Is it time we re-examined our voting systems?

“Alex Salmond is a gambler. It is what he enjoys doing. But this is not the time to gamble with the future of the country.” Scotland’s First Minister is scornful of her former mentor’s bid to get back into politics in this election. Aiming a further kick in her predecessor’s direction, Nicola Sturgeon added that he “backs horses on a daily basis.”

Unfortunately for the SNP’s ambition to be the sole judge of Scottish nationalism, she’s wrong, and he’s right on electioneering. Gaming the electoral system to the Holyrood parliament may be bad behaviour. Still, it was the most promising way for Salmond, and his colleagues in his new Alba party, to bid to become Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs).

Since the top-up regional list section discriminates against parties that have done well in the first-past-the-post (FPTP) constituency elections, Salmond calculated that concentrating on regional list seats was Alba’s only chance of joining a “super-majority for independence”. Smaller parties generally start getting members elected at around just 5 per cent of the votes on the list. It looks as though it didn’t work this time though. Alba appears to have fallen short.

There is no perfect form of representative democracy. As Boris Johnson knows well, voting systems matter, having brandished an overall majority of 56 per cent of MPs at Westminster, having won only 43.6 per cent of voters who turned out in December 2019. (The Conservatives got only 36 per cent support from the total electorate of those eligible to vote, but the “didn’t votes”, like the “don’t knows”, don’t count, which was perhaps what they wanted all along.)

For decades FPTP has been under fire as multi-party politics replaced the straight red blue battle of the immediate post Second World War period. Now the tables are turned, and legitimate questions are being asked about the proportional representation systems introduced more than two decades ago for the UK’s new elections beyond Westminster.

It is ten years since the UK’s Alternative Vote (AV) referendum when changing the voting system for general elections was rejected by a stonking 67.9 per cent to 32.1 per cent.

The 2011 AV referendum was a sop by David Cameron to his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. He deftly manipulated circumstances to make defeat inevitable. His success bred the referendum hubris in the Prime Minister, leading to chaos in Scotland in 2014 and his Brexit nemesis in 2016.

The AV referendum quelled grumbles about FPTP at Westminster, at least unless there is a serious attempt to replace the Lords with an elected chamber. The smell lingers though, that there is something a little bit grubby about what Lord Hailsham called “elective dictatorship” by governments which often only command minority backing. Concern increases when, as now in London and Edinburgh, they pursue defiantly non-consensual policies.

Winner takes all FPTP was not deemed appropriate for the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh, London and Northern Irish assemblies. There was much well-intentioned talk of trying to bring communities together. Under the Belfast Agreement, Northern Ireland’s Single Transferable Vote system was explicitly designed to force cross-party power-sharing. In Edinburgh and Cardiff, the Additional Member System (AMS) was intended to stymie the majority government by a single party. It hasn’t worked out that way in Scotland.

To begin with, AMS delivered the intended outcomes. Labour, then the dominant party and the instigator of devolution, gave ground, paving the way to a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats in hung parliaments after the 1999 and 2003 Holyrood elections. In 2007, the SNP narrowly overtook Labour, and Alex Salmond became the first minister with the support of the Greens.

Then in 2011, the SNP broke the mould winning 69 out of the total 129 seats. New Labour had designed the system partly to ensure that “Old Labour” would not get a majority in Scotland to pose a threat. No one had envisaged that the SNP would form a majority government. It wasn’t even a proportional result. The SNP had an overall majority of MPs, although they had polled 46 per cent, less than half the votes.

In May 2016, the SNP fell back a little to 63 MSPs but continued to dominate thanks to support by the pro-independence Greens. The historic breakthrough and controversy came in the battle for second place. The Scottish Tories led by Ruth Davidson overtook Labour by a worthwhile 31 MSPs to 24, even though Labour got more votes in the constituency section and only trailed 19.1 per cent to 22.9 per cent in the list vote. The Conservatives seem set to benefit again from votes lent to them on the list by supporters of the Union who otherwise support other parties.

Nobody expects the balance of power to shift dramatically this year. This weekend, the SNP is teetering on the brink of an overall majority, although they may be denied it, and are any way guaranteed support from the Greens, who seem likely to increase their tally of 6 seats.

The joke could be on Alex Salmond for backing the wrong horse. The Greens, not Alba, may well be the decisive members of the nationalist super majority, which is likely to be bigger measured in share of MSPs compared to a share of the vote. There has been speculation that Sturgeon might offer them ministerial posts whether she needs them or not. It would be a way of refreshing a government that has been in power for fourteen years. It may also be convenient for her that the Green Party is less keen on pressing immediately for Indyref2.

The Additional Member System (AMS) in Scotland and Wales was designed to be more proportional and to maintain the links of members to localities, either a constituency or a larger region. It has failed on the proportional measure because, most egregiously for the Senedd, too few seats are allocated to the proportional list for the maths to work.

If the number of seats on the party list increases at the expense of individual constituency members, then local ties would be loosened. Having two votes for and two types of member in the same devolved parliaments has confused voters and encouraged promiscuity in party preferences. To cast their ballot most effectively, voters are obliged to game the system.

Northern Ireland has a different and more proportional voting system for Stormont. But the current ructions in the DUP have once again brought to the surface the age-old resistance of majoritarian unions to share power with nationalists. Conversely, Unionists have also demonstrated repeatedly how the system rewards splinter groups who form new parties.

The trials and investigations concerning Alex Salmond’s behaviour have amplified the notion that Scotland’s democratic institutions are in urgent need of a spring clean to strengthen the separation of powers between the executive, the parliament, the judiciary and the civil service. Re-examination of the voting system should be a necessary part of this process. But so long as one party can prevail so forcefully, there is little incentive for those in power to change the rules.

Even then, would any changes make the electoral system any fairer or more representative? The Nobel prize winner Kenneth Arrow thought not. Arrow’s theorem states that any voting system must abandon at least one criterion of fairness to be fair. That is where gamblers find their edge.