The recent move of a Tory councillor to the Liberal Democrats has resulted in a lot of the usual calls for her to resign her seat and re-stand for her new party in a by-election, or to at least declare herself as an independent instead.
Predictable, and not entirely without merit, but how often does that actually happen? Defections are quite common and very few stand down; so few that I don't think anyone really expects it. This week a couple of Tory Lords defected to t UKIP, which is much more interesting.
Whether you like Councillor Head or not, and regardless