Second choices need to be counted, not assumed

Tweet

 

Following the result of a by-election in the Vale of Glamorgan last week, some partisan commenters have attempted to make the argument ‘vote Green, get Reform’, or ‘vote Labour, get Reform’. There’s certainly a mathematical basis for such suggestions: added to the vote of the second-placed Plaid candidate, either the votes cast for the Green candidate or those cast for the Labour candidate would have been enough to secure a victory for Plaid had one or other of those parties chosen not to stand. By the same token, however, if the Conservatives had not stood a candidate and all of those votes had gone to Reform Ltd, then Reform Ltd would have won, even if there had only been two candidates in the race. Whataboutery works both ways.

The bigger problem with the argument that voting for one party ‘allows’ another to win is that it makes assumptions about what people’s second choices would have been and about how voters choose a party. In an ideal world, maybe we would all sit down with the detailed manifestos of the various parties and assess which one most closely represents our own views, which comes second and so on, and then assess which of our acceptable choices has the best chance of winning before casting a vote. In the real world, the first doesn’t happen and the second requires a degree of knowledge about what other voters are going to do which owes nothing to science and everything to guesswork and rumour.

Years of direct doorstep experience tells me that, whilst those 85 who voted Green should logically have put Plaid as their second choice (both parties favour Welsh independence, and both have strong environmental credentials, although Plaid is somewhat shaky, to say the least, on energy policy), it is highly unlikely that they would all have done so. Some would have chosen Labour, some the Tories, others would have stayed at home – and I’d be very surprised indeed if at least a couple hadn’t opted for Reform Ltd. Similar considerations apply to those who voted for each of the other parties: the basis on which people choose a party to support is much more complex than an analysis of policy positions.

Back in the days when Plaid would have been seen as a ‘no-hope’ party in places like Barri, I and other candidates (I did once stand in a ward in Barri itself) used to argue that people should vote for the party they most want to see win, rather than against the one that they most want to see lose, whilst those parties seen as having a real chance at winning argued that people should vote for the least distasteful of them rather than ‘wasting’ their vote. Now that Plaid is seriously in contention in such seats, it’s no surprise (even if a little disappointing) to find those positions reversed.

The real lesson of the by-election is that an electoral system based on first-past-the-post where more than two parties are involved can deliver seats to a party which enjoys only minority support – and the more parties in serious contention (there were four in this case), the lower the percentage of the vote needed to win. If we really want to know about people’s second choices, we need to count them. A system of proportional representation wouldn’t necessarily stop the rise of Reform Ltd (I suspect that a number of people in all parties would be unpleasantly surprised to see how many of their supporters would give their second vote to Farage’s lot), but it would be likely to deny absolute power to any party which cannot demonstrate broader support. The question is whether the government in Westminster is able to understand that, and make the change before the next UK-wide parliamentary election. Rueing the day afterwards will be too late.