The Worst Electoral System in the World?
(No, not that one)
Imagine that one May morning you walk down to the polling station.
It’s a big day: you’re going to have the opportunity to vote for not just your Member of Parliament, but your local councillor and your Police and Crime Commissioner as well - three elections on one day. What’s more, thanks to a bloodless coup by Arnold Schwarzenegger1, we now have California-style ballot initiatives on things that really shouldn’t be referendums, so you’ll also have the chance to vote on legalising cannabis, banning mobile phones in schools and whether the Rwanda scheme should proceed.
It’s a big day with a lot of choices. You worry you’re not an expert on all the issues, or everyone standing. But fortunately, when you get your ballot paper, at the very top it presents you with an ‘Easy Vote’ option: tick this box and you’ll automatically vote for the current Government’s recommended candidate for each position being elected, and on each issue. One tick, no hassle, no worry.
No-one’s taking away your choice. You’re completely at liberty to go down the ballot paper and make your own decision in each case. Maybe you want to vote against the Government on every issue. Or maybe in some of the cases you agree with the Government’s recommendation and in some cases you don’t. It’s absolutely up to you. But if it’s all feeling a bit complex, or you’re in a hurry…there’s always the ‘Easy Vote’. After all, they’re the experts, aren’t they?
This sort of system would be utterly outrageous in any political election. It gives the party in power a massive and obvious advantage. If any country claiming to be a democracy ran its elections like this, the UN would be condemning and we’d rightly call them sham elections. It’s a better system than North Korea’s, where 99% of people supposedly vote the party line, but that doesn’t make it good or fair.
A trade union which elected its General Secretary in this way would also be unlikely to retain the confidence of its membership. Though I’m sometimes critical of trade unions, most of those in the UK do appear to have genuinely vibrant and hard-fought elections.
Yet systems very like it are in use in a number of membership organisations in the UK. I have a bank account at Nationwide and every year I get the opportunity to vote in the AGM. There’s choice - but there’s also the option to vote as the current Chairman recommends. You can see how that works out below:
The National Trust does something similar, which has been the subject of some controversy in the last couple of years. Since 2022 they offer a ‘quick vote’ which works in almost exactly the same way as the fictitious ‘easy vote’ I described above. If one selects it - and it is the first option one sees on the ballot paper - then one is considered to have voted for all of the candidates recommended by the executive, as well as for the motions - and only for the motions - recommended by the executive.
Again, we can see what difference this makes. 46% of the 157,000 votes cast in the Council elections and 41% of the 133,000 votes cast for the motions were cast by Quick Vote2.
In a darkly amusing way, a motion to remove the Quick Vote itself was narrowly defeated, by 69,715 to 60,327. Almost 80% of the votes against this were themselves cast via Quick Vote.
As it happens, I disagree with most of the wilder right-wing claims about the National Trust. Their scones are not, as it happens, ‘woke’. They have made the occasional bum decision3 - what big organisation hasn’t? - but overall they remain one of the best organisations in the country, with an astonishing 5.3 million members4.
Every time I’ve been to one of their properties in the last couple of years I’ve enjoyed it greatly5: they continue to display and curate our history with loving attention to detail6. And besides, who do you think is going to look after all this heritage if they don’t - the taxpayer? [Cue sounds of hollow laughter]7. As Evelyn Waugh wrote, “It seemed…that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century.” It is largely the National Trust we have to thank for having avoided this fate.
The only serious argument I’ve heard for this is that it prevents an organisation being taken over by a small group of committed activists. That shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand: in an organisation which most people use as a service (say a local football club), but where there are typically only 25 people at the AGM, you don’t want a random group of people to be able to come and take it over. But once you get to the stage of having more than 100,000 people voting in your election, that falls flat8. At this point you have a mass-scale election, not something which a few mates can take over, and if someone you disagree with is running for election in such a system, you need to be actively making your case to the membership.
But at the same time, if serious candidates such as a former Supreme Court Judge9 want to run for the Council, they deserve to be able to participate in a fair election. Maybe it would have been good to have a bit of a shake-up, with some of the ‘official’ candidates getting in alongside some of the ‘challenger’ candidates. That sort of diversity of thought is often healthy.
