishes.

We have got to insist that elections are for the electors. Parties matter only so far as the electors think they do.

* * *

### FISSION AND FUSION

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

The political air is full of talk about the 'terminal illness' of the Labour party, speculation on whether its Social Democrats can form any kind of alliance with the Liberals, accusations that they are traitors to the Labour cause. There is certainly a possibility that, by splitting the vote, they may keep the Conservatives in power, but to allege that this is their object (Margaret Jackson, Nationwide, 21 January) is an example of the extremes into which otherwise reasonable people are led by an electoral system that so heavily penalises any non-conformity with the party line.

The present difficulties would never have arisen if only we had been using the single transferable vote. Most probably, no breakaway party would have been needed, for the various shades of opinion that exist within the Labour party (and any other party) could have been put honestly to the electors by different candidates all within the party. Our single-member constituency condemns each party to selecting just one candidate, but in a multi-member constituency it has to select more than one, and when the vote is transferable it can have any number without risk of splitting its vote. lf a party does not spontaneously try to maximise its appeal by submitting a variety of candidates, any section that feels left out can insist on nominating another without any risk of thereby harming the party's chances. Labour voters could then give full support to their party by voting 1, 2, 3 . . . for all its candidates, while giving preference to candidates like Tony Benn or like Shirley Williams as the case might be.

Suppose a separate party were nevertheless formed. lreland did have, briefly, two Labour parties, but this had no effect on the total Labour representation, since most of those who voted first for candidates of the one gave their later preferences to the other, and when the cause of dissension had passed the two came together again without difficulty.

What about sympathisers in other parties? Again no difficulty. No question of pacts in the constituencies (a Liberal standing down for a Social Democrat or vice versa) would arise, for any voter who favoured an alliance of the two would simply give his earlier preferences to the one and then go on to the other. That range of opinion would secure its due voice in the House of Commons just as much as if it were organised in a single party.

At the same time as this struggle for representation of different Labour opinions, we have a bid for parliamentary seats on the part of another opinion group, the Ecology party [later, the Greens]. This comprises people who feel great concern about the threat to our environment presented by anything from the H-bomb down to litter in the streets and seek to preserve our heritage. However, a report of the party's conference (Guardian, 2 March 1981) shows how difficult it is to promote such a cause by means of another party. Policies put forward included reduction in our population, encouragement of small enterprises, organic farming, taxation of land values and protection of animals from exploitation by man. People wishing to promote such objects could do so much more effectively if, under STV, they were able to give preference to those candidates of the established parties who showed most concern about the environmental questions to which the voter attached great importance.

* * *

### NATIONS IN CONFERENCE

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

ln August 1979 I was one of over 1600 people in the triennial conference of the International Political Science Association. Being held in Moscow made it more than usually interesting to us of the West, but from the point of view of the Electoral Reform Society the chief gain came from discussions with people whose countries hold what we regard as real elections. The conference divided into a number of specialised groups, of which two gave openings for my contributions

One dealt with the role of women in politics, and there it fell to me to introduce what would otherwise have been quite neglected — the effects of electoral systems on the number of women elected to parliaments or other bodies.   
There was a paper from a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany who compared the numbers of women in the parliaments of various countries but had failed to notice that her own Bundestag has four and a half times as many women in one half of it as it has in the other. The 248 single-member constituencie elected 7 women; the other 248 members elected by party list PR with each Land as one constituency included 32 women.   
Multi-member constituencies as such (whatever the method of voting) remove a major obstacle in the way of women seeking a parliamentary career: a party reluctant to select a woman as its only candidate in any constituency will readily include her as one of several, in order to widen its appeal.   
With a party list system, whether she is elected or not will depend primarily, if not entirely, on how high in its list the party has placed her; with STV it depends only on how many voters prefer her to other candidates.   
The transferable vote also has two other consequences: if a party does not spontaneously include a woman among its candidates the electors can insist on adding one — without any risk of harming the party by splitting its vote \- and a preference for women (or any other particular kind of candidate) need not be confined within any one party.

The other group in which I played a considerable part was concerned with integration, in particular with the European Community. Here again, nobody else had studied electoral systems as an important factor making for either integration or division, and an otherwise valuable paper analysing the results of the EEC elections had not considered the different electoral systems as a factor possibly influencing turnout. When I pointed out the contrast between Great Britain (32% poll), where electors had a very restricted choice and high expectations that their vote would make no difference, and Northern lreland (57%), where electors had a free choice among 13 candidates and near certainty that their choice would affect the result, one of the two authors of that paper hailed this as something of a revelation and approached me afterwards, eager to ensure that we kept in touch.

My impression has been strengthened that countries with party list systems now have their minds more open to the need in Community elections for a flexible system that will reflect public opinion on European questions cutting across the national party lines. There is much work yet to be done before STV can be established as the common system for future Community elections, but the hope of success has substantially increased.

* * *

### THE TYRANNY OF LISTS

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

Le Monde has been running a series of articles by spokesmen of the main parties on possible changes in parliamentary elections. At present, the Assembly is elected by the second ballot in single-member constituencies.   
ln the last two elections, this has resulted in every member being elected by a clear majority, but this does not make the overall result any more proportional than in the UK. The 1981 election did indeed give roughly fair representation of Left and Right as a whole, but greatly distorted support for the parties within those groups. On the first ballot, which gives all parties the opportunity to test their popularity, the Socialists polled twice as many votes as the Communists, but because it was in most cases the Communists who had to stand down so as not to split the Left vote, they ended with only 44 seats to the Socialists' 284.

The present government (Socialist with Communist support) has expressed its intention to change the system, but no definite proposal has yet been put forward.   
In the articles under discussion, there is (as also in Britain!) too much talk of advantage to this or that party, and a good deal of abuse of the other side for allegedly seeking to promote whichever system is in its own interest.

Jean-Claude Gaudin, attacking PR, ascribes to it faults that belong only to a party list system. This is much more excusable in a Frenchman, who has no experience of STV, than in an Englishman, but he really should not refer to the Fourth Republic as an example of the evils of PR without mentioning that its last two elections were under a system devised to give the government far more than its proportional share of the seats, nor neglect the fact that its 'procession of ministerial crises' was no worse than under the second ballot before the war. Nor should he refer to the Marseilles result as being under a proportional system — see Representation No. 92, page 38.

The case for PR is best made by Jean Wlos, whose article has the great merit of stating criteria for a good electoral system: equality of votes and equality of elected members in respect of the number of votes needed to elect them. He also supports PR as a system 'permitting the free expression of the many and diverse strands of thought', which should lead him to support STV when it is drawn to his attention, rather than a system that gives free expression only to opinions about parties.

All the contributors are handicapped by knowing nothing of the single transferable vote. Even when Gaudin makes a valid point in favour of the second ballot, he is not aware that the same advantage applies even more to the alternative vote: either enables all and sundry to compete in the first stage and form alliances in the second, but the second ballot requires negotiations between party leaders, while AV leaves the voters to form their own alliances. And STV in multi-member constituencies will give both the alliances and their component parts their fair share of the seats.

Multi-member constituencies will also make it easy to remedy the gross disparities in electorates which are rightly the subject of complaint. With single-member constituencies, unless all natural boundaries are disregarded it is impossible to draw them so as to ensure equality of electorates within a margin much less than two to one. With constituencies returning, say, half a dozen members, the margin can be much smaller and natural units need never be divided.

Supporters of the existing system say it should not be changed behind the backs of the people and without their consent. But were they ever asked whether they want this present system?

SOCIAL SECURITY ELECTIONS

The need for France (and other continental countries) to get to know about STV is underlined by figures and comment also in Le Monde (18-21 October) concerning elections to various bodies involved in social security. When similar elections take place in Ireland (see for example the article in this issue [no. 93] on election of worker directors) no difficulty arises: any qualified person may stand and the voters choose those they consider the most suitable. But in France, in order to ensure fair representation of different interests it is necessary to have voting for 'parties', in this case the different trade unions. We therefore get results like this for the'Caisses d'allocations familiales' in Paris:

| votes, % | seats  
---|---|---  
CGT | 25.92 | 4  
FO | 24.08 | 4  
CGC | 23.61 | 4  
CFDT | 16.36 | 2  
CFTC | 10.00 | 1

There is an analysis (Le Monde 21 Oct.) of how different groups voted as determined by an opinion poll. From this it is obvious that the different unions do not suffice to represent different interests — manual workers and professionals, men and women, etc. In every group, each union is supported by some voters. Students divide nearly equally among all five; manual workers mainly support the CGT, but only to the extent of 48%, and so on. Clearly the supporters of any given union would appreciate being given power to express their opinion on other points — which power STV would give them.

Comment on the elections includes the remark that they 'should not be a test of strength between unions' and 'should not become anonymous and impersonal', but that is just what they are. There is great need for those responsible for them to be made aware of the highly personal single transferable vote.

* * *

### THE GRASS IS GREENER IN THE STV MEADOW

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

A report by Michael Binyon in the Guardian of the 5 March 1984 discusses the internal problems of the West German ecology party, the Greens. People who agree in working to protect the environment do not necessarily agree about anything else; hence, the party's power to promote its basic object is weakened by divisions of opinion on other matters. Its conference 'tried to give new direction to the party by debating its policies for elections to the European Parliament in June and selecting 15 candidates'.

The majority was hostile to the EEC, but surely it must welcome any action by that body against such things as polluted rivers or acid rain which are no respecters of frontiers.

There is also controversy over 'rotation', imitating a device used in France in the previous election: any elected Greens will have to give up their seats, half way through the term, to others on the party's list.   
This is of course entirely alien to the spirit of the single transferable vote, which gives to the voters alone the decision as to which man or woman shall fill any seat. Those who wish to promote a particular policy, such as conservation, can serve their cause by giving preference to candidates who support that policy — whether or not those candidates form a separate party.

# Districts

### THOSE BOUNDARIES

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

The boundary commissions that started work in 1976 have recently completed their reports, making recommendations that leave only 48 of the present 635 constituencies unchanged. This drastic revision has given rise both to an attempt by the Labour party to get the reports as a whole invalidated and to great difficulties for a number of constituencies, MPs and candidates.

