Comparison with STV
The Single Transferable Vote is realistically our best hope in the near future of a fairer and more proportional electoral system, it’s the champion of electoral reform groups and creates more proportional outcomes without using party-lists. Although it shines in comparison to our existing system (as, unfortunately, does picking votes randomly out of a hat) STV is far from perfect. The following is an examination of its weaknesses and how the Delegated Vote compares.
A summary of STV and how it works can be found at the Electoral Reform Society but in essence candidates are ranked in order of preference and then a quota system will reallocate votes to fill the number of seats available. STV’s ranking and redistribution system is simply a method of working out how to fill a number of glasses evenly given a certain amount of voters who have expressed an order of preference of which glass they’d rather be in. This can result in more proportional outcomes because parties stand multiple candidates in each constituency. This proportionality is limited however, given a seven-member constituency (which is too large to be practical in rural areas) it can only deal out proportionality in discreet units of 1/7. Ranking and redistribution smoothes over the edges but STV can only deliver approximations on proportionality. DV on the other hand can theoretically deliver (and is likely to deliver something close to) a 100% proportional result and use smaller constituencies to achieve it. However in STV’s favour, DV does not allow people to distinguish between different candidates for the same party.
STV suffers from the same problem of most constituency systems in that it rewards concentrations of support. This poses a problem to parties with low levels of support nationally but without significant levels of support in a single constituency: these parties would still be unable to gain seats in an STV system. STV lowers the bar of support and parties require much less of a share of the vote in a constituency than under FPTP but still far about the 1/650 of the popular vote a strict PR system could claim. It can also be said that votes do not matter equally to the outcome as the value of your vote differs between constituencies depending on the number of votes cast in each. Voters remain unequal in different constituencies. Under DV, the vote takes a universal value and small parties are able to gain seats by pooling constituencies together to create regions large enough to gather enough votes, lowering the bar to what a party-based PR system could claim whilst still using constituencies.
Another problem is STV’s lack of transparency. This doesn’t relate to the much mooted ‘complexity’ of a ranking system (It should be seen as demeaning to voters to say they’re incapable of understanding how to rank candidates in order) but to the system of converting votes to seats. Broadly we can say that by placing a candidate higher than another you make the chance of them receiving a seat more likely, but in a minority of cases this isn’t true, it’s possible to hurt a candidate by giving them a higher ranking. This wouldn’t be that concerning (it’s still a quite unlikely event) if it wasn’t for that fact that due to the complex nature of the process it’s almost impossible to work out when it’s happened. STV has a fundamental lack of transparency in regards to working out exactly what your vote meant (The counter-argument to this is it makes it almost invulnerable to manipulation or strategic voting). DV has a simple ‘one tick in one box’ ballot form which transfers your vote to the candidate you selected, creating a completely transparent process.
Given the assumption that all MPs must be given an equal vote, STV is absolutely the best system on offer, creating roughly proportional results using named candidates instead of party lists and so empowering people rather than parties. Once we forget that assumption, better systems become possible.