ELECTION VOTING (PART 1).

1. The question.

This is all about how to vote at an election in a democracy. Doing this consists of you answering the question: "who do you want to be the government?" where you are given a choice between a few different political parties who each want to be the government. The rest of this report is me trying to work out what kind of things people (including me) should think about (and what they do actually think about) when they try to come up with an answer to this question.

And so to work out what sort of activity voting is. As if I was having to explain it to someone from someplace where democracy was unheard of. To them it will seem rather odd I suppose.

2. Self-interest.

Should you give extra weight to (the party with the) policies that will make you, as an individual voter, better off in particular? Or are you meant to just consider (in a more objective sense) what will be "good for the country" and will make people in general better off? Certainly it's true that, in fact, people do vote for policies that are better for them. But then this means they are voting for an unfair policy. (Which shows the people's usual disapproval of unfairness does not extend to unfairness that benefits them.) Although they might deny it.

(By the way, I'm not entirely sure what "good for the country" means. It's more than just the idea that all members of the society are prosperous. It also has a lot to do with some kind of economic management. A party is good for the country if it ensures stability and doesn't, through mismanagement, have an economy with high inflation and unemployment and that sort of thing.)

For example if there is some policy that will reduce the amount of tax paid by Jack (and people of his income bracket) then Jack will vote for that policy because it is in his self-interest to do so. Afterwards he might deny that this is the reason he voted for the policy but the fact that the proportion of people in his income bracket who voted that way is a lot higher than the proportion of people in general who did would seem to prove him wrong. Jack might respond by saying that yes voting for that policy correlates with being one of the people in the income bracket he is in but that this doesn't mean the latter caused the former. He would say they voted for it for some other reason such as that they genuinely think that them getting a tax cut will benefit everybody in the long run. And that the fact that the tax cut benefits them more than others right now is irrelevant or a coincidence. (If he did give such an explanation then he would sound disingenuous and/or self-deceiving.)

(A very similar example would be a student who votes for free education and says they are doing so because them being educated will benefit everyone. But the proportion of students who vote for free education is greater than the proportion of people in general who do so.)

Or Jack could admit it was about self-interest but defend himself by saying that voting according to your self-interest is just how democracy works. The way it works is that each person votes for whatever is in their interest and then these interests are balanced against each other and the outcome is some sort of compromise solution. This idea would be fine if the system was one where everybody's vote did affect the outcome in some way. But in a system where only the votes of the majority affect the outcome it is very easy for some minority gets exploited. (A "tyranny of the majority".) For example a majority, say 60%, of the population could vote for a policy which says that they don't have to do any work at all. The outcome is the slavery of the other 40%. Maybe this kind of exploitation of minorities is going on right now. But not in such an overt way as outright slavery so we don't notice it. To be on the safe side you should never let self-interest affect who you vote for. (You should vote as if you were a member of a population but you didn't know which one you were. (See John Rawls' idea of the 'Veil of Ignorance'.))

The problem is lack of consistency. Some people will vote (explicitly) in terms of self-interest. And others will vote according to what they think will be the best for everybody. Maybe there's nothing wrong with either. But for the result to mean anything everybody should be using the same criteria.

(Aside: you never get people who say they don't pay enough tax (except Warren Buffett).)

3. Morals and ideology.

Instead of thinking about how much a policy will benefit either you or other people you could think about whether it is right or wrong. This applies to particular issues such as abortion, capital punishment and matters of social freedom such as the legalisation of drugs. But mostly it will be about economic justice. Differences on this last issue are the main part of the ideological differences between left wing and right wing. Economic justice is about the rules by which people relate to each other economically. For example rules about what, if any, minimum wage that an employer must pay to an employee. What the maximum rent is that a landlord can ask from a tenant. Whether or not large scale capital infrastructure (factories, railways etc) may be owned privately. Whether taxation should be progressive. You, as a voter, need to decide which rules are fair. But I don't see how you can do that. How do I decide if something is fair? Big question.