Implementation of the last revision, in 1969, was delayed by the then Labour government until after the 1970 election, because the changes were unfavourable to Labour; the present Labour opposition sought to delay this revision for the same reason. lt argued in the High Court that the commissioners had not carried out their duties properly, leaving unnecessarily large differences in electorate between one constituency and another, e.g. the Isle of Wight with 94,768 electors and Surbiton with 46,824.   
Whatever may be said about Surbiton, the lsle of Wight is a particularly clear case of the impossibility, under a single-member system, of doing justice to a place with one and a half times the standard electorate. One must either under-represent the island with one MP, over-represent it with two, or cut off a bit and attach it to the mainland — a solution that the islanders would by no means tolerate.

However, the real motive for a costly court action and for trying to delay acceptance of the proposals by parliament must be the certainty of an adverse effect on the number of Labour seats. There is no way the commissioners could avoid a bias against Labour. The party is highly concentrated in inner-city areas whose electorates have decreased; for instance in lslington and Hackney, where in 1979 it won all six seats. Since their combined electorates are now less than four times the standard, Labour must lose two seats. The Labour migrants from that area will of course have votes elsewhere, but there is no guarantee that they will elect anybody; they may well be a minority in their new homes.

Certain objections to particular boundaries have been accepted, particularly in Wales, where the original proposals had put into the same constituency villages in different valleys with no road between them. There is, however, (given the system) no remedy for the difficulties of MPs and prospective candidates whose constituencies have disappeared or been cut up or merged with others.   
A prominent example is Tony Benn, whose Bristol SE constituency has been abolished in the process of reducing Bristol's representation from five members to four. The revision leaves only one safe Labour seat in the city, which is held by the party's chief whip, Michael Cocks. lt is far from certain that Mr Benn can succeed in being selected for that seat in place of Mr. Cocks (and that would only transfer the trouble to the latter), but he remains deeply attached to Bristol and unwilling to accept better prospects offered him in Scotland and London.

The Conservatives are involved in bitter disputes over the selection of a candidate for the new Welsh constituencies of Clwyd NW and Bridgend, and one of their ministers, Jock Bruce-Gardyne, has had his constituency abolished and failed to be selected for either of the two into which it has been divided.   
A particularly painful situation has arisen in Battersea, currently two Labour-held constituencies but now being reduced to one. The Member for Battersea North is retiring at the next election and the prospective candidate in his place has been Russell Profitt, one of the rare black candidates for a winnable seat; he has the support of Alf Dubs, MP for Battersea South. But Mr Dubs himself is considered a first-class MP, not least in his record on race relations, and the Battersea Labour party selected him for the new single constituency, leaving Mr Profitt stranded.

All such difficulties would disappear with the reform to which the Electoral Reform Society is committed. If Bristol City were one 5-member constituency, it could be reduced to four members without any alteration of boundaries. Benn, Cocks, and any other Labour candidates could all stand, without dispute and without risk of splitting the party's vote, and the Labour voters would decide which one, or perhaps two, got elected.   
The same applies to any of the other MPs whose seats have sunk under them. If Battersea were part of an 8-member constituency covering Wandsworth and Lambeth, its representation could be reduced, in accordance with its reduced electorate, to six, with no boundary changes, and the voters would decide which two of the existing MPs or prospective candidates should disappear. No need to disturb the friendship of Dubs and Profitt; both could stand and quite likely both be elected. Certainly, any party in that constituency would be much more willing to include a black candidate in its team than it is now to select one as its sole candidate for a single-member constituency.

The actual redistribution has taken some 40 people six years' work (and it is estimated would have taken them at least three years even without a delay caused by local government boundary revisions). It is claimed that a computer would have done the job in 15 months. But to change to natural multi-member constituencies such as the city of Bristol or Leeds, two adjacent London boroughs or a county like Wiltshire would take far less time, even without a computer, and the boundaries thus agreed upon would very seldom need revision. The number of electors per MP could be made much more nearly equal than is now possible.

The lsle of Wight would no longer be an awkward case if attached to its near neighbours across the Solent — not too welcome, perhaps, to some of its 'nationalists', but certainly far better than having Ryde or Cowes go into a different constituency or having votes worth only half what they are in Surbiton.   
The exact way in which the new constituencies were drawn would be most unlikely to have any material effect on the total result. Whether Lambeth is joined with Wandsworth or with Southwark, whether a large county like Surrey is divided north and south or east and west, is a matter for local preference and can affect, at most, only one of the several seats to be shared among the parties. A vote in support of any party will count just as much in Bermondsey as in Bournemouth, so no party can be robbed by its supporters moving from one constituency to another.

* * *

### PERVERSE VERDICT

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

"The Committee have received a considerable amount of evidence in favour of the proposition that elections for the European Assembly should be carried out under a system of proportional representation.' This is paragraph 14 of the Second Report from the Select Committee on Direct Elections to the European Assembly (HMSO, 3 August 1976, 30p) and the evidence of course includes that submitted by the Electoral Reform Society. All the evidence is to be published by the Committee and will probably be available by the time this account appears.

It will then be possible to form an opinion as to the relative weight of the arguments put forward on each side; until then we can judge only from the short summary in the Report. Readers of Representation will be familiar with the objections to using for our EEC elections the system used to elect the House of Commons — the main ones being that it is virtually certain to produce grossly distorted representation of the parties, that it will give no opportunity to vote on European questions that cut across the party lines, and that its introduction will involve lengthy and contentious boundary drawing.

In defence of the X-vote system the Committee produces these points:- (i)

If the United Kingdom were to change the electoral system for the first round of elections for the European Assembly, the electoral system would have to be changed twice within a comparatively short period.

(ii) lt would not in practical terms be easy on this issue to reach agreement on a particular new system in the time scale envisaged.

(iii) The first past the post system is familiar to the electors and to the returning officers' staffs. It could be implemented in the time available with little difficulty and there would be no risk that the electorate would become confused by having not only a new tier of elections but also a new electoral system, different from that used for national elections

(iv) It would be easier for the existing constituency organisations of the political parties to operate.

(v) Voters would identify more easily with their existing Parliamentary constituencies.

We do not understand (v), since it is impossible for the election of 81 EEC representatives to take place in the existing 635 parliamentary constituencies, and the same criticism applies to (iv).   
A preference for the familiar outweighed all considerations of its disadvantages and the Committee recommended the use of the first past the post system.

The only committed reformer on the Committee, Mr Jeremy Thorpe, strongly , opposed this. He succeeded in carrying an amendment improving the wording of the paragraph stating the advantages of a proportional system, but was in a minority of one on a further amendment emphasising the importance of a choice for the voter between candidates. Mr John Cartwright and Mr George Reid supported him on another amendment (lost 4-3): 'So far as the different systems of proportional representation are concerned, a majority of those who made written submissions considered that the single transferable vote system would be preferable in the context of European elections'.

He was again alone in urging that the decision between first past the post and STV should be left to the House of Commons, and in voting against the Report as a whole. Discussion is now going on as to the best course of action for reformers if the government insists on adhering to the Select Committee's recommendation.

* * *

### AN UNWANTED ENCORE

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

Representation of July 1979 described Britain's lamentable performance in the first election to the European parliament — an abysmally low poll and a distorted result which upset the balance of the whole parliament. The second election takes place on 14 June next year, and failure to agree on a common system for the whole Community has meant that the United Kingdom, except for Northern Ireland, will again have to vote with X's in single-member constituencies.

This has already spelled trouble, for the boundary commissioners have recommended alterations, it is uncertain whether these will be accepted in time, and the parties' preparations are consequently hampered. Voters will still have no choice between candidates of the same party with different views on Community questions, and the seats won by any party are likely to bear little relation to its support among the voters.

In the Guardian of 1 September 1983, David McKie gives a table of results as they would be if, in the revised constituencies, votes for the parties were cast as in the 1983 general election. On those assumptions, the Conservatives would take 56 seats as against 60 last time, Labour would improve its position to 21 seats instead of 17, the Scottish Nationalists would lose their one, and the Liberal who narrowly failed last time would be elected. However, Labour fears a low turnout of Labour voters, which could present up to 10 of their seats to the Conservatives. On the other hand, a much larger increase in the Liberal/Social Democrat vote is unlikely to bring them more than one additional seat.

Now suppose the election was taking place by STV in the regional constituencies suggested by the Electoral Reform Society — Scotland, Wales, Greater London, West Midlands, etc. In the first place, the boundary commissioners would have had nothing to do. Then, the result would have reflected accurately support for the various parties, and changes from the assumed voting pattern would bring about corresponding changes in the seats won, neither exaggerating them nor preventing their due effect.

| Conservative | Labour | Lib/SDP/All. | Nationalist  
---|---|---|---|---  
actual 1979 result | 60 | 17 | 0 | 1  
predicted 1984 result  | 56 | 21 | 1 | 0  
estimated STV result 1979 | 44 | 25 | 8 | 1  
" " " " 1984 | 35 | 22 | 20 | 1

Each of the three main parties would have had at least one representative in each constituency. Moreover, the seats won would have reflected the voters' opinions about Community questions, not only about the national parties. Labour supporters, for instance, would have had a choice between Labour candidates agreeing with the party's policy of seeking withdrawal from the Community and Labour candidates opposing it; Alliance supporters would have had a choice between Liberal and Social Democrat.

* * *

### DISTORTED DISTRICTS

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

'Local government is about cracked pavements and homeless families; local elections are too apt to be about the prime minister and the rate of unemployment. The tendency will reach the point of burlesque if tomorrow's borough and district elections are determined by events in the vicinity of Antartica.' The Times, 5 May 1982.

Unfortunately they were largely so determined. The Conservatives, instead of being slaughtered as expected before the Falklands crisis, made a net gain of seats, while Labour suffered a net loss and the Liberal/Social Democrat alliance fell far short of expectations although the Liberals did gain over 200 seats.

