Ian Simpson from the Electoral Reform Society talks about proportional voting systems at One Tree Books, Petersfield
Footage filmed by Michelle Monaghan/Tindle
Footage filmed by Michelle Monaghan/Tindle
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00:00We have, however, expanded out into other areas of democratic innovation and other things
00:11that we campaign for and think would be a good thing. So House of Lords reform, obviously
00:17there's a bill going through Parliament at the moment around removing the remaining hereditary
00:22peers. We think that needs to go further and we'll see what happens with that. That's obviously
00:30also can take quite a long time in that the first set of hereditary peers were removed
00:35back in the late 90s and it's taken another 25 or so years until a further reform. We're
00:42in favour of votes at 16. I know that's maybe a sometimes controversial position but it
00:49looks like the government are going to introduce that in there. There's a planned elections
00:53bill that's due to start its way through Parliament in the summer and that was in their
00:58manifesto and it looks like it will be in the bill. Voter ID has been introduced in
01:05recent years. We've always had a system where it was based on trust and you could turn up
01:11at the polling station and have your name crossed off. Often people would show their
01:16polling card but even that wasn't strictly necessary and we think that the introduction
01:22of the ID has been a sledgehammer to crack a nut really. There was very little evidence
01:28of voter fraud at our elections. In Northern Ireland they've had voter ID for a lot longer
01:35and there was actually a case for it there back in the 80s I think it was. There was
01:40evidence of widespread fraud at the ballot box and it was introduced but in Britain as
01:48a whole there's just not that evidence and we have seen a number of people, thousands
01:53of people being turned away at local elections and the general election because they didn't
01:58have the correct form of ID. So it looks like the government will address that to some extent
02:04in the elections bill and they may widen the forms of ID that could be usable but again
02:10we need to see what they propose. In terms of voter registration, that's another area we're
02:15looking at. There's thousands of people missing from the registers, mainly younger people,
02:20often people who move around a lot and in many other European countries they have systems
02:27whereby if people register for the local council tax or have some other interaction with
02:33the authorities then they are automatically registered to vote as well. We'd like to see
02:39greater diversity of representation so I think there are now, I think the proportion of MPs that
02:46are female is up to 40 or 41 percent I think but obviously it's still below half and we also
02:56campaign around to see better laws around campaign funding. Obviously there's been a
03:03lot of discussion at the moment about potential mega donations from the likes of Elon Musk,
03:08foreign donations and we think there's quite a lot of loopholes in that area that could be
03:13and should be tightened so that's a broad overview of what we do. Obviously PR for elections is still
03:19the main focus and our preferred system is the single transferable vote which I'll speak a bit
03:24more about later but moving on to the general election we could see from polling and various
03:33things that it was likely that it was going to be quite a disproportional result given that
03:39Labour looked at the Tory collapse and Labour were quite far ahead so we were getting prepared
03:45thinking this could be a very disproportionate result so we made sure we had the data going back
03:52to compare it to and when we saw I think even we were quite shocked about how disproportionate it
03:57was and we were very quickly able to the next day work out that it had been the most
04:04disproportional general election in British history and this was from the day after the general
04:09election on the BBC website that they picked up our claim that it was the most disproportionate
04:15and they looked into it and just at a glance you can see there that Labour got just around a third
04:24of the vote and two-thirds of the seats. Unusually the Lib Dems nearly matched their
04:35vote share, their seat share nearly matched their vote share which historically they've usually
04:40got nowhere near to that but as you can see you know the big difference between the Labour
04:47vote share and the seat share and this is going back over a hundred years showing the difference
04:53the winning party's difference between their vote share and their seat share and as you can see in
04:572024 it was nearly 30 points much higher than any other election in the last century
05:05and as the BBC said we used some other statistical scoring systems but on all the measures that you
05:12can use this general election came out as the most disproportional so one way of doing it
05:17is something called a DV score or deviation proportionality score and to calculate that you
05:25calculate difference between each party's vote share and seat share add these up divide by two
05:33divide by two and the higher the score the more disproportional result and for the last election
05:38that score was 31 which clearly beats the previous highest of 24 at the 2015 general election 23 at
05:45the 1983 general election so on any measure you wanted to look at this was the most disproportional
05:52result. Just moving on a bit to look what happened a bit more widely inside of Bruloe Wall
06:00this was quite an extraordinary election in many ways really so the Tories were defending 94
06:07seats that they had held for 100 years or more and the way we worked that out was by obviously
06:13constituencies change over time with boundary changes but we worked back through and worked
06:18out the most you know the predecessor seats for the current seats going back over time
06:26and there were 94 seats they held for 100 years or more they only managed to defend 51% of those
06:33so they lost 46 of those seats 25 to Labour 21 to Lib Dems one to the Greens not all of these
06:40were in in southern England but a lot of them a lot of them were.