Is my vote wasted? There are a lot of articles in the papers, as there always is right after an election, about whether the result accurately reflects the voters’ intentions. A lot of the arguments revolve around how the outcome of national elections depend on marginal constituencies and only votes there really count. Being in the most marginal constituency I suppose my vote counts a lot now!

The other issue is about how the drawing of boundaries affects the outcome. We know it does here: we were firmly Tory until the boundaries closed in and excluded all the surrounding villages.

As always, the solution of proportional representation is proposed – although there are several varieties of PR. I have an open mind on PR, although the Labour party leadership is against it, as is the Tory leadership. I can see the merits of both sides of the argument.

The benefits of PR are a more representative government, and, um, thats it.

The benefits of first-past-the-post are that you have an MP connected to a constituency, and you are less likely to end up with minority or coalition governments which have a tiny party holding the balance of power. Another benefit is that it allows for regional parties to be represented – how would a system of PR treat Plaid Cymru and the SNP?

Looking at those benefits, I do wonder about the issue of minority government. I automatically assume its a bad thing, as do a lot of people, but is it inherently bad, or just something we have very little experience of therefore less understanding of? Being objective I can see it is not fair that the BNP got 4.5% of the national vote, which would give them 5 seats in parliament, but I am still glad they have no platform like that for their nasty views.

I do also get a bit confused about what happens if an MP elected by PR dies or decides to resign. You couldn’t have a by-election. Maybe their party can nominate a replacement or something? But what about if an MP defected to another party? Under the current system an MP could at least claim to have a personal vote and a slight moral justification to stay in their seat. Under PR it is only parties who are voted for – if someone defected they would have to leave parliament wouldn’t they? These are the sorts of loose ends and anomalies which would have to be sorted out before PR was acceptable.

Using single transferable votes or approval votes in constituencies is supposed to address some of the ‘fairness’ issues, while still keeping the local connection. I guess my biggest reservation about this is how complicated it would be to count. The poor couls at the Crawley count had enough trouble with just sorting and counting piles of polling slips. I don’t know how they would cope with transferrable votes!

Part of me says that the current system is unfair. Another part of me says that at least its unfair in the right direction at the moment.
But, of course, that is only at a national level. If you look at the county elections it is still unfair, but in the other direction. In West Sussex the Tories had 43.3% of the vote but hold 65.7% of the seats. Proportionately this should be a hung council and not an extremely Tory one – it would also have a couple of UKIP councillors.

At the borough level, we would have the Tories as the largest party, but if the Greens and Lib Dems voted with Labour they would control the majority, so it would be up to two parties with a combined vote of about 15% to have the deciding votes.

Naturally, such calculations are rubbish, because you cannot take the results of an election which was held under one system and transpose the results to another system. There are people who vote a particualr way tactically and no way of knowing if they would have voted the same way under a PR system. Maybe the fringe parties would pick up a lot more votes under PR – remember a lot of them only stand in a fraction of the seats available.

When it comes to Parliament, I do have an idea. Maybe a form of national PR would be a good idea, but with a much smaller parliament. The commons only has 645 seats because thats how many constituencies there are. If we had no constituencies we could choose the size of the commons. 100 is a nice round number. We could have 100 MPs – based on the recent election that would be 35 Labour, 32 Tories and 22 Lib Dems, with 11 odd MPs. The government would either be a Labour/Lib Dem coalition or a Tory/Lib Dem coalition (notice the common factor. I wonder why the Lib Dems are so keen on PR?) I wonder how that would go? After a few minority governments maybe we would get tired and vote for the two main parties more, or maybe the Lib Dems would pick up enough votes to become the largest party. I could see problems with this, but I do like the sound of a smaller house of commons!

To keep the link with constituencies we could use first past the post to elect the Lords – which would need a different name. The second house could do a pretty good job of all the scrutiny of government policy, maybe even do a lot of the committee work. It could either be done by having a vote for the local ‘lord’ and then using the popular vote to determine proprtionality in the commons (like the Billy Bragg plan in reverse) or with two separate votes. Maybe we could have two separate polls but in different years? Or elect the Lords in thirds with the commons elected on the fourth year. (Which implies fixed terms. That would be handy.)

All of that would mean totally breaking the link between the monarchy and the government, but that would surely be a good thing. Would a system like that lead to more parties or to a concentration of parties?

On balance, the system we have now works, sort of. The risks of a totally new system being a lot worse might be too great to even think of trying it.