The effect was far from uniform, even over small areas. For instance in Kent the Conservatives in Tunbridge Wells swept the board but in Maidstone lost 3 seats to Liberals, and the summary press reports show many boroughs with results such as 'C gain 1 from L; L gain 1 from C'. In wards electing two or more councillors, there were far too many instances where nearly everyone had voted on party lines and the X-vote made them appear to have no preference between individual candidates; in only a few places was there emphatic discrimination in favour of a well-known and admired candidate.

Birmingham: Billesley ward Conservative | Labour | Alliance | others  
---|---|---|---  
3,028 | 3,742 | 2,848 | 288  
2,939 | 3,195 | 2,533 |   
2,784 | 3,052 | 2,359 |

Hammersmith: Broadway Ward Liberal | Labour | Conservative  
---|---|---  
Knott 939 | Gorter 636 | Carswell 273  
Mulcahy 694 | Prentice 618 | Seward 250

There were all the usual distortions, much the most common being gross over-representation of the largest party with dangerous enfeeblement of any opposition. None of the councils with elections this year has only one party represented, but lslington escaped that by only one vote!

Clerkenwell was the only ward with divided representation:

Conservative | Labour | Alliance | WRP  
---|---|---|---  
Bromfield 778 | Green 874 | Hyams 823 | Price 61  
Brown 675 | Oliver 864  | Southgate 701 |   
Bush 625 | Barstow 822 | Rogers 700 |

The apparently overwhelming Labour victory in that London borough rested on very little over half the votes:

| Conservative | Labour | Alliance | Others  
---|---|---|---|---  
votes,% | 24.4 | 51.5 | 22.3 | 1.8  
seats | 0 | 51 | 1 |

Among the districts electing only one third of their councils, one, Tunbridge Wells, elected councillors all of one party:

Tunbridge Wells | Conservative | Labour | Alliance | Others  
---|---|---|---|---  
town votes,% | 47.8  | 15.4 | 36.5 | 0.3  
seats | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0  
whole district votes,% | 51.7 | 12.8 | 34.4 | 1.1  
seats | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0

A very small number of people voting differently could have given an entirely different impression of the voters' opinions. lf, in the nine most marginal wards, only 529 of the 13,233 people who voted Conservative had voted Alliance instead, the Alliance could have won 9 seats to the Conservatives' 7, although still polling 3,373 votes fewer than the Conservatives.

An actual instance of an exaggerated effect by a few votes occurred in the London borough of Barnet, where a large part of the Arkley ward votes were accidently omitted from the count. Correction of the error made only 0.3% difference to the votes of the two largest parties but ten times as much to their seats, and made the council less representative of the voters' wishes.

Barnet, original & corrected counts | Conservative | Labour | Alliance | Others  
---|---|---|---|---  
original count  
votes, % |

47.8 | 24.9 | 26.3 | !.0

seats | 46 | 14 | 0 | 0  
% | 76.7 | 23.3 | 0 | 0  
corrected count  
votes,% |

48.1 | 24.6 | 26.3 | 1.0

seats | 48 | 12 | 0 | 0  
% | 80.0 | 20.0 | 0 | 0

The Conservatives, with twice Labour's vote, won four times as many seats (three times in the original count) and the Alliance, with more votes than Labour, (all three parties fought all seats) got no seats at all. The Alliance, and in Scotland the SNP, were the most frequent victims of the system. (In the whole of Scotland, those two parties together polled half as many votes as Conservative plus Labour but won only 48 seats against 307.) But every party suffered unfairly somewhere.

ln Calderdale, all three parties came out in the wrong order:

| Conservative | Labour | Alliance  
---|---|---|---  
votes | 22,060 | 20,116 | 20,370  
seats | 7 | 9 | 3

The bad psychological effects of X-voting are very evident. One might think a party that has won 51 seats out of 52 could afford to be magnanimous about its opponents' one, but no; the lslington Labour party threatened to dispute the count in that ward and to deny the lone Social Democrat the use of the room customarily occupied by the leader of the opposition. 28 of the 183 councils with elections this year have no overall majority for one party, and party spokesmen have generally referred to this position as deplorable. lt does not seem to have occurred to them that co-operation might be better than one-party dictation, and Liverpudlians continue to be the victims of the bickering that has gone on for years.

London and the Metropolitan boroughs had elections for the entire council, other districts only for one third of it, and this gives an opportunity to compare multiple and single vacancies from the point of view of people who find it difficult to get accepted as candidates by their party. The results that have reached the Society are incomplete, but where we are able to compare similar towns in the two categories there is confirmation that women are more readily accepted in a team of two or more.

muti-member elections | % women candidates | % elected  
---|---|---  
S. Tyneside | 30 | 33  
Gateshead, part | 23 | 10  
Kirklees, part | 25 | 19  
Sunderland | 24 | 11

single-member elections | % women candidates  | % elected  
---|---|---  
Newcastle/Tyne | 21 | 12  
Barnsley | 15 | 9  
Bradford  | 17 | 17  
Coventry | 15 | 22

Perhaps more reliable are comparisons within the same town, where most wards were electing only one councillor but a few were electing two.

| single vacancies  
% women candidates |

% elected

| double vacancies  
% candidates |

% elected

---|---|---|---|---  
Chester | 29 | 17 | 25 | 33  
Reigate & Banstead | 26 | 15 | 41 | 50  
Woodspring | 14 | 28 | 30 | 25

The same handicap applies even more strongly to ethnic minorities. The Guardian of 15 May reported 'only a slight increase in the number of councillors from ethnic minorities although substantially more stood as candidates. . . . Most of those who won seats did so in London' — where all council elections are multi-member. The Times, 28 April, reported that non-white candidates amounted to one third of the Labour party's total in Brent (London). Asian candidates can usually be identified by their names, but West Indians cannot; for the latter we need local information which is not yet available.

A count of Asian names in three comparable cities gave this result:

| members per ward | Asian candidates | out of  | elected  
---|---|---|---|---  
Birmingham | 3 | 20 | 372 | 4  
Coventry | 1 | 1 | 66 | 0  
Barnsley | 1 | 0 | 65 | 0

We look forward to carrying out a more extensive study.

* * *

### PLUMPING

Table of contents

THE lsle of Man report refers incidentally to resentment caused by a candidate in a 2- or 3~member constituency asking for votes for himself alone and suggests that this might be forbidden, electors being required to use all their votes.   
This remedy, however, would be far worse than the disease. It would mean that the votes cast (to say nothing of the result) would misrepresent the voters' opinions even more than is now the case. Under the present X-vote system, an elector who thinks candidate A far superior to all the rest can at least say so, but if he is obliged to cast his other votes he will be made to say, quite falsely, that he thinks candidates B and C just as good as A.

Moreover, far from discouraging tactical voting on the part of A's supporters, it will drive them into more sophisticated manoeuvres. Their second and third votes will count against A and may help to defeat him, therefore they must on no account be given to the next best candidates; A's supporters must arrange to throw them away on the candidates they believe to have the least chance of election.

With the single transferable vote, no later preference can ever possibly count against an earlier one, so plumping becomes pointless.

ENID LAKEMAN

[The Isle of Man report: a commission, chaired by David Butler, made an STV recommendation. The Guardian news-paper showed the three-armed Manx motif, bearing the preference votes 1, 2, 3, _Editor_.]

* * *

### 'AFFIRMATIVE GERRYMANDERlNG' — AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

The Guardian of the 4 March 1978 reported a decision of the United States Supreme Court that the constitution does not prohibit the use of race as a criterion when drawing the boundaries of electoral districts. That is, there is nothing unlawful in drawing boundaries in order to give representation to an ethnic group which would not otherwise get it.

An article by David I. Wells in the National Civic Review of January I978 refers to previous decisions on this subject, which had been concerned with attempts to deprive such groups of representation; the present position [since reversed] appears to be that gerrymandering is condemned when its object is to give a particular section of the electorate either much more or much less than its proportional share of the seats, but sanctioned when its object is to give that section its fair share.

However, the same two sources demonstrate that gerrymandering is no cure for ethnic mis-representation. To begin with, if an ethnic group is insufficiently concentrated it may not be possible to draw any boundary that will give it a seat. Then, a gerrymander which serves its purpose in the circumstances of one election may fail in the next (see for example Representation No.68, p.23).

In addition, an attempt to do justice to one group may inflict injustice on another, and the position of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn is a clear instance of this. Until 1974, the 35,000 of them, living in a close-knit community, were all in one voting district, which they controlled, but blacks and Puerto Ricans had no representation.   
The Supreme Court case concerned the re-drawing of boundaries in a way that gave fair representation to the non-whites but — by dividing the Jewish community between two districts -- deprived it of its rights.   
There are always likely to be many instances of such conflicts — for instance, boundaries which gave fair representation to a number of ethnic groups might create a monopoly for one political party — and there may be many other kinds of groups whose interests are not served at all. It may be important that women should have their voice in the elected body, or young people, or the supporters and opponents of some particular kind of legislation, and boundaries drawn on ethnic criteria cannot provide for these.

A second article in the same Review is by Bruce Adams as spokesman of Common Cause. Its main theme is that boundaries should be drawn by an impartial commission, not by people with an interest in producing any particular election result, and with that of course we must agree. It will also be agreed that electoral districts should so far as possible be equal in electorate and that 'local political subdivision boundaries' should be respected, but according to what other criteria is the commission supposed to operate? Mr Adams constantly uses the word 'fair' but gives no indication of how we are supposed to judge what is fair and what (apart from deliberate gerrymandering) is unfair.   
There are many ways in which an impartial commission could divide Brooklyn while avoiding all the practices which Mr Adams condemns; suppose one of them resulted in the election of whites only or non-whites only, would that be 'fair'?

Readers of Representation will recall that in our last issue Eric Syddique gave two schemes for dividing Greater London into ten Euro-constituencies; either could equally well be adopted by an impartial commission but their effects on political party representation would be very different. Removal of the deliberate gerrymander is of course desirable but it is no protection against the unintended gerrymander which is inseparable from any system under which the whole representation of any electoral district goes to one party (or other group).   
Given that condition, it is certainly preferable that the 'whole representation' should be one member rather than half a dozen; on the other hand, single-member constituencies make it impossible for the representation to be divided and therefore impossible to prevent the result of an election from being affected seriously by the way boundaries are drawn.