In modern western democracies for as long as anybody can remember left wing and right wing ideology has always been the basic central issue. (So much so that when you encounter a place where that isn't the main issue then it seems odd. (Like in Northern Ireland where the divide is religious sectarian.) I'm surprised that a moral non-self-interest issue has played such a large part in politics. I would have thought that it was more likely for the main conflict issue to be one of group interests. (Or am I just being cynical here?) On the other hand maybe the left wing right wing divide is actually a group interest difference in disguise. People who want equality (disproportionately poorer people) don't want it because they think it's the right and fair thing but because it's in their interest. And, as in the previous section, Jack might have defended his vote by saying that he thinks it's right that he gets a tax cut and that progressive taxation on the whole is morally wrong. But he might only think that because it's in his interest.

The other thing which you would have thought the main conflict issue would be (I mean rather than ideology) is between (so to speak) providers. Like a straight competition between product manufacturers. So choosing a party at an election would be like choosing between which company to buy your soap powder from. The policy aims of all parties would be identical. The only issue would be how effective each are at achieving those aims.

4. Effectiveness.

If two parties are both saying they will achieve the same aims. Which is often the case because they all say they will improve the health service, cut crime, reduce unemployment, borrow less money, increase prosperity and that sort of thing. But those parties are proposing different policies for getting to those aims. Then you need to make a judgement about which policies will be more effective. Note that this applies regardless of the content of the policy, ie regardless of whether (as described above) the policy is only in your interest, or in the interest of everybody or even if it's a moral point.

The argument between different parties is then just about "the best way of doing things". More generally it's about which party is better at "management" in a technical sense.

A good example of this is (and I think this was the situation at the General Election in 2010) where two parties are both saying that they will end the recession. One is saying that increasing public spending will achieve this and the other is saying (the opposite!) that cutting public spending is what we need to do. So I have to make a judgement about who is correct. But I don't know enough to have an opinion on this matter! I don't know what will be more effective at ending a recession. Other things I don't know the truth of are: cancelling our membership of the European Union will make the nation more financially prosperous, increasing prison sentences will cause a reduction in crime, having a nuclear deterrent maintains the peace, increasing interest rates causes inflation. Really you need to have a good understanding of the issues, especially ones about economics, before you can express an opinion on a party's policies. But this level of understanding is one which hardly anybody has.

Sometimes I think that maybe we got mass democracy at the point (mid to late 19th century) at which things in general became too complicated for the mass of ordinary people to have a proper opinion about them.

But maybe you are wrong to think that you need to make a decision yourself about the effectiveness of individual policies. Maybe all you need to do is to make a judgement about which party is talented enough to produce effective policies rather than to make a judgement about the effectiveness of each of the policies that they produce. In the same way that you decide which doctor to go to based on how good they are at producing effective remedies. You don't make a decision yourself on each of the remedies they propose. You have delegated to the doctor the responsibility for those decisions.

A judgement about the talents of a party is a matter of trust judgement. Or of brand loyalty. You make a judgement about a party's abilities based on its past record. But it seems like this is a judgement that is insufficiently considered. Your deciding to vote would be as insignificant as your decision to buy the same brand of soap powder you have always bought. It seems like your judgement ought to involve more than just that.

One other thing is that right-wing parties have a reputation for running the economy efficiently. See blog about "left wing and right wing" HERE for more about this. Under section "organisation".

5. Rationality.

You should make an informed decision based on reason and a rigorous examination of the facts and the evidence. But parties often encourage you to make a decision based on a very superficial and partial examination of the facts. For example the UKIP once had campaign posters which said: "75% of our laws are now made in Brussels" and "The UK pays £55 million a day to the EU". On the face of it these seem to be excellent reasons to vote for a policy to leave the EU. But you would be wrong to make a judgement based on just these few facts. For all you know the 75% of laws made in Brussels might be boring (but very good) legislation about the formalities of inter-country trading. And when you decide that it is unacceptable that the UK pays £55 million a day to the EU you need to consider what the UK gets in return for this money.

