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The Make My Vote Count group revealed that over 70% of votes were ‘wasted’ in the 2005 election. By wasted, they mean votes that went to losing candidates or were surplus to the needs of the winning candidate.

I thought that I would do the same calculation for the 2010 general election. The result? 71.2% of all votes cast were wasted.

Because those surplus votes for winners don’t move up to a regional count, as they do under Regional Top-Up and other PR systems, they are essentially wasted. Just 28.8% of votes cast actually elected someone.

Key facts:
29,653,638 votes cast in the election
15,683,974 votes for losing candidates (52.9%)
13,969,664 votes for successful candidates.
8,550,440 votes for second place candidates.

21,102,549 total wasted votes (allowing for a 1 vote majority)
8,551,089 votes actually used to elect people

Over 2 million voters completely unrepresented in Westminster.

A study of the General Election results has shown that over 2 million voters have no MPs in Westminster representing them. Parties such as UKIP achieved a significant percentage of the popular vote but failed to have any MPs elected due to the First-Past-The-Post system.

“Not only do we have a situation where the Liberal Democrats have just 57 MPs instead of the 149 MPs that their share of the vote deserved, there are also vast numbers of voters without a single MP representing their views in Parliament.” claimed Anthony Butcher, a campaigner for the Regional Top-Up electoral system.

“2 million people voted for parties that didn’t get any MPs elected. Combined with the massively disproportionate number of MPs that the Conservative and Labour parties both have, it paints a dismal picture of just how unrepresentative our Parliament really is. While many people complain about the lack of female and ethnic minority MPs, the real scandal is the lack of alternative political views in Westminster.

“While the 285,616 Green voters were lucky enough to have a single MP, nearly a million people voted for UKIP but still have no voice in Parliament. It’s time we had a new, fair electoral system that allows everyone’s vote to count. AV just isn’t going to cut it; we need a proper form of PR like Regional Top-Up”.

END

Notes to Editors:
There were 2,075,252 votes for parties (and independents) who had no MPs elected. The major voting groups unrepresented are:

UKIP (917,832 votes)
BNP (563,743 votes)
Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force (102,361 votes)
English Democrats (64,826 votes)
Respect-Unity Coalition (33,251 votes)
Traditional Unionist Voice (26,300 votes)

You can visit the Regional Top-Up website here:

http://www.regionaltopup.co.uk

Aside from the disappointing electoral reforms that our new Liberal Conservative Government has so far promised, I have been impressed with the new partnership. As in 1997, David Cameron has managed to create the positive, refreshing start that Tony Blair conjured. I am just a little bit excited by it all.

We are hopefully witnessing a new age of cooperative, grown-up Government that will replace the head-to-head slanging matches and point-scoring that the public is increasingly turned off by. The people of Britain don’t care about tribal political loyalties any more; they just want the politicians to get on with the job and it looks like Cameron and Clegg have realised this.

But with this new attitude towards politics, isn’t it time the Tories re-evaluated their attitude towards our electoral system too?

It is a given that Conservatives believe in free markets. Start-ups with new ideas are essential for innovation, and in their manifesto the Tories promise to introduce ‘Work for Yourself, a new scheme to help unemployed would-be entrepreneurs start their own business by giving them access to a business mentor and start-up loans.’

But why is this entrepreneurial attitude limited to businesses? Is our political system so much less important? The barriers to success for new parties are considerable. Firstly, just standing in the General and European elections costs a fortune. New parties must expect to lose £500 for every candidate they stand in a General Election and have to pay £5000 for every region in the European elections.

Then there is the issue of publicity. Although every party receives a free leaflet drop for their candidates, they still have to pay for the printing, folding and delivery to the post office. For a single constituency, the cost alone can be in excess of £800 for a basic leaflet. The cost to cover the European regions is huge.

Then there is the biggest barrier of all – our electoral system. Even when parties have survived the challenges and built up a substantial base of support, they still can’t get MPs. Between them, UKIP, the Greens, the English Democrats and the BNP received 1.8 million votes, but just one MP.

If our electoral system was a marketplace, it would be the equivalent of forcing companies to open a shop in every single constituency and only allowing the sale of products in batches of 20,000 or more. The result is that most constituencies actually have a very limited selection of products, only one or two of which can ever be bought in reality… if 20,000 other people also want one.