David Wells has become conscious of the futility of tinkering with the matter of gerrymandering, for towards the end of his article he says, 'If we are to have proportional representation of groups, perhaps we should consider scrapping the idea of geographic representation altogether; do away with districts and elect our law-makers on an at-large basis, using a PR system'.

Just so. If we elect several representatives together, so as to make it possible for several different kinds of voters each to elect one, and give the voters means of saying freely and effectively whom they want as their representative, there will be no need to manipulate boundaries so as to ensure the fair representation of an ethnic group, a political party or whatever; the voters themselves will bring about the fair representation of whatever groups they feel to be important. And, since the position of a boundary can affect, at most, only one of the several seats in an electoral district, it ceases to be important. The ingenuity devoted to gerrymandering or to its prevention can be diverted to better purposes.

Reverting to the Greater London example, if that already existing unit were one constituency for electing ten members to the European parliament, with votes being cast by numbering candidates in the order of the voter's preference, any group of people who wished to be represented by one of themselves would give preference to candidates of that group and if they amounted to more than one eleventh of the total they would be certain of representation. No boundary commission would need to consider whether it should seek to give seats to political parties, blacks and whites, Jews and Gentiles or anything else; the voters alone would decide.

# Elections

### QUIET UPHEAVAL IN THE NETHERLANDS

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

Being on holiday there in the week of the Dutch general election, l had hoped to get an inside view of the campaign, but found that there was very little sign of activity and had great difficulty in making contact with party workers. Partly, this was due to its being holiday time and only eighteen months after the previous election, with all the parties hard up, but another factor would seem to be the very centralised nature of the electoral system.

Votes for the parties are totalled over the entire country, and division into constituencies seen only as an opportunity for the parties to adjust their lists so as to give pride of place to locally popular candidates. Committee rooms and their associated organisations exist only in the largest cities.

The campaign was carried on largely by television and radio, and l heard many favourable comments concerning an eve of the poll TV debate among the leaders of the four largest parties. The poll was down as compared with the previous election, but only from 86.6% to 80.6%, still high by British standards. One factor in the high turnout is that an elector can vote anywhere on production of his identity card, so is not automatically disfranchised by being on holiday.

A Dutch ballot paper looks like a Belgian one, but instead of having to mark either one party list or one candidate within it, the voter has to do both. However, his personal vote is of much less use than the Belgian's, for it takes effect only if the candidate has a number of personal votes at least equal to the quota. Only a few candidates achieve this, and thoughtful electors expressed to me their dissatisfaction with the ineffectiveness of their personal votes.

As usual, the election demonstrated the value to women of multi-member constituencies — 27 were elected out of the 150 members of the lower house, that is 18%, between five and six times the British level.

The sensation of the election was the leap forward of the Liberal WD. lt had been gaining pretty consistently over many elections but in this one suddenly increased its vote by nearly half a million in spite of the lower turnout and shot up from 26 seats to 36.

1981---------------------------------------1982 | votes, % | seats | % | votes, % | seats | %  
---|---|---|---|---|---|---  
Christ. Dem. | 30.8 | 48 | 32.0 | 29.3 | 45 | 30.0  
Labour | 28.3 | 44 | 29.3 | 30.4 | 47 | 31.3  
Liberal | 17.3 | 26 | 17.3 | 23.1 | 36 | 24.0  
D66 | 11.1 | 17 | 11.3 | 4.3 | 6 | 4.0  
Pacifist Soc. | 2.1 | 3 | 2.0 | 2.3 | 3 | 2.0  
Communist | 2.1 | 3 | 2.0 | 1.8 | 3 | 2.0  
State Reform | 2.0 | 3 | 2.0 | 1.9 | 3 | 2.0  
Radical | 2.0 | 3 | 2.0 | 1.6 | 2 | 1.3  
Reformist | 1.3 | 2 | 1.3 | 1.5 | 2 | 1.3  
Reformed Polit. | 0.8 | 1 | 0.3 | 0.8 | 1 | 0.7  
Centre | 0.1 | \-- | \-- | 0.8 | 1 | 0.7  
Evangelical | 0.5 | \-- | \-- | 0.7 | 1 | 0.7

At the time of writing, a coalition government of Christian Democrats and Liberals is in the process of formation.

* * *

### FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

The German general election of October 1976 confirmed what we have previously said about their mixed system of election. (248 members are elected in the same way as British MPs, and the elector casts a second vote for a party list; another 248 members are added so as to make each party's total seats proportional to its list votes.)

The overall result of the 1976 election was:-

| % 1st   
votes | constituency  
seats | % 2nd   
votes | list   
seats | total   
seats  
---|---|---|---|---|---  
SPD | 42.9 | 113 | 42.6 | 100 | 213  
CDU/CSU | 48.8 | 135 | 48.6 | 109 | 244  
FDP | 6.5 | 0 | 7.0 | 39 | 39  
others | 1.8 | 0 | 1.8 | 0 | 0

Compared with the 1972 election (see Representation, January 1973) the result in the single-member constituencies is less distorted. There is also a less sharp division between the predominantly SPD cities and the predominantly CDU country districts, but this improvement is due largely to CSU gains in Munich and these supply an example of how, under a majority system, a relatively small change in the votes can bring about a sweeping change in representation.

#### Munich 1972 and 1976.

Munich | 1972 |  | 1976 |   
---|---|---|---|---  
| votes, % | seats | votes, % | seats  
SPD | 51.0 | 5 | 42.3 | 1  
CSU | 41.0 | 0 | 47.4 | 4  
FDP | 6.6 | 0 | 8.9 | 0  
others | 1.4 | 0 | 1.4 | 0

lndividual Lander also show great distortions in their first-vote results. Two small ones (Hamburg and Bremen) have only SPD members; in Hesse, where the two major parties have respectively just over and just under 1,600,000 first votes, the SPD has 17 seats to the CDU's 5, while in Baden-Wurttemberg 2,887,829 first votes gave the CDU 32 seats but 2,060,387 first votes gave the SPD only 4 seats. ln the Saarland the slightly smaller party won three seats to the larger one's two.

The second votes, cast for a party list in each Land, do correct anomalies of this kind, so that the total result is a fair reflection of support for the parties. But it is not a fair reflection of anything else. Inspection of the first votes and comparison of them with the second votes in the same constituencies shows that the single-member constituency half of the election almost entirely fails in its object of introducing a personal element. The German system is indeed slightly more personal than the British, since an elector who admires personally one of the local candidates can show this without necessarily helping that candidate's party, but in practice the number of people who do this is very small — vanishingly small compared with the numbers of lrish voters who demonstrate their support for particular candidates by giving them preference over their party colleagues.   
Moreover, those lrish preferences do secure the election of the admired candidate, while the German first votes seldom, if ever, do. For instance much the largest personal vote was for Lieselotte Funcke in constituency 113 (Hagen), where her first votes were 140.4% of her party's second votes, but since that party, the FDP, was a poor third in the constituency this could not bring her anywhere near being elected. She was elected, but purely by the choice of her party organisation which had placed her second on its list for that Land.

The CDU leader, Helmut Kohl, failed to be elected for his constituency (159, Ludwigshafen), with 101.2% of his party's vote; he was of course placed first on his party's list. The CSU leader, Franz-Joseph Strauss, was elected for his constituency (212, Weilheim) but actually polled slightly fewer votes than his party (99.7%). The SPD leader, Helmut Schmidt, is also a constituency member (18, Bergedorf) with 107.5% of his party's vote. ln the FDP the differences between first and second votes are much greater, and their leader, Hans-Dietrich Genscher (60, Wuppertal I) had 125.2% of his party's vote.

In the case of the FDP, much of the difference between first and second votes must be due to tactical voting: the FDP supporter knows that he can safely cast his second vote for the party, since it will contribute to the total on which seats are awarded, but also knows that his first vote for an FDP candidate will almost certainly be 'wasted' and he may therefore use it to help or hinder a candidate of one of the two largest parties. As in Britain, this effect is most marked in marginal constituencies, and it must be taken into account when assessing the extent to which first votes reflect support for a candidate personally.

There were more women candidates than previously, and of lower average age, and more were elected. The number elected, though small, was greater than in the United Kingdom; 39 (7.9%) against 27 (4.3%). As in the previous election, the figures confirm that it is much easier for a woman to become one of a team of candidates in a multi-member constituency than to secure her party's nomination as its only candidate in a single-member one. Only seven German women were elected from the single-member constituencies, 32 from the Land lists. Few were placed near the top of a list but there were two in first and two in second place, all FDP. (See Representation, July 1975. pp 29-33.)

When the 1969 election led to the present SPD/FDP coalition, we pointed out (Representation, January, April 1970) how uncertain was the evidence of the votes regarding whether the majority of voters favoured that coalition or not. The same still applies. The Christian Democrats, having more votes than any other single party, are seeking to make themselves into a majority by detaching the Liberals from their alliance with the Social Democrats and they have had some success in the two regional parliaments of Lower Saxony and the Saarland.

There are also divisions within both major parties. Up to now, the CDU and CSU have acted as allies, the CSU fighting seats only in Bavaria and the CDU in all other Lander, but soon after the election it was announced that this alliance was to be broken. However, before the new Bundestag met it was announced that this split would not after all take place. On the SPD side a breakaway party has been formed by the right wing, to counteract what it considers to be an unduly left-wing trend within the party.

All these things illustrate the superiority of the single transferable vote to the German system. If the German elections had been by STV there would have been no doubt about the wishes of the people regarding a coalition: those who wanted the SPD/FDP coalition would have been able to promote it by doing as the Irish did, voting 1, 2, 3 for candidates of the one party and then going on to those of the other, and by giving pro-coalition candidates preference over anti-coalition candidates of the same party. Those who thought the SPD too left or the CSU too right would not have needed any separate party to counteract those tendencies: they could have stayed within the party and by their preferences helped to shift its balance in the opposite direction.