In fact frequently parties will want you to make a decision based on no reasoning and no examination of the facts at all! They'd like you to decide based on how good looking the members of the party are. Or how honest they sound. Or by how their speeches make you feel. Some politician saying "yes we can!" over and over again will make you feel energised. All this sort of thing is making a decision based on "gut instinct". You might as well make a decision by tossing a coin! Both the above mentioned UKIP posters were accompanied by the slogan (appealing to the emotions) "Take back control of our country". The fact that political parties spend so much money during an election on their publicity demonstrates that a lot of their persuasion is non-rational. If they were just interested in giving facts and arguments in favour of people voting for them they could do that with a website and a few people writing out their policies and the arguments for them and answering questions about them. That would cost hardly anything. It costs a lot more to go round giving big speeches and looking fabulous. I think that at an election the only thing that political party campaigners should be persuading people of is the need to make a sensible and informed decision. They shouldn't be trying to persuade people of the value of any particular policy. If a party is convinced of the value of a policy then they should be perfectly confident that any voter making a sensible and informed decision will arrive at the same conclusion as the one they have arrived at.

I get annoyed at UKIP type people not because I don't like the decision they have made (although it is true that I don't like that either) but because I feel that actually they have just failed to make a decision.

If people consistently fail to make a sensible informed decision then they are failing to say what they really think and what they really want. This means that what they really want will have no effect on what the government does. But that's what a tyranny is. A tyranny is where what people really want does not affect what the government does.

6. Electoral technicalities.

Apart from the issues, in particular the economic ones, as described above, the voter also need an understanding of the technicalities of democratic voting. They need to know the relation between their vote and the outcome of some party getting elected to be the government. And their relation with their elected representative and the government. The following are some issues described in detail that a voter needs to understand.

Note that almost all of the following is specific to the UK. But it can be generalised. You could substitute the general term of 'representative' for the specific term 'MP' (Member of Parliament) and 'electoral district' for 'constituency'.

6.1

What a government is and what kinds of things it does. And which bits of it do what. This is important. For example sometimes at elections for local authorities people will not vote for a particular party because they object to some of that party's policies at the national government level, foreign policy for example. Despite the fact that how the party conducts itself at the local level is unobjectionable. And the fact the local party has no influence on national policy. Conversely people will vote for a national government based on things that are entirely in the control of the local government. For example how nice the parks and libraries are.

6.2

When a voter votes that vote is not voting directly for the government (which is the PM (Prime Minister) and his/her cabinet) or its policies. Rather the voter is voting for an MP (member of parliament) who then votes for the latter. In effect the electorate delegate (surrender) their power to vote for the government to their MP. The MP represents the electorate to the government. But the thing about this is that after being elected an MP has no obligation to do what they told the electorate they would do. Once elected MPs could vote for a different PM or different government as they see fit. They don't have to ask their electorate and/or get re-elected by them. (So in 1976 and 1990 and 2008 we got a new PM without a General Election.)

I guess a more common situation is where the MP sticks with the government when the latter change a policy rather than siding with the electorate who wanted the original policy. So let's say that Mary of Party A gets elected as an MP in some constituency. And Mary and Party A say they will implement policy P. But then once Party A are the government they might say: we are going to implement policy Q instead of policy P. And Mary will vote with the government despite what she said during the election.

So when people complain that politicians say they will do something but then don't. That is a somewhat misguided complaint. Because the politicians are simply exercising freely the power that you freely delegated to them. This might sound like a tyranny but it's not. Because you can decide to delegate to someone else next time. Once elected Mary is not someone who communicates the electorate's opinions about individual policies to the government. Rather she is someone who has got from the electorate (and they have lost it) the power to express opinions to the government. And she will express the opinions that she has regardless of whether or not those opinions are the same as the ones that the electorate have. Although if she wants to get elected again she will try to keep her opinions as close as she can to those of the electorate. She will diverge as much as she thinks she can get away with. (Maybe the relationship is like that between buyer and supplier (seller). You can't complain to anybody that a supplier isn't giving you what they said they would. Instead you just go to a different supplier instead. The fear that you will do that is what motivates your current supplier to do what they say they will do. That's the only motivation they have.)

