I guess I’m a little late to the UK election commentary game. Most attention now seems to have turned away from the contest itself and, quite rightly, towards plans for how best to mitigate the disastrous result that nobody wanted (with the exception, perhaps, of a handful of libertarians who probably didn’t like any of the major parties anyway, but were oh so torn between the Tories and the LibDems). It’s over now, the UK’s been ConDem’ed. Smarmy git Cameron is in 10 Downing Street with Judas by his side. Now the question is how we can prevent this from ever happening again.
That is: Electoral Reform. There’s been a lot of talk about how best to go about this. I have mostly stood back from it. I don’t like voting at the best of times; I prefer consensus decision making. However, when one is in the position of selecting one’s new government overlords, there are clearly too many people involved in the decision for consensus to be practicable, so as long as we’re insistent on having a government, I suppose it’s best to try to make it at least as fair as possible.
Thus, having discussed at length the relative merits and pitfalls of the various systems, I have a new proposal of my own: Negative Voting. It goes like this:
- Voters are given a ballot paper with a list of all the candidates/parties they are being asked to choose between (these can be selected by whatever method is normal for the given system). Beside each candidate/party name is a box.
- Voters mark the box beside every candidate they do NOT want to see in office.
- The candidate with the fewest marks across all the ballots is the winner. (In the event of a tie, a runoff election can be held.)
This started off as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more I think would actually seriously support a system like this. Yes, it would probably tend to punish the incumbents. But incumbents are often punished in every electoral system, and usually the only result of that is that whatever next-strongest party gets voted in, even if the voters don’t actually like them very much, just on the grounds of being not-them. Hell, even Nick Clegg’s angelic rise to prominence in this campaign (despite his net loss of seats) seems mostly to have been on the platform of being neither Cameron nor Brown.
On the other hand, it also seems likely to discourage tactical voting. If, in this last election, some hypothetical generally-lefty voter would’ve really liked to vote Green, but didn’t think they’d win, and was trying to decide between voting for Labour or the Lib Dems instead (a question I’m sure many in my constituency wrestled with!) In this system, they could simply blot out everything but the few they would’ve been satisfied with. Of course, this wouldn’t get rid of tactical voting altogether. Supporters of larger parties who might be likelier to win would probably just blot out everyone but their one preferred party, and encourage others to do the same.
It obviously still needs a bit of thinking-through, and I’m still not convinced myself that it would be a preferable system to STV, which similarly discourages tactical voting, but with the added bonus of making well-liked but “unelectable” small parties actually viable. But… but… just imagine a system in which voting for ‘none of the above’ was a legitimate vote.