With all its deficiencies, the German system does at least give a better reflection of the voters' wishes than the Hansard Society Commission's AMS variant would. Even as regards party representation AMS is worse, for it proposes to fill three quarters of the seats, instead of half as in the Bundestag, by first-past-the-post and the one quarter of additional seats will in many cases be insufficient to correct the anomalies.   
The German's first vote is of little effect but it does at least enable a voter to applaud a certain candidate without any risk of thereby contributing to the election of a candidate he dislikes; an AMS vote, on the contrary, no matter how personal are the grounds on which it is given, automatically contributes to the total votes of that candidate's party and may help to elect, say, an extreme left-winger when the vote was given to a right-winger.   
Also, while the German system gives no certain evidence that the SPD/FDP coalition is the wish of the majority, it does supply some indication of this, since where (as is usually the case) FDP first votes are many fewer than their second votes most of those missing first votes are usually to be found in the SPD total. There is nothing corresponding to this in AMS.

* * *

### FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY — CREDITS AND DEBITS

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

ln the Federal Republic of Germany the general election of October 1980 showed again the strengths and weaknesses of their additional members system; our remarks on the previous election (Representation, No. 66, page 4) still apply.

The three parties whose votes surmounted the 5 per cent threshold of course won their proportional shares of the seats, but this was one of the rare occasions on which the award of half the seats to additional members was insufficient to correct the distortions in the single-member constituencies. ln Schleswig Holstein, the SPD, with 46.7 per cent of the votes, won all the 11 constituency seats, giving it one more than its total entitlement of 10. Under the rules it retained this extra seat (while receiving none from the Land list) making the total for the whole country 497 instead of 496. If this can happen with half the seats filled by additional members, it must be expected to be much commoner with the one third or one quarter usually suggested by advocates of AMS in Britain.

The SPD/FDP coalition gained votes and seats nearly everywhere and FDP voters were able (spontaneously and/or by party direction) to use the two-vote system to show approval of that alliance: they supported their party with their second vote (which alone determines the number of seats won) but, having virtually no hope of any constituency seats, used their first vote for the SPD candidate. SPD supporters, on the contrary, who could win constituency seats, had no means of expressing approval of the FDP link without voting against their party. The FDP was the main gainer, especially in North Rhine Westphalia, where a dismal performance in the Landtag election five months earlier appears to have galvanised it into action.   
Reports suggest that its extra votes were largely an expression of agreement with its appeal for votes to prevent any single party from having sole power. CDU/CSU supporters also appear to have used this 'vote splitting' to express disapproval of the party's unpopular leader, Strauss — but of course that expression is very weak compared with what it would be under STV. lrish voters in that position could throw their leader out of parliament altogether if they so wished.

The election of women which multi-member constituencies facilitates seems to be having the effect of reducing the prejudice against women candidates, at least in the SPD, so there were more women than usual elected in the single-member constituencies — but still there were two and a half times as many elected from the Land lists. It will be interesting to see whether this Bundestag shows any change in the consistent pattern noticed by Gerda Hollunder: there are always more women members at the end of a parliament than at the beginning because a deceased member is replaced by the next on his party's list and the more lowly-placed tend to be women!

Since the election, the SPD has had difficulties due to differences of opinion within its ranks on defence matters. Such differences would be likely to cause less trouble under the flexible STV than under a system that treats each party as a monolith.

* * *

### CANADA BEGINS TO MOVE

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

The first half of October 1979 gave me the opportunity to promote our cause in Canada. First there was the annual congress of the Liberal International, which gave the same kind of openings as in Moscow. Canadian Liberals, in spite of having just 'lost' another election in which they won the most votes, have not yet been converted to the policy of their British counterpart, but one of their large delegation was deeply impressed by what I said and seems to be a reliable ally for the future.

After the congress I stayed on to help in the launching of a Canadian Electoral Reform Society. This we owe to the initiative of Patrick Smith, a lecturer at Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, who visited us in London not long ago. He had published a booklet, The Electoral Reform Question in Canada, consisting mainly of the accounts of Canadian elections (federal and provincial) which have appeared in Representation from 1962 onwards, and arranged for me visits to Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, and Acadia. At each l met many members of faculty, and l addressed altogether eight undergraduate classes and two open meetings. An interview on local television was outstandingly successful. lt was also very pleasant to renew acquaintance with two ERS members, Hilda Buckmaster and Conrad Wright.

Between lectures there was opportunity to study a number of documents not readily available in Britain, especially a Green Paper published by the Quebec government and the three-volume report of a 'task force' (what we should call a working party) set up by the federal government - this covers many constitutional matters besides the electoral system. Both are quite extraordinary documents, which l have felt obliged to criticise in letters to their authors. One would think that a Canadian body set up to consider possible alternatives to that country's present electoral system would as a matter of course consider Canadian experience of other systems, but no; there is not even a passing reference to STV in Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton or the alternative vote in Alberta.

The Quebec report discusses the French second ballot, but does not mentioni that the alternative vote is a much quicker and more effective means of achieving the same object, nor that it was used in Alberta.

Both working parties seem to have been aware that it is desirable to give fair representation to such groups as French— and English-speaking Canadians, Indians, Eskimos, etc., but completely unaware of the single transferable vote as a means of securing this. They have allowed themselves to be attracted by the West German mixed system, without taking account of the fact that it gives proportional representation only to parties. It cannot possibly enable lndians to elect Indian representatives unless they set themselves up as a separate Indian party and that is surely not to be desired.

Thus, Canadian politicians, to say nothing of their electors, are even more badly informed than British ones and a vast amount of education has to be done However, our friends in the Electoral Reform Society have made a good start

* * *

### CANADA'S ERRATIC PENDULUM

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

Canada's seventh minority government in 22 years suffered a vote of no confidence after only seven months in office, leading to another general election in February 1980 (fortunately the winter was not severe by Canadian standards).

The change in support for the parties was substantial considering the short time involved, but — as so often happens under a single-seat system — the change in their representation was out of all proportion. The already dangerous exaggeration of differences between provinces was further increased.

'Others' include Social Credit, which in Quebec fell from 16.0% to 5.8% of the votes and lost all its six seats. It ran only five candidates in Ontario and none elsewhere.

It will be seen that while in the previous election the Liberals, with 40% of the votes, lost to the Conservatives who polled fewer votes, this time, though still backed by only 44% of the voters, they have a clear majority of 12 seats over all others combined. They gained both votes and seats in every province except British Columbia, where the loss of only 0.8% of their votes meant the loss of their onty seat there, leaving them with only two seats in the western provinces.

The Conservatives lost votes everywhere except in Newfoundland, where they gained 5.9% but got no extra seats. The New Democratic Party gained votes nearly everywhere but with very inconsistent effects on its seats: in Nova Scotia a gain of 2% meant the loss of the only NDP seat and identical gains of 0.4% meant in Saskatchewan a rise from 4 to 7 seats but in Ontario a fall from 6 to 5 seats. Ontario is the marginal province on which the whole result hinges, and there a small swing almost exactly reversed the representation of the two largest parties — 38:57 to 52:32. The exaggeration of the difference between Quebec and the rest has been further increased, the Liberals now holding all but one of its 75 seats for two thirds of the votes.

One consequence of the exaggerated difference between east and west is that the incoming prime minister had great difficulty in forming his cabinet. Traditionally, every province should be represented, but only one of the four western provinces, Manitoba, has any Liberal MPs at all, and that only two. As in his previous government, Mr Trudeau has had to fill the gaps with senators.

It would appear to be this difficulty which has directed his attention, and that of the NDP leader, Mr Broadbent, to the need for changing the electoral system. Unfortunately, as recorded in Representation No. 77, the only system at present being considered is an additional members system on the German model. While (if the total number of MPs were increased by about half) this would indeed give fair representation to the parties, it would not enable those now unrepresented to play any part in selecting the person they wished to represent them. lt would not enable Liberal voters to say whether or not they welcomed the return of Mr Trudeau as their leader or Conservative voters to show whether or not they blamed Mr Clark for their party's poor showing in office; whether they share the admiration widely expressed for Flora MacDonald or are content that she has only a precarious hold on her seat. AMS would do nothing to help Indians or any other group who want to be represented by one of themselves, nothing to improve the miserable 4% of women MPs. Those demanding self-government for Quebec would still be unable to show by their votes whether they prefer complete independence or some moderate change. Worst of all, AMS would not touch the adversarial effects of a system that compels the elector to vote as if he thought candidate X was perfect and all others abominable. Canada badly needs the 'healing and unifying' effects of STV.

### QUEBEC

Quebec's provincial election in November 1976 turned a Liberal majority of 102 seats to 8 into a Parti Québecois majority of 69 to 41. The astonished comments on this are odd, for the opinion polls should have led anyone to expect an even greater landslide. Figures for the two largest parties five days before the election showed 30 per cent for the PQ and 16 per cent for the Liberals, with 30 per cent still undecided (these last when they made up their minds narrowed the gap considerably) and anyone familiar with the single-member first-past-the-post system should have known that a PQ landslide was almost certain.

The result was:

| Parti   
Québecois | Liberal | Union  
Nationale | Social   
Credit | others  
---|---|---|---|---|---  
votes, % | 40.5 | 34.4 | 18.3 | 4.6 | 2.2  
seats | 69 | 28 | 11 | 1 | 1

The PQ, grossly under-represented in 1973 with only 6 seats for a third of the votes, increased its poll by only about a quarter but won 11.5 times as many seats; the Liberals lost over a quarter of their votes but three quarters of their seats, including that of their leader.

A Canadian correspondent points out that the distortion is not due to splitting of the vote by the smaller parties. On the contrary, he believes that if the alternative vote had been used most of the UN and SC votes would have transferred to the PQ, thus tending to increase its already exaggerated majority.

We have previously pointed out on several occasions that the unity of Canada is endangered by an electoral system which makes the provinces appear to be much more different in political opinion than they really are. This election will make matters much worse, for it has given a large parliamentary majority to a separatist party which is supported by much less than half the voters.