Yet if we were to view political start-ups in the same way we view business start-ups, there would be a very different set of rules. Firstly, we would do everything we could to encourage new parties to be formed with new ideas and new ways of doing politics. We certainly wouldn’t tax them £500 for every candidate, while the big established parties pay nothing. In fact, we would scrap the ‘deposit’ (AKA The Small Parties Tax) for ten years (or altogether) and perhaps even match their start up funds pound-for-pound up to a limit.

For leaflet drops, wouldn’t it be better to have a single election brochure with a double page spread for every party standing in the constituency? Not only would this massively reduce the burden on the Post Office, it would ensure that all of our parties get an even playing field to start with and the electorate get a much better picture of what is on offer from a single source.

And what about political mentors? Starting up a new party is fraught with unforeseen pitfalls, from accepting illegal donations to creating a robust constitution. A political mentor with experience of party start-ups could answer questions, advise on best practice and provide templates for the party structure and documents.

Once those start-up parties started to show some electoral promise they could be wooed by the bigger parties and deals made – just as big businesses acquire smaller ones. This would allow those political entrepreneurs access to much larger resources and have a chance of implementing their ideas. Political alliances and mergers are too rare in Britain; we need more fluidity.

Finally, we would adopt a free-market-style electoral system that allows voters to support the parties that they want, from any constituency. There are several systems that allow the retention of constituency MPs but also allow for a top-up of MPs, some of whom would be from the smaller parties, including AV+, Additional Member, Total Representation and Regional Top-Up.

So the big question is: do the Conservatives (and the Lib Dems) have the nerve to practice what they preach for businesses in the political world too? Do they have the vision to allow new ideas, new people and new parties to thrive or are they content to continue their three-party cartel in Westminster?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Nearly £1million in lost deposits

The General Election saw nearly £1 million in lost deposits from candidates achieving less than 5% of the vote. The biggest losers were the small parties, with UKIP losing 458 deposits, costing them £229,000.

The Green party was hit by a £164,000 loss, 265 lost deposits cost the BNP £132,500 and the English Democrats were out of pocket by £53,000.

In contrast, the Conservatives lost just two deposits, Labour five and the Liberal Democrats didn’t lose any.

“I think that we really need to examine what the purpose of the deposit is” claimed Anthony Butcher, campaigner for the Regional Top-Up electoral system. “At the moment, it is only acting as a hefty tax on small parties. The big parties with their huge election funds effectively pay nothing, while the smaller parties are forced to spend a large percentage of their income simply to offer the public an alternative. It’s time to reduce the threshold to 1% in the interests of reviving our democracy.

“If the new Conservative and Lib Dem Government is serious about electoral reform, then why not switch to a system like Regional Top-Up that allows the electorate to vote for a party even if there is no local candidate. This will not only reduce the number of low quality paper candidates and allow everyone across the country to vote for their preferred party, but will also reduce the bill for lost deposits.”

ENDS

Notes to Editors:

Regional Top-Up combines First-Past-The-Post with a top-up mechanism to create a proportional, locally based and extremely simple electoral system. It improves upon the Additional Member System used for the London Assembly and Welsh Assembly elections.

Website: http://www.regionaltopup.co.uk

Deposits lost for each party:

UK Independence Party: 458
Green: 328
Independent: 313
British National Party: 265
English Democrats: 106
Christian Party: 71
Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition: 38
Monster Raving Loony Party: 27
Socialist Labour Party: 23
Christian Peoples Alliance: 17
National Front:: 17
Alliance Party : 10
Scottish Socialist Party: 10
Plaid Cymru: 10
Pirate Party UK: 9
Respect-Unity Coalition: 8

Other small parties: 177

Total: 1887 (£943,500)

For more information please contact:

Anthony Butcher
email: ***************
phone: **********

The disappointing news about a referendum on the AV system has been tempered significantly by the announcement that the House of Lords is to become an elected chamber using a PR voting system. Potentially this is very exciting news for supporters of electoral reform.

As always, however, the devil is in the details. Firstly, what they have actually announced is that a committee is to be established to draw up proposals, by December, for the replacement of the House of Lords with a wholly or mainly elected Upper Chamber, on the basis of proportional representation. Committees can very easily become dumping grounds for unwanted projects, and December is a very long time away.

