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Political duopoly gets helped by preferential vote system

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CROYDON COMMENTARY: With postal voting forms dropping through letterboxes this week, ANDY BEBINGTON thinks that the preferential voting system being used to elect the borough’s first executive Mayor is flawed

I believe that the electoral method which we have to use for the election of Croydon’s Mayor is flawed. It favours a two-party system and, as such, is perhaps unlikely to be changed any time soon.

For the Croydon Mayor, we all have two votes – a first choice and an alternative choice. When the first choices are counted, unless any one candidate has 50per cent of the vote or more, then the top two go into the second phase.

In that second phase, the alternative votes of the remaining, the rejected, candidates, are then counted if they are for the leading two candidates. Alternative votes which are not for the top two are disregarded.

This is blatantly unfair, as can be seen by an illustrative example. Given six candidates (yes, I know we have more – this illustrative only) who poll first votes at 23per cent, 22per cent, 21per cent and the remaining 34per cent scattered among the “last” three (but with none getting 21per cent or more), the third candidate and the last three are dropped and the alternative votes on “their” papers are counted, but only those for each of the first two.

If all the alternative votes are found to have been cast for the last four only (disgruntled voters effectively saying “a plague on both your houses” to the top two), No1 is declared elected. That could happen despite them getting less than a quarter of the vote (which, given the number of people who don’t bother voting at all in local elections, would probably equate to something like 8per cent of the electorate, tops).

Not much choice: the voting system being used on May 5 favours the political duopoly

Any voter who cast neither of their votes for the “top two” will have been wasting their time: their first vote was for a candidate who didn’t make the cut and their second choice vote is disregarded (as being for a “failed” candidate).

Were the system to be that, if no one secured 50per cent then all alternative votes are counted, it is possible that a third candidate could overtake the “top two”, giving a Mayor who was the least “not-wanted”, who appealed to enough voters as to attract at least their alternative votes.

Were we faced with, say, candidates from the Republican and the Democrat parties, against someone from a minor party and a serious independent candidate, plus two or three no-hopers, it is likely that the current system would lead to a Republican or a Democrat Mayor. A fairer system, as outlined above, might well also lead to one or the other – but could lead to the minor party candidate or the independent leap-frogging them, thus giving us a Mayor with broader support than otherwise.

That, of course, would upset the two-party set-up and that is why the current system isn’t going to change to a more “open” system. Indeed, it’ll be almost the opposite as the government has decided that you and I are confused by the current system – as has been used in London since 2000 for the city’s Mayoral elections – and they seem likely to revert to the old “first past the post” system – which we do understand, and which embeds the two-party system even more into concrete.

Those with long memories may recall the late Bernard Levin commenting that the problem with the two-party system was summarised by an opinion poll some time in the 1970s. One of the results of that poll was that 48% of those responding said they’d vote for the Liberal Party if they thought it had a chance of winning. ‘Nuff said…

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