### 'LANDSLIDE'

Nova Scotia's provincial election of September 1978 is yet another instance of an entirely false impression produced by our electoral system. To all appearance there was a massive defection from the Liberal government, which fell from 31 seats out of 46 to 17 out of 52, to the Conservatives, who rose from 12 seats out of 46 to 31 out of 52. ln fact, relatively few voters changed sides and in neither election was either party supported by as much as half of them. The majority did not want any such drastic change.

| 1974 |  |  | 1978 |  |   
---|---|---|---|---|---|---  
| votes, % | seats | % | votes, % | seats | %  
Liberal | 49 | 31 | 66.5 | 39.5 | 17 | 32.7  
Conservative | 38 | 12 | 26.1 | 45.8 | 31 | 59.6  
NDP | 12 | 3 | 7.4 | 14.2 | 4 | 7.7  
others | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0.5 | 0 | 0  
| 100 | 46 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 52 | 100.0

### IRELAND'S GENERAL ELECTION, 1981

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman (Winter 1981/2)

The Dail election of June 1981 was of special interest for several reasons — including, for ERS members, the pleasure of seeing the Society's president become Taoiseach. Among Fine Gael candidates, it was noticeable that, voters tended to give preference to those of Garret FitzGerald's political complexion.

1981 marked a change in the pattern of Irish politics, a much more vigorous Fine Gael challenging Fianna Fail for the position of largest single party. It did not succeed in achieving this but made a large advance and was called upon to form the government.

1977 | % 1st pref. | % votes   
@ last stage | seats | %  
---|---|---|---|---  
Fianna Fail | 50.3 | 53.8 | 84 | 57.1  
Fine Gail | 30.9 | 31.6 | 43 | 29.3  
Labour | 11.6 | 12.2 | 16* | 10.9  
others | 7.2 | 2.4 | 4 | 2.7  
| 100. | 100.0 | 147* | 100.0

1981 | % 1st pref. | % votes   
@ last stage  | seats | %  
---|---|---|---|---  
Fianna Fail | 45.3 | 49.8 | 78* | 47.3  
Fine Gail | 36.4 | 38.9 | 65 | 39.4  
Labour | 9.9 | 8.9 | 15 | 9.1  
others | 8.4 | 2.4 | 7 | 4.2  
| 100.0 | 100.0 | 165* | 100.0

*plus the Speaker, by law returned unopposed.

It will be seen that the correspondence between votes and seats is closer than in the previous election. This is a consequence of a pledge given by Fianna Fail in 1977, to end the practice of entrusting constituency boundary revision to a minister and transfer it to an impartial boundary commission. (See Representation No.68, p. 23.) This put an end to attempted gerrymandering and reversed the trend to 3-member constituencies. These now number only 13 instead of 26, with 13 fours and 15 fives. The total membership was raised to 166. None of the new boundaries appear at all unnatural, and the opposition spokesman in the debate on the 17 June 1980 said it was 'the first such revision that had not caused political controversy'.

The number of women elected continues to increase and is now 11 (6.6%), compared with the United Kingdom's 3.0%.

Unlike the election of 1973, there was no explicit coalition between Fine Gael and Labour, but voters of both parties continued to support one another by their transfers and the two parties together secured one seat more than Fianna Fail (the outgoing government). However, it was very uncertain whom the other seven Deputies, of varied complexion, would support. Their attitude would depend on the particular question involved.

The position was complicated by the election of two candidates from the H-Block prisoners in Northern Ireland, then on hunger strike. They would not have taken their seats even if free to do so, but one of them died and in his constituency, Cavan-Monaghan, the largest number of votes in the general election went to Fianna Fail. Thus, the pending by-election could put the government in a minority.   
This illustrates the objection to filling a casual vacancy by a new election over the same constituency.

Despite its precarious position, Dr. FitzGera|d's government has pursued its policies with firmness, especially in seeking better relations with Northern lreland.

* * *

### MALTA'S ANOMALY

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

Malta has elected its House of Representatives by STV for sixty years, and the election of December 1981 was the first to give an anomalous result. In a 2-party contest, the party with 49.1% of the first preference votes won 3 seats more than the party with 50.9%.

There could be two explanations for this. First, it might be that many of the votes for the losing party's candidates were personal ones, which transferred not to other candidates of the same party but to those of the other. The truest measure of a party's support is the total of votes its candidates have at the last stage of the count.

That, however, does not apply in Malta; there are very few transfers across the party lines. That leaves us with the second explanation, which is the margin of error inherent in the system. That error is minute compared with that in a single-member system like the British, but large enough to affect the result in a close contest.

Malta has 13 5-member constituencies, which means that five sixths of the voters contribute to the election of a candidate they want. In each constituency there will be a sixth candidate, having up to one sixth of the votes, whose supporters have failed to eiect him. ln previous elections, these ineffective votes have been more or less evenly shared between the parties, but in the 1981 election they happened to be heavily on one side.

con-  
stit. | 1st pref.   
votes |  |  | 6th   
candid. |  | seats |   
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---  
| Nation. | Lab. | Ind | Nation | Lab. | Nat | Lab  
1 | 7,786 | 8,240 | 9 | 2,367 |  | 2 | 3  
2 | 5,207 | 11,871 |  | 2,381 |  | 1 | 4  
3 | 6,375 | 10,355 |  |  | 2,139 | 2 | 3  
4 | 6,846 | 9,972 |  | 2,092 |  | 2 | 3  
5 | 7,569 | 9,949 |  |  | 2,145 | 2 | 3  
6 | 8,333 | 9,316 | 13 | 2,214 |  | 2 | 3  
7 | 8,210 | 9,267 |  | 2,364 |  | 2 | 3  
8 | 10,945 | 6,923 |  | 1,975 |  | 3 | 2  
9 | 10,856 | 6,673 |  | 2,377 |  | 3 | 2  
10 | 10,793 | 6,282 |  | 2,294 |  | 3 | 2  
11 | 10,048 | 7,604 |  |  | 2,185 | 3 | 2  
12 | 10,999 | 6,550 |  | 2,143 |  | 3 | 2  
13 | 10,165 | 6,988 | 7 |  | 2,265 | 3 | 2  
totals: | 114,132 | 109,990 | 29 | 20,207 | 8,734 | 31 | 34

The defeat of the party with just over half the votes has of course drawn protests from that side (derided by a Labour newspaper as 'bad losers') and some possible remedies have been suggested. It seems undesirable to embark on drastic measures to prevent something that has happened only once in sixty years and may not occur again for another sixty, but there is a simple expedient that could be used only if the occasion arises again.   
The anomaly arises from the 'wasted' votes cast for the unelected sixth candidate and could be corrected by utilising those votes. ln the present instance, the Nationalists could be awarded four extra seats, giving them 35 to Labour's 34, those seats going to the 'best losers' among their candidates (ie those in constituencies 2, 9, 1 and 7).

(This is very different from the award of additional seats to best losers under the AMS scheme, for under the British system a loser's votes bear no relation to his personal popularity, while under STV the best loser has been chosen by the voters as the last survivor among several of his party.)

This would involve awarding seats on a party basis, and should therefore be kept to a minimum. There is already in Malta far too much emphasis on Party. There is much bad feeling between the two parties, which is shown by, and aggravated by, the instructions they give their supporters to number all of their party's candidates and then stop.   
The party organisers are convinced that to give later preferences to the other party will some-how help it to win more seats, which is impossible. Such a vote can never go to the second party until the first has no more candidates capable of being elected.   
lt is to be hoped that educational standards in Malta will improve and lead to less blind obedience to the party. This foolish instruction works against one of the great benefits of STV, its invitation to the voter to consider any good points that may exist in the other side.

One symptom of the excessive antagonism between the parties is the readiness of the losers to believe that their defeat was due to deliberate gerrymandering, and that this will be continued so as to keep them out of power indefinitely. This could be true, or not, and it should improve the atmosphere if steps were taken to remove the possibility. From the clause of the constitution laying down the composition of the Electoral Commision, it would appear to be a reasonably impartial body, but there is no machinery, as there is in Britain, for members of the public to challenge its recommendations.

More seriously, boundary revisions are very frequent, virtually before each election, and are directed to making all constituencies equal in electorate. Given that certain streets are known to be strongly Labour or Nationalist, their transfer from one constituency to another is bound to arouse suspicions, whether justified or not. lt might be a good thing for Malta to debate the relative advantages of the present equal but changing constituencies and of unequal but permanent ones. If each constituency is a natural unit (such as the town of Valetta or the islands of Gozo and Comino), and if a change in its electorate is met by giving it one member more or fewer, not by subtracting or adding a portion of territory, there can hardly be any gerrymandering either real or suspected.

### MALTA — CONTINUED

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

The boundary changes which gave rise to the anomalous result of Malta's 1981 election (see our last issue (PP 7-9)) continue to cause trouble and there are signs that the government will concede that something has to be done. The Nationalist party, which lost the election although polling 50.9% of the votes, alleges that the government packed the boundary commission with its own supporters and has sent to the Council of Europe details of the boundary changes alleged to have been made with no other purpose than to favour the government party.

It is certainly true that anyone looking at the map of constituencies must be struck by their extraordinaw shapes, bearing a strong resemblance to Governor Gerry's creation. For instance, the old town of Valetta forms a constituency, not with its own suburb of Floriana, but with an apparently unrelated area to which it is joined only by a mile or so of coast road which bypasses Floriana.

I am sure that Malta's great need is to get away from the perpetual re-drawing of boundaries that is causing so much bad blood and settle for permanent constituencies which everyone will accept as natural communities. They need not all return the same number of members, and although it is of course desirable that the number of electors per member should be nearly equal everywhere, no exaggerated importance should be attached to this. Even very large inequalities (notably in the case of the Australian Senate) do not prevent the representation of parties from being nearly proportional.

The boundary commissioners in Malta did indeed produce constituencies in which the number of voters per member was very nearly equal everywhere. Excluding the two small islands which form division 13, that number varies by only 11%, but the number of Nationalist voters per member elected was 14% greater than for the Labour voters.

While it is certainly desirable that a vote should have the same value whether cast in Valetta or Mdina, it is surely more desirable that it should have the same value whether cast for one party or for another. Although Ireland has 3-, 4-, and 5-member constituencies, mostly defined by existing county boundaries, the number of votes per member elected in the last election differed by only 3.4% for the two major parties.