If MPs didn't have the power delegated to them. But instead had to communicate their electorate's wishes on an ongoing basis. For example each time the government wanted to get some legislation passed. Then you wouldn't need elections.

While I'm on the subject, there is one thing about the function of representatives that I don't understand. After an election the MPs get together to form a parliament. And this parliament votes on behalf of the electorate for a government. (Or rather a majority of the parliament does.) What I don't understand is what the function of this parliament is for the five years after that. It seems to be to approve each policy proposed by the government as and when the latter wants to implement it. But, given that a majority of the MPs have voted for the government that is proposing policies, it will be a foregone conclusion that each policy will be approved won't it? Especially when you take into account the fact that the government is constituted entirely out of MPs from parliament. So does this mean parliament is redundant? Parliament made more sense when the government was not constituted by MPs.

But I suppose that, while it might seem pointless for MPs to vote on each policy, the idea is to keep a check on what the government proposes. Just in case? So, while the electorate have, at the election, delegated their power to the representatives, those representatives, when they vote for a government, do not similarly delegate their power to the government. In this sense the voting democracy within parliament is a direct referendum democracy of the sort that some people would like to exist between the electorate and government.

6.3

How the votes determine the outcome of who gets elected to be the government.

The first basic fact is that a government can get elected without getting 100% of the votes. Because democracies are usually majority systems. So some Party can win an election with only 50% + 1 vote. Which is odd when you think about it. Because this result is treated the same as if the Party got 100%.

But there are two other things going on as well.

First, governments are elected via representatives for districts rather than directly by the electorate, as explained above. The electorate is split up into a number of districts each with the same number of electors. Then a representative gets elected in each district which means that they win the corresponding seat in the representative body, ie parliament or congress or whatever. They become the representative for that district in the representative body. The government is voted for by the representatives. Which means that the electorate vote for the government only indirectly, via a majority of the representatives rather than directly which would be a majority of the electorate.

Second, at the level of the district a representative can get elected via FPTP (first past the post) rather than with an absolute majority. An example of FPTP would be: there are 4 candidates and 3 of them get 20% each and the 4th one gets 40% so the latter wins. Despite not getting more than 50%.

(By the way sometimes the FPTP rule is stated using the phrase "the party who gets the most votes". It would be clearer to state it as "the party who gets more votes than any other party". The phrase "the party who gets the most votes" could be taken to mean the same as "the party who got most of the votes" where this latter means they got more than 50% of the votes. But that's not correct. Also the FPTP system is often called the "simple majority" system. But this is confusing because there is no majority!)

Certain anomalies follow from these things. And it all gets a bit complicated but here's how I think it works out.

The first thing comes from the fact that you do voting in districts. So then what happens is that the outcome is affected by the distribution of the votes, rather than just by how many votes there are. Here's an example. Suppose there's an electorate with 1,100 people in 11 districts of 100 people per district. And for a party to win a particular district they have to get a simple majority (ie more than 50%). And then government is elected by the 11 representatives. So the government will be whichever party wins six seats. Suppose there are just two parties and Party A get 660 votes (60%) altogether and Party B get 440 (40%) votes. These figures are what is called the Popular Vote. If the distribution is that each district has the same result where Party A get 60 and Party B get 40. Then Party A wins all 11 districts. But if the distribution was that in 8 districts Party B get 55 and they don't get any votes at all in the other 3 districts. Then the outcome will be Party A get 3 and Party B get 8. The only difference between these two scenarios is the distribution, the Popular Vote in both cases is the same. As far as I can figure out the lowest proportion of votes that a Party needs to win the majority of the districts is (roundup(n/2))*(0.5p+1). Where p is the number of voters per district and n is the number of districts. The minimum seems to be about 25.3%.

Here's another example which shows that distribution matters. Suppose Party A gets 60 votes in each of districts 1 to 5 and Party B gets 60 votes in districts 6 to 10. But in district 11 Party A gets 51 and Party B gets 49. So the totals are Party A get 551 and Party B get 549. If two Party A supporters in district 11 change their vote this will affect the outcome. But if two Party A voters in any other district changed their vote it wouldn't affect the outcome. If the vote had been done without districts then any two Party A votes anywhere could have affected the outcome regardless of where they were.