More to the point, on an intrinsic level, this sort of voting system isn’t open or fair. It’s not right for Nationwide, it’s not right for the National Trust and it’s not right for any organisation that claims to be run by its members.
Of course, at one level, private organisations can do what they like. Charities and businesses do not have to be democracies - and most aren’t. Nationwide could choose to weight its votes by the amount of money in their accounts. The National Trust could weight votes by the number of visits to a country house you’d chalked up in the last year10. They could choose to something completely wacky, such as only accepting the votes of people with a even number of letters in their name in even-numbered years and the converse in odd-numbered years. There’s no law against it.
But to the extent that organisations claim to be run by their members, and to be running open and fair elections, they shouldn’t do this. Civica, the company that oversees many non-governmental elections, should refuse to certify organisations that want to carry out elections under this process. And they should be rightly called out for it if they claim their elections are fair.
On one level you might think this doesn’t matter much. Both Nationwide nor the National Trust are currently perfectly OK organisations. But what if that changes? What if Nationwide uses its system to push through converting into a bank, or the National Trust to selling off some of its properties, under the ‘quick vote’. The argument ‘no-one is abusing it right now’ is not a great argument.
More broadly, we shouldn’t normalise subvertions of democracy, even in cases where it doesn’t seem to matter. I find it shameful that otherwise upstanding organisations are resorting to this, rather than being confident they can win their case on the merits. If they want to be taken seriously as membership organisations, they should stop this sort of skulduggery and run fair elections in future.
Addendum
I spent most of my spare time last week writing a book review entry for Scott Alexander’s book review contest. I won’t say what it was because the rules aim for anonymity. If I do well enough to make the final, you’ll be able to read it there at some point; if not, I’ll post it here once it’s all over.
Second Addendum
I’m currently looking for players to join an online game of Diplomacy. If you’re interested, I’ve set up a game on PlayDiplomacy.com:
Game ID: 219128
Game Name: World of Edrith
Password: Edrith2024
24 hours a move, so the game should take 1-2 months to complete.
I’m afraid a coup by Gavin Newsom just sounds ridiculous. Arnie is the eternal Governator of California.
'Restore Trust’ was/is a campaign group that fielded a slate of candidates opposed to the current National Trust executive. Unlike the ‘quick vote’, there was no option to click and vote for all of them; they were simply being recommended by an external body.
And in this case reversed it after criticism
This is more than the number of people who voted for the Liberal Democrats and SNP combined in the 2019 General Election.
Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire being a particular recent highlight.
And no, the occasional duff sign somewhere does not disprove this.
In addition to the unlikeliness of the Government stumping up this cash, if we look at what has happened in schools, the public sector and state-funded museums over the last decade, the Government would almost certainly be more ‘woke’ than the National Trust! There is real value in membership organisations which depend on membership and visits to exist, rather than Government largesse; the latter cannot stray too far from the public mood if they want to continue to survive and thrive.
I’m aware this is only a few percent of National Trust members. It’s still an awful lot of people. The number of people who voted in the last National Trust AGM is more than double the number of votes recorded in my local Parliamentary constituency in 2019.
Lord Sumption.
I actually think this would be somewhat justifiable, if a nightmare to administer!
I don't know. Our church does something similar or even more so: there are quarterly members' meetings with votes on things like new staff appointments, major spending on the building (like solar panels), changes to the administrative structure, etc. And it's not even "vote for candidate A, B, or C, and A is the default recommendation"; it's "the proposal is to appoint candidate A; vote yes or no."
The vast majority of these votes are unanimous. I've previously cynically described it as "democracy theatre".
But I think it does have some value, just as a safeguard or a veto power. The default expectation is that the decisions made by the leaders will go ahead, but the congregation has the power to veto them if necessary, which helps prevent abuse of power and bad decisions.
I think it makes sense to compare it not with a true democracy, but with a church where the leaders make those decisions without that safeguard - and to note that that's generally seen as OK.
Similarly, AFAIK there are organisations similar to Nationwide and the National Trust where decisions are made unilaterally from the top and this is seen as OK. So "this is what we plan to do, but you can veto it if you want" seems like a variation on that, and an improvement on it, rather than a variation on actual democracy.