This election is rigged – here’s how to make your vote count

Theresa May, her rich supporters and her mass media cheer leaders would all like you to believe that you will be voting for a Prime Minister on Thursday.  The main reason why they are doing this is to encourage millions of people across Britain to waste their votes.  This is because the more parliamentary constituencies (aka “seats”) they can remove from the election, the more chance they have of securing a majority on a minority share of the votes.

To understand this, you need to understand how Britain’s somewhat antiquated electoral system actually works.  Because Britain is a representative democracy, in theory we do not have a single election where we vote for the governing party – still less the Prime Minister.  The Prime Minister is chosen by the majority of MPs elected to parliament.  While this is almost always the leader of the largest party, there is no constitutional requirement for this.  For example, in 1931 parliament elected Labour’s Ramsey MacDonald as Prime Minister even though the majority of MPs were Conservatives.  Voting for Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn no more guarantees that they will be Prime Minister until 2022 than voting for David Cameron guaranteed that he would be Prime Minister until 2020.

During a general election we participate in what are in effect 649 separate, winner-takes-all  local elections (the Speaker’s seat is usually uncontested) to decide which MPs will represent our respective constituencies.  It is these MPs who decide which party/parties will form a government and who will be Prime Minister.  Normally, this would be the party with the majority of constituencies unless – like in 2010 – there is no winner.

Constituencies contain roughly the same number of voters.  However, the way the boundaries have been set up tends to favour the two largest parties – Labour and the Tories.  If you look at an electoral map of the results in 2015, it appears as if the overwhelming majority of England and Wales is Tory:

However, this is because most of the UK population lives in cities where Labour tends to do well.  The Tories, in contrast tend to fare better in rural seats.  This matters because it results in the overwhelming majority of parliamentary constituencies being “safe” for one or other of the two largest parties (since 2015 a large number of Scottish seats have become safe for the SNP).  The majority of the largest party in each of these seats far exceeds the vote of all the other parties combined.  Votes for losing parties in these seats are simply wasted.

This means that the entire general election can turn on a couple of thousand votes in fewer than 100 of the 650 constituencies.  Encouraging voters to cast their votes for parties or potential Prime Ministers ensures that the number of seats – and the number of voters within those seats – whose votes actually make a difference remains small.  This gives the advantage to the party with the deepest pockets (i.e. the Tories) as they can focus their advertising effort on the relatively small number of voters who will actually make a difference on Thursday.

There is a means by which people could thwart this cynical means of winning elections.  However, it relies on voters doing a bit more homework than we usually do.  It also involves our making hard choices about where to put our votes.

Let’s stop being tribal

Far too many of us treat political allegiance as being hereditary.  That is, we vote the same way as our parents did, just as they voted the same way as our grandparents.  However, what may have been appropriate when our parents or grandparents were raising families, building careers, buying a home, etc. need not be appropriate today.  For example, a lot of today’s older voters supported Margaret Thatcher because she sold off Britain’s social housing stock at a discounted rate at a time where the large baby boomer generation was struggling to find accessible private housing.  For young families today the situation has reversed.  Under Theresa May’s Tory party there is plenty of – often unaffordable – private property, but a serious shortage of affordable social housing; particularly in the areas where people want to work.

Many others among us treat political allegiance in the same way as supporting a football or rugby team.  We assume that we have to stick by our chosen team through thick and thin, no matter how atrociously they perform on the pitch.  There is a psychological reason why we tend to do this.  It is called “the law of previous investment.”  In effect, to change the team we support or the party we vote for can appear to make our previous choices wrong.  But again, the policy position of the parties has changed dramatically over time.  For example, the Tories “support for business” in the 1980s involved considerable support for young entrepreneurs, many of whom went on to create the successful businesses of the 1990s.  Today, that “support for business” amounts to little more than corporate welfare handouts to large multinationals and banks; many of which do not even pay their fair share of tax for the public services and infrastructure they benefit from.

It’s about policies

Tribalism and hereditary voting emerged in the past because of the difficulty in finding out what the various parties stood for.  For most of the twentieth century this resulted in people voting along class lines.  The rich, the middle class and those working people who aspired to join middle class tended to vote Tory, while working people and many among the academic middle class tended to vote Labour.  The decision to vote in this way was a matter of tradition and gut feeling coupled to those elements of the various parties’ manifestos that were presented through the biased lenses of newspapers, radio and television.  Very few people were able to go directly to the parties’ manifestos to see for themselves what was being proposed.  Even as recently as the early 2000s, we often only discovered the unpleasant small print in manifestos after a government had been elected.

However, the development of Internet-based apps provide us today with the means to check our personal policy preferences against the proposals made by the major political parties.  The ISideWith political quiz, for example, provides a pretty comprehensive questionnaire that allows you to give your preferences on a range of policies.  Based on your responses, it will list the parties in order of your preferences.  This information is essential to bringing more constituencies into play in the general election.