Also concerning is the caveat that existing peers will be allowed to stay on in Parliament, as the new Government plans a “grandfathering system” for current peers under which the new requirement for election will not apply to them.

How that can work in practice remains to be seen – will unelected Lords have as much credibility and authority as elected Lords? It also suggests that it will have to use a party list system and that the Lords will not have any local or regional links.

It may be a very long time before any substantial numbers of Lords are there with an elected mandate.

However, I am cautiously optimistic about this news overall.

All our hopes of proper electoral reform were dashed this evening when the details of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition were released. Rather than holding out for PR, the Lib Dems have sold out for a referendum on the ‘AV’ (Alternative Vote) system.

Firstly, and most importantly, AV is not a form of proportional representation in any way. It is merely a modified method of electing each individual constituency MP.

Not only is AV more complicated than the existing FPTP system, its impact will be minimal, shuffling a few seats between the major parties. It will not add any MPs from any of the smaller parties and will only add confusion to the voting procedure.

Bizarrely, neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems had a commitment to the AV system in their manifestos. So we have now been lumbered with a vote on a system that not a single person who voted for either party actually voted in support of. With all the talk of mandates and listening to the wishes of the public, how on earth do they justify this referendum?

The big question that has struck me though is this: who will campaign for AV in the referendum?

The Conservative party is against electoral reform, and they have stated that they will campaign in favour of FPTP.

Labour cynically added a commitment to a referendum on AV to their manifesto after 13 years of Government to make themselves look like reformers. Let’s not forget that a promise of a referendum on PR was in their 1997 too, yet nothing came of it. The Labour party doesn’t want reform – they gain too much from FPTP.

The Lib Dems support the STV system, not AV. In fact AV will not significantly address the disparity between the Lib Dem vote share and the ridiculously small number of MPs they have in Westminster. Lib Dem support for AV will be lukewarm at best.

So what about all of the activists who have campaigned so fiercely for electoral reform over the past few months and years? Very few of them would even vote for AV, let alone campaign for it.

In the end, this referendum on AV could be a total waste of everyone’s time with no substantial campaign and little enthusiasm for the Yes side.

A referendum result against a switch to AV would be heralded by the defenders of FPTP as a clear indication that the British public are not interested in reform.

This unwanted, mandate-free referendum on a system that no one really wants could severely damage the call for real electoral reform.

One of the most common criticisms levelled at PR systems is that they would create a perpetual Labour-Lib Dem coalition Government. Today’s announcement about a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition clearly demonstrates that politicians from both the right and left can find enough common ground to work together.

This is the type of grown-up, compromise Government that so many of us have been looking forward to. Hopefully the days of British politicians endlessly trying to score points over each other and bickering like children will become a thing of the past. The public have had enough of their politicians behaving badly.

The Sun today published details of a YouGov poll that puts the Liberal Democrats on 33% ahead of both the Tories (32%) and Labour (26%). However, there has never been a better example of why our current First Past The Post system is both broken and inappropriate. If this poll prediction was realised in the General Election, it would still leave the Lib Dems massively behind in terms of the number of MPs in Westminster. According to the Sun:

Astonishingly, because of Britain’s voting system, Mr Brown would still remain in No10 after the election if people vote the same way. Despite lagging six points behind the Tories and seven behind the Lib Dems, Labour would get 243 Commons seats.

That is just one less than the Tories on 244. And Mr Clegg’s party would end up with just 134 seats.

Is this really a sustainable system for our government? FPTP only works properly for a two party system. Britain moved beyond that a long time ago, and support for the big two has been dwindling ever since. This ridiculous system would allow two parties with a combined total of 58% of the vote to gain 75% of the seats and leave the winning party miles behind in third place.

The primary defence of FPTP is that it provides ‘stable’ Governments. However, it is hard to see what would be stable about Labour staying in power having come third in a General Election, with just 26% of the vote and only staying there through a deal with the Lib Dems.

The referendum on an Alternative Vote system has been scrapped as part of the ‘Wash Up’ session at the end of Parliament. With it dies any hope of electoral reform in the near future.

The Tory slogan ‘vote for change’ doesn’t seem to apply to electoral reform though. The Tories, who are likely to form the next Government, are actually opposed to any change largely because they are one of the chief beneficiaries of the existing system.