* * *

### BELIZE

Table of contents

Enid Lakeman

Belize (British Honduras) is on the brink of independence. Four members of its opposition, the United Democratic party, recently visited the Electoral Reform Society in search of advice. Their anxieties extend to matters with which this Society is not directly concerned, but certainly the figures of the last House of Representatives election (November 1979) show that reform of the electoral system is badly needed.

The present system is first-past-the-post in 18 single-member constituencies. In 1979 there were only two substantial parties so no member was elected on a minority vote, but the party representation is grossly distorted.

party | People's   
United | United   
Democrat | Toledo   
Progressive  
---|---|---|---  
candidates | 18 | 18 | 2  
votes polled | 23,309 | 20,245 | 96  
% | 53.4 | 46.4 | 0.2  
seats won | 13 | 5 | 0  
seats-to-votes   
proportion | 10 | 8 | 0

Nor is this by any means the whole story. In most constituencies the majority is small, so a few voters changing sides can produce a disproportionately large change in the numbers of seats won. For instance, in Toledo North the UDP majority was only 56, so if 29 of its voters defected to the PUP that seat would change hands. In the five constituencies now held by the UDP a total of 384 people changing sides (0.9% of all those voting) could wipe out that party's representation. ln case the PUP might think that splendid, it should realise that if the swing were in the opposite direction only 127 voters (0.3% of the total) could give the UDP a majority in the House, and 1,923 voters (4.4%) could give it every seat! Belize has in fact suffered from exaggerated swings between one election and the next.

The case for reform is by no means confined to party representation. Belize has a racially mixed population and, in the interests of peace as well as of justice, it is highly desirable that each race should feel it is getting a fair deal in the matter of representation and undesirable that this should be secured by means of racial parties. There can be no assurance of this with single-member constituencies, but with the single tranferable vote in multi-member constituencies there can be.   
The parties would tend to select a racially mixed team in each constituency so as to widen their appeal; if they did not do so spontaneously the electors could insist on adding candidates of their own race, and the free choice of the voters would decide which were elected. Anyone could give full support to PUP or UDP by voting 1, 2, 3 . . . for all its candidates but at the same time give preference to candidates of his own race.

The same applies to any other group cutting across the party lines. In the 1979 elections there was just one woman among the 38 candidates. She was elected for the PUP in Pickstock. With multi-member constituencies there would probably be more, since a party reluctant to select a woman as its only candidate will much more readily accept her as one of several, and with STV those voters wanting more women to be elected could promote this by use of their preferences.

No question of the Belize voters' capacity to cope with the STV system need arise, since it has been used successfullv for the election of Belize City Council.

* * *

# Reviews

### WOMEN IN THE HOUSE

Elizabeth Vallance. Athlone Press 1979 £9.50

Table of contents

This book has been a pleasure to read. It is a very thorough and objective examination of its subject, in lucid English with a blessed absence of sociologists jargon. The appendices alone will be invaluable to those seeking information not readily available elsewhere (how many women candidates or MPs at any date; how this compares with other countries, etc.) and provide some surprises.

In sixty years, only 109 women have ever sat in the House of Commons and only seven in the Cabinet. And where and when did women first get the vote?   
The Isle of Man in 1881!

Routes to the Commons are considered — through party work, local government, trade union activity — with the different positions of men and women in these respects. What kinds of women succeed in getting elected? An apparent oddity is examined — that the first women elected did not include any of those who had worked most conspicuously for women's suffrage. There is much interesting material on the performance of women MPs, their relations with the men, whether they form a recognisable group, to what extent they tend to deal with 'women's subjects'.

Readers of Representation will be pleased to note repeated references to the electoral system as a major factor in determining whether or not women seeking a parliamentary career are handicapped as compared with men. Almost invariably, an essential step is selection as a candidate by a party organisation (the only Independent woman MP has been Eleanor Rathbone, elected by STV) and although there is little evidence that selection committees deliberately exclude women they do tend to believe that women are less effective in attracting votes or less capable of the hard campaigning work; therefore if they have to select only one candidate they tend to prefer a man. However, when they have to select more than one candidate in a constituency the tendency is to widen the party's appeal by including both men and women; hence, single-member constituencies handicap women, multi-member constituencies give them an equal chance. Because of this countries with proportional systems (which necessarily involve multi-member constituencies) consistently show a higher percentage of women in their parliaments than do those with single-member systems.

To the table in Appendix 7 should be added three of the countries referred to on page 148 as having had women prime ministers but not many women MPs — lndia, Sri Lanka, Israel and now Britain. But Israel, with 7.5 per cent women, is at least much higher in the table than the other three, all with single-member systems.   
One factor in this which is not explicitly mentioned and which had not previously occurred to me either is that PR reduces the difficulty of combining home ties with nursing a constituency, because a would-be MP has no need to seek nomination for a perhaps distant constituency where her party is the largest but can represent a minority in her own home constituency.

There is a postscript bringing the book up to date with the British general election of May 1979 but it was completed too early to cover the lrish local government elections of the following month. This is unfortunate, because those elections are an excellent illustration of how the single transferable vote, much more than party list forms of PR, enables the growing political awareness of women to find expression in their elected bodies. Instead of having to persuade their party organisation not only to include women in its list but also to place them high on it, they can insist on their own nominees and by their own votes promote their election.

No doubt the fortunate students of Queen Mary College will have an interesting time following, with Elizabeth Vallance, future developments in the story of women in the House.

* * *

### POWER AND PARLlAMENT

Timothy Raison. Blackwell 1979 £5.95

Table of contents

Apart from other defects, this book exhibits yet again the deplorably low standard of knowledge and of reasoning so common in discussion of electoral systems. The author attaches great importance to parliament yet barely considers its foundation in the votes of the people, and when he does briefly mention the question of how it should be elected he falls into numerous errors.   
He does indeed say he would have 'welcomed experience of proportional representation through the European Assembly and the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies' but has doubts about Westminster. 'ln its pure single transferable vote form it represents the end of the constituency system as we have known it' ~— but in any form it does, and surely the personal STV is less of a break with our traditions than a party list system would be. To say that 'under STV the election of representatives would tend to be less locally based and controlled more firmly by the central parties' shows that he cannot have understood how STV works. How can any such consequences follow from his being selected as one of several Conservative candidates for Buckinghamshire and his chance of election depending solely on how many people prefer him to other candidates? That STV makes it impossible for any party organisation to impose a candidate on a constituency against the wishes of the voters is one of the main reasons why the 'organisation men' of the parties dislike it.

Mr Raison discusses the representation of particular interests without having realised that STV makes this possible by the natural tendency of voters to give preference to candidates who share their own interests. He looks for a change of attitudes rather than of institutions.  
Agreed, but PR, and especially STV, does change attitudes. To share seats fairly instead of grabbing the whole representation of a constituency from the 'enemy' changes attitudes; so does the change from having to vote as if we thought candidate X was perfect and all the rest no good at all. STV in Northern Ireland is no magic wand, but something has happened to attitudes there when it has become possible for a non-Unionist with a Catholic wife to become a popular Lord Mayor of Belfast.

E.L.

* * *

## Enid Lakeman 1903-95

Table of contents

Being synonymous with the electoral reform cause for over forty years tended to obscure Enid Lakeman's life-long connnitrnent to the Liberal Party. It was that commitrnent that led her to the advocacy of preferential voting, as her one book promoting the Liberal cause — When Labour Fails, published in I946 — makes clear. Those who only knew her in later years were fascinated by the contrast between the apparently frail person and the powerful and fluent writing she consistently produced.

Born on 28 November 1903, near Tonbridge, Kent, Enid was the only child of Horace Bradlaugh Lakeman (I874-1962), an excise oficer, and Evereld Simpson (I867-I950). She had a suifragist and feminist pedigree: her grandmother, Jane Ann Simpson, was a campaigner for votes for women and in I879 was the first 'working woman' candidate for her local School Board in Brixton.

After graduating from the University of London Enid worked first as a research chemist and later as a teacher. Then, after four years' war service as a radar operator in the WAAF she, in her own words, 'forsook a scientific career for politics because of her feeling that more scientific knowledge was needed less than better government to secure its proper use'.

She was planning to stand at the election due in I940 but the war postponed her parliamentary election debut to 1945, when she contested the St Albans constituency, one of only three servicewoman candidates. She later unsuccessfully contested Brixton in 1950 and Aldershot in I955 and 1959. Her only election success was in I962 for a single term on the Tunhridge Wells borough council.

In 1946, after demobilisation, she joined the staff of the Proportional Representation Society (later the Electoral Reform Society), becoming its Director in 1960. The Society then had only a fraction of the income it has today but Enid performed an amazing sleight of hand in giving the public appearance of a significant lobbying organisation whilst fulfilling almost all the different roles single-handedly. She conducted an intensive campaign of letter-writing to any newspaper that showed evidence of the iniquities of the first-past-the-post system. This was accomplished by the employment of a good press cuttings agency combined with an ability rapidly to produce pertinent letters, in the knowledge that editors of newspapers in far-flung corners of the country would be so impressed by a letter from an impressive-sounding London campaign that they would always publish them. Enid was very ascetic and economic, labouring away in the semi-dark and usually unheated library, much to the anguish of her younger but less hardy colleagues.

Whilst at the Electoral Reform Society she produced a number of books and pamphlets, including the standard textbook, How Democracies Vote. The Society, with Enid at the fore-front, played a key role in persuading the Irish Republic to adopt the single transferable vote (STV) and in winning two referendums to retain it, against the wishes of the parties. Her efiorts continued into Northern Ireland; culminating in the reintroduction by William Whitelaw of STV there.

On her retirement in I980 she was made an OBE. She was a humanist, a vegetarian and an internationalist and fine linguist, attending international conferences and study tours well into her eighties. She remained unmarried, and died, on 7 ]anuary I995, at her home in Tunbridge Wells. The library at the Electoral Reform Society oifices is named after her, and annual lectures at her old college and at the Politics Association ensure the memory of this doughty warrior.

Michael Meadowcroft.