Alternative vote (sort of)

The biggest drawback with the British electoral system is that it forces us into a political duopoly in which most of the votes cast are wasted.  (This brief but informative video by CPG Grey explains why this is inevitable in a First Past the Post electoral system).  All too often, voting for the party we would prefer runs the risk that the party we dislike the most will actually win the constituency on a minority of the votes.  There is a similar – but fairer – system to the British one known as the Alternative Vote (AV) system which removes this risk.  Under AV instead of putting a cross next to a single party – as we have to do on Thursday – voters list parties according to their order of preference.  If a candidate wins more than 50% of the first preference votes, they win.  If, however, none of the candidates has a majority the one who came last is eliminated.  Their second preference votes are then added to the remaining parties.  This process is repeated until a candidate has the majority of the votes.

The exciting possibility today is the fact that because the last general election was just two years away, it is possible to calculate a likely Alternative Vote for yourself.  Wikipedia have all of the 2015 results by constituency.  These will provide you with a reasonable guide to how your preferences might work under an AV system.  Let me use the constituency where I live together with one where a Labour-supporting friend lives for an example of how you might do this.

Using my own results from the ISideWith quiz, my preferences would be:

1. Green (70%)
2. Plaid Cymru (68%)
3. Labour (57%)
4. LibDem (40%)

Since I would not vote for UKIP and really do not want the Tories to win, these are the only parties I would want to vote for; and I would ideally vote for them in that order.  If I look at the 2015 election result, I get a good idea of what would happen to my vote if I voted for my first choice – the Green party:

My vote would be wasted, and I risk seeing the Tories win the seat despite having a minority of the votes.  But suppose the green’s 1,254 votes were added to my second preference?  That would give Plaid Cymru a respectable but still worthless 3,555 votes and the result would be the same – the Tories get in with a minority of the vote and my vote is wasted.  But suppose the Green, Plaid Cymru and LibDem votes were transferred to Labour, even though this would not be these voters first choice:

This would give Labour more votes than the Tories, but still not quite enough for a majority.  That would depend on where those 3,953 UKIP voters go.  Nevertheless, anyone who does not want to see another Tory government – particularly one with a big majority – can see that in the seat where I live, voting Labour is the only alternative.

My friend lives in St Ives (Cornwall).  The 2015 election result there was very different.  My friend is also more pro-Labour than I am, dislikes the Greens, and personally loathes the LibDem candidate:

This said, the St Ives constituency is contest between the Tories and the LibDems.  If the Green, Nationalist and Labour votes were transferred to the LibDem candidate, this would give them more votes than the Tories:

Although closer, this doesn’t quite give the LibDems 50% of the vote.  Again, much depends on what happens to the UKIP voters.  Nevertheless, the best hope for avoiding a Tory victory in St Ives is a vote for the LibDem candidate… which is precisely what my friend – while holding his nose – decided to do.

The best of what is least

Okay, not everyone is interested enough to check the results in their constituency before voting.  But if you are unhappy with the way the government has performed over the past seven years and you want to vote for change, you might want to check the Tactical2017 website.  Simply type in your postcode or select your constituency and it will tell you which party is most likely to defeat the government candidate where you live.

In almost all cases in England and Wales, this will be the LibDems or Labour.  In one or two seats it will be the Greens.  There are also a couple of Welsh seats where it is safe to vote Plaid Cymru as an alternative to Labour.  In Scotland, the SNP are likely to be the best opposition party.  I fully understand that this will grate with many people desperate to see their favourite party make a breakthrough.  But against that desire, you really have to ask yourself just how you will feel if you wake up on Friday to discover that Theresa May is back with a large enough majority to do more or less as she pleases.

A tactical vote on Thursday may not give us what we most desire.  For me there will be no Green party breakthrough to raise environmental concerns higher up the political agenda (although I hope Caroline Lucas holds onto her seat).  Nor will Plaid Cymru be doing more than holding onto their three parliamentary seats (even though I would like to see them make a breakthrough in the south Wales valleys).  I wish it were otherwise, but previous results and current polling is clear that outside the Celtic fringe a vote for Plaid Cymru is a wasted vote; and in seats like Newport West, Bridgend and especially Gower, by splitting the anti-Tory vote it could be the difference between a Tory majority and a hung parliament. 

Even Labour voters will not get the majority government that they long for if they vote tactically in seats where the LibDem is best placed to defeat the Tory candidate.  But what tactical voting does give them/us is the best prospect of delivering a coalition for change – not just a change of faces around the cabinet table, but a shift away from the neoliberal ideology that has held us in its grip for the best part of four decades.  If successful, a tactical vote on Thursday will give us all some of the things we need from our government even though none of us will get everything we want.  The (still most likely) outcome, in contrast, is a winner takes all, two fingers up to everyone else, Tory majority that rides roughshod over any group that did not vote for it (and several groups – like pensioners – who did).

The choice is ours.  Let us hope we have wisdom to use our votes intelligently.