Let’s hope that there are some senior Conservatives out there who can see beyond their narrow partisan interests and look at the broader health of politics in this country. Fewer people are voting, fewer people trust the main parties and fewer people trust the politicians. It’s time for some real change to shake up the system and restore politics to a calling for people of integrity, passion and belief. Only by giving the people the politicians they actually vote for, and not those just foisted on them by the main parties will we see any real change.

Although it seemed highly unlikely that we would ever see reform of our national electoral system, change is finally afoot. Ignoring the fairly transparent self-preservation motivation behind this Labour initiative, this is still a policy that should be encouraged all the way.

However, it is worth saying that the ‘Alternative Vote’ system is political junk. While in theory it allows us to vote for our favoured candidate, the reality is that the real race simply moves to the second place votes. For example, if I vote ‘Green’ my candidate still has no chance of being elected, so it is my second preference that matters. The two horse race remains.

The dire lack of ambition in this ‘reform’ was amply demonstrated by the rather desperate plug on the BBC trying to link it to the X Factor and other reality TV voting systems.

A radical new voting system proposed by Gordon Brown which would allow the public to rank prospective MPs in order of preference has been compared to that used by TV’s X Factor.

Radical? Pull the other one.

So why should we all support it? For all the criticisms of this proposed new system, once it has been demonstrated that the First Past The Post system isn’t the only solution to national elections, and that the sky isn’t going to fall in if we elect our politicians using a more sophisticated method… then we can look at introducing some proper reform. It is a stepping stone to a better kind of politics.

I just issued the following press release. Hopefully a few people – perhaps some bloggers – may pick up on it! I also sent a note to MPs about the system.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Electoral Reforms Proposed to MPs

A brand new style of electoral system was today issued to MPs for consideration. Combining the benefits of first-past-the-post and proportional representation, the new system, known as ‘Regional Top-Up’, is designed to end the argument over which voting method is best.

“Gordon Brown declared in June that he wanted to take a fresh look at electoral reform for the UK, and Regional Top-Up offers a simple, proportional, locally based solution” claimed the inventor, Anthony Butcher. “The Alternative Vote system that Mr Brown proposed on Tuesday doesn’t address any of the problems, and instead just adds complexity to the voting procedure”.

Under Regional Top-Up, voters still place an ‘X’ next to their favoured candidate or party, and elect a local Constituency MP. The constituencies would be slightly larger, allowing for a number of Regional MPs to then be allocated using a proportional representation system for each region of Britain.

“There’s no change for voters, so there’s no confusion in the voting booths. All people need to know is that every vote counts. If your vote doesn’t elect an MP in your constituency, it will go towards an MP for your region instead” continued Mr Butcher, a former candidate for Libertas, the European reform party.

The Regional Top-Up system also avoids the widely criticised use of party lists by creating lists of the runners-up from each party, with the most popular candidates being elected as Regional MPs.

“Our current voting system is broken. Labour has 55% of all MPs from just 35% of the vote, while the Liberal Democrats with a very respectable 22% had just 62 MPs elected in 2005”

“Smaller parties such as the Greens and UKIP, despite earning enough votes for a number of MPs, are left without any representation. The last European Elections showed that 43% of people might vote for a party other than the big three in a General Election if they thought that their vote would count. It’s time that Parliament properly represented the political views of the British public.”

ENDS

Gordon Brown yesterday announced that the consultation that he has supposedly run on electoral reform has resulted in a call for an ‘Alternative Vote’ system. But who has actually suggested this? Not one of the groups that campaign for reform has supported the announcement.

The ‘Alternative Vote’ system complicates the voting procedure by forcing voters to rank candidates in order of preference, resulting in the least unpopular candidate being elected. It does nothing to address the real problems of a lack of proportional representation in Parliament.

A cynic might suggest that the Alternative Vote system is simply designed to keep Labour in power – it is widely believed that many Lib Dem voters would place Labour as their second choice over Conservative, thus giving Labour enough first and second preference votes to retain many seats that they would otherwise lose under the First Past The Post system.

Let’s hope that Mr Brown seriously reconsiders this move and instead gives the public some real options for electoral reform.

I am launching the site today to ask for feedback, criticism from a few trusted people. I am half expecting someone to point out a major flaw that renders the whole idea broken. I will settle for some typos and rewording though!