* * *

### Explanatory note.

Table of contents

A cause for regret is the lack of personal knowledge of one so knowledgable in Personal Representation. Enid seems to have been as engaging a companion as she was an intellect. Her obituary of Sir Leonard Behrens CBE gives a glimpse:

"He joined the Society many years ago, was elected a vice-president in 1969, and until quite recently was a vigorous and witty correspondent who could be relied upon to seize every opportunity of promoting our cause. His eminence in the life of Manchester gave him many openings for spreading the STV gospel. He was greatly loved, and one of my treasured memories is of a weekend school just after the war, where he was one of the speakers. We all knew Leonard as someone on a platform but had not till then had the opportunity to discover what a delightful person he was to live with."

"STV gospel"?   
You've heard of the incident of the loaves and fishes?

Enid left no family to carry on a tradition of her memory. A rare insight is the lifelong friendship she made, at school with Maria Van Aerschot, from Belgian refugees of the Great War. Many times, over the years, she visited her and her family in Antwerp.

https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/rtwbelgians/2017/07/03/housing-the-refugees-by-anne-logan/

Enid twice won the LeJeune prize, for a historical essay, given by a Belgian senator.

Enid Lakeman B.Sc. A.R.I.C. was author of the standard work, How Democracies Vote (last edition 1974) a classic of electoral research, and essential reading for the serious student. Its classical style lets the facts speak for themselves, tho that may involve considerable investigation as to what the facts are. Its many tabulations of voting statistics resemble early unsigned Representation articles, most or many of which would have been by her.  
Her next most important publication, Power To Elect (1982) is Enid the reformer, a more accessible work meant for the general public but full of interesting, out of the way information. It retains the historical perspective of the former work, which makes its allusions to period politics of enduring interest, rather than "dating" the book.

The booklet, Nine Democracies, is a straight-forward account of the electoral systems of the member countries of the then European Economic Community. It is a later edition, expanded from Six Democracies, when the EEC was only six members. I seem to remember a passing remark that the personal element, in the German Additonal/Mixed Member system, is "illusory" but she said that elsewhere.

The editor is grateful to all of our Lakeman group, former colleagues, for their support in this project of publishing the uncollected writings of Enid Lakeman. This edition is only a small sample but, for many, that may be inspiration enough. All of our group are well into retirement, so we can only hope that a new generation will be prompted to complete the publication of the Lakeman archive.   
It is not enough just to name a lecture, a library or a fellowship after her. No-one did more to challenge the invincible ignorance of voting method in the world. Or, as Lakeman rightly would call it, "the deplorably low standard of knowledge and of reasoning so common in discussion of electoral systems." Her considered letters to the Press alone perhaps numbers thousands.

Altogether, her unpublished writings must run into some few volumes. Humanity owes Enid Lakeman a tremendous debt of gratitude and would do itself a favor by gathering her uncollected writings to make her saving intelligence freely available, as soon as possible.

Especial thanks are owed to Michael Meadowcroft for the posters of Enid Lakeman, as a Liberal candidate, used on the cover of this edition. Michael was a Liberal MP for Leeds, who made good use of his experience, in his book on electoral reform, to show-up the short-comings of the vaunted single-member system: The Politics Of Electoral Reform. There is a pdf version:

http://www.bramley.demon.co.uk/currentaffairs/politics_of_electoral_reform_2015.pdf

And I believe there is also a more recent edition.

As the above account by Michael indicates, Enid Lakeman became identified with Electoral Reform, because she was, for long, the driving force of the Society. Many of the articles may have remained unsigned because she did not want to give the impression of "a one horse town". According to her executor, Eric Syddique, there was also considerable input by Robert Newland (who signed several articles) and Frank Britton (who put his name or initials to few, in the Lakeman era).

The editor has kept to signed articles by Enid, while he was a Society member, receiving copies. The only exception is the anonymous review of Women In The House, as the inference is that the feminist Enid wrote it.   
A catalog of articles, by Enid Lakeman and some by anon. from issues 65 to 95, is given below.   
This does not include several anonymous fillers, in the text of the "Representation" journal. To my mind, these are a further indication of the hands-on approach of Enid Lakeman. They are characteristic of her taking every opportunity to pick-up on some casual news item and convert it into another reason for people to be better informed of electoral method, in particular transferable voting. The fillers are of a piece with her multitude of promotional letters to the Press. These snippets are reminiscent of the passages one finds in anthologies of some authors output, like a lot of little sign-posts to their way of thought.

Fomer colleagues were familiar with the Lakeman style. Future researchers of the anonymous texts may run frequency counts of the words and sentence structures to determine, which are most characteristic of Lakeman, and which may indicate other pens, at least in part. There may also be clues in the content to individual authors. It would be worth knowing for a project of complete works by Lakeman.

Actually, the most important achievement of The Electoral Reform Society, during that period, I have catalogued, is not recorded in the Representation archive. This was the sought advice of the General Medical Council, which was represented solely by white male General Practitioners in First Past The Post elections. Robert Newland and Frank Britton persuaded the GMC to try the Single Transferable Vote. This transformed the situation in 1979 to the proportional representation of women, immigrants and specialists. This was possible in an at-large election of about 22 or 24 members. (I forget the exact number.)

The ERS produced a special pamphlet on the subject, which is why it has slipped off the record. A local Social Democratic Party parliamentary candidate asked me for my copy. In an unacknowledged follow-up e-mail to the Arthur McDougall Trust, I offered to publish the pamphlet, in this book, if they sent me a copy.   
The only public reference, (while it lasts) which I know, is in the Wikipedia article on the Single Transferable Vote. This refers to the 1979 Audit of the ERS, which records the gratitude of the British medical profession for the STV transformation of its GMC (and that was sent by me).

These virtually unknown elections are hugely important proof of why STV is, as Lakeman would say, incomparably superior to party list systems. The latter can only vote for the PR of one characteristic, like party. STV can proportionally represent a diversity of characteristics, because it is, as John Stuart Mill said, Personal Representation. You are proportionally representing your order of individual candidates, more or less sharing a diversity of particular attributes. Not an all or nothing choice for a party clone.

Robert A Newland and Frank S Britton jointly authored "How To Conduct A Election By The Single Transferable Vote", published by the Electoral Reform Society. (I still have an initialed copy from Frank.) Colin Rosenthiel edited later editions, as did Jim Woodward-Nutt, a member of our Lakeman project.

It would have been nice to publish a more complete edition of Lakeman Representation articles, signed by Enid, not to mention some of the more likely anonymous articles. My enquiry, for this purpose, was acknowledged, but four months of silence later, I was obliged to send a reminder. This due diligence received neither let nor hindrance, to the Lakeman project, from the relevant body. While age permits, the door remains open to co-operation in a more substantial release of uncollected writings by Enid Lakeman.

Editor, Richard Lung.

* * *

### Catalog of Representation articles by Enid Lakeman and anon. (issues 65-95).

Table of contents

Number 65. October 1976.

Perverse verdict.

To whom the decision?

66. January 1977.

Federal Republic of Germany. Canada.

67.

Commons and Lords consider reform.

68.

Ireland's general election, 1977. (Unattributed).

69.

Primaries? Not like this, please! (Unattributed).

Family feuds affect the neighbours. (Unattributed).

Israel. (Unattributed).

70. January 1978.

At least there is debate. (Unattributed).

71.

France votes. (Unattributed).

The whole case.

"Affirmative gerrymandering" – an exercise in futility.

Sir Leonard Behrens CBE.

72.

Locals a little more local. (unattrib.)

Those EEC constituencies. (unattrib.)

73.

Westminster MPs elected by STV. (Unattrib.)

74. January 1979.

Ireland's Diamond Jubilee. (Unattributed).

Local misgovernment. (Unattributed).

Which coalition? (Unattributed).

75. (Mainly unattributed.) --

76.

Their masters' voice. (Unattributed).

77.

Canada begins to move.

Nations in conference.

Women in the house by Elizabeth Vallance. (Unattributed review).

78. January 1980.

Realignment?

Power and parliament (book review).

79.

Canada's erratic pendulum.

Plumping.

80. –

81.

Belize.

82. Winter 1980/1. –

83.

Fission and fusion

Federal Republic of Germany – credits and debits.

84 -- ; 85 –.

86. Winter 1981/2.

Ireland's general election, 1981.

87.

Learning by phone-in.

Malta's anomaly.

Dodging the issue.

88.

Distorted districts.

Malta – continued.

89.

Quiet upheaval in the Netherlands.

Power to Elect, by Enid Lakeman. (Book review by B. Keith Lucas).

90. Winter 1982/3.

Summary of the first Lakeman lecture (endowed by the society) delivered by Enid Lakeman (1982).

91.

Those boundaries.

92. –

93.

The tyranny of lists.

94. Winter 1983/84 –

95.

The grass is greener in the STV meadow.

* * *

## Other collected writings, on electoral reform, by the editor.

Table of contents

### Meek method STV code of Dr David Hill.

The main body of this work is a highly specialised text by Dr David Hill with his comments on his coding of Meek method STV, which was used as the basis for the implementation of Meek method computerised STV elections, for Health Boards, as well as some local and regional political elections, in New Zealand.

The book also celebrates the 2019 bicentennial anniversary of his ancestor Thomas Wright Hill, a mathematician and teacher, for inventing, in essentials, the first known published principles of a single transferable vote.  
The pamphlet, on the 200 year-old Birmingham local society elections, is discussed, by Steve Todd, a retired civil servant, who helped facilitate the NZ Meek implementation, and Anthony Tuffin of STV Action, on his web page about anniversaries:

https://stvact.wordpress.com/2017/12/24/anniversaries/

(Anthony and Steve also are both helpers in the Lakeman project. By coincidence with the below edition of Mill, Steve Todd also had published an edition of John Stuart Mill, in time for his centenary.)

* * *

### John Stuart Mill:   
Proportional Representation   
is Personal Representation.

* * *

### The Angels Weep: H G Wells on Electoral Reform.

* * *

### The editor

Table of contents

The editor, Richard Lung has also published on several topics, including a Democracy Science series of e-books on electoral reform:

Peace-making Power-sharing.

Scientific Method of Elections.

Science is Ethics as Electics.

FAB STV: Four Averages Binomial Single Transferable Vote.

(In French) Modele Scientifique du Proces Electoral.

Smashwords profile page:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/democracyscience