So that's the first thing. And then we have the next thing which is the FPTP system. This increases the anomaly of a Party being able to win a majority of seats with a minority of votes. They will be able to do this with even less than the minimum of 25.3% of the Popular Vote as mentioned above.

Just as a matter of fact (well according to this page HERE anyway) in the general election of May 2010 only 34% of MPs had the support of at least 50% of the people who voted. And (see THIS New Statesman article) none of them had the support of the majority of the electorate in their constituency. But that's because of people who didn't vote. It would, of course, be more accurate if the winner had to have more than 50% of the votes. Even better if this was 50% of the electorate. Even better if this was 50% of the voting age population. (This latter would then cover people who haven't registered.)

If you are in a district where your representative is of a party other than the one you voted for the representative will say (disingenuously): "I represent all the electors in my district" but obviously they don't! If you didn't vote for your representative then you have no representation. Which means you are disenfranchised and you could (like the Americans) proclaim "no taxation without representation" and refuse to pay your taxes!

Some system of PR (proportional representation) is presented as the alternative to remedy the anomaly caused by using districts. PR will give a Party a number of seats in the parliament where that number is in proportion to the Popular Vote. One objection to this is how will the seats be allocated to districts. So in the example above where Party A get 60% of the Popular Vote and all 11 seats. In PR they would get only (say) 7 seats. And Party B would get 4 seats. Where would those 4 representatives go? Which district? But this just shows that in a PR system you can't use districts.

7. Freedom and Practicality.

When voting you need to bear in mind that you are not being asked to give your opinion about everything. By which I mean you are not being asked: "which system do you want: capitalism or socialism?". At the most you're being asked about some of the details of that system. It might seem as if you are being given a say on everything. The existence of parties with minority opinions will give you that impression. But actually there is a restriction on the degree of your choice.

You have the freedom to vote for whoever you want. But in practice your freedom is restricted by two things. First, what you have previously decided and, second, what other people want.

The first thing is about the fact that, a lot of the time when you are given the choice of what you want, that isn't a repeatable choice. And most of your choices are like this. If you decide to have children then you can't decide later not to have children. If you decide on a capitalistic system then you can't ask for something else after five years. Because it's not feasible to completely change a country's economic system every five years depending on what people want. The economic system is too gigantic to make changes to it that casually. This restriction is not one that politicians are imposing on the electorate. It's just a fact. If the government builds some railways (despite some people saying that it's not cost effective to do that) then at the next general election no party can offer people the option to not have those railways anymore. Or: if the government privatises large chunks of the economy then no party can sensibly give people the option to reverse that after five years. Even if lots of people wanted to do that.

So really your election vote should only be one for the whole of your life. (The phrase "one person one vote" would then be literally true.) At the age of about 18 you'd vote for a complete system including all the details. And that's what you'd get. It might mean moving country to one that had the system you wanted but you would get exactly as you wanted it. But you couldn't change your mind afterwards. It would be rather like getting married.

In fact it seems odd that there are elections every few years. If you've decided then why are they asking you again? It's like you decide what you want at a restaurant and order it and then they keep asking you again and again what you want and you feel like saying: "look, I've already told you!".

A particular country has whatever system it has. Once that's decided you don't need to keep revisiting that decision. Subsequent decisions can only be about the details.

8. Consensus/compromise.

The second reason for the restriction in choice is because what you vote for will be affected by (what you know about) what the rest of the electorate are expected to vote for. See next post on this subject.

9. Not voting.

Voting is about making a choice. So choosing not to choose is an option. For many people making a decision about who they want to be the government is one of many choices that they need to make and, in the list of priorities, it might not be that high. Other things are more important such as where to live, who to live with, what to eat. So you can just not vote. Like you might not make any considered decision about where to shop but just go to whatever the nearest supermarket is.

[29 April 2015]

[Last substantial revision 15 April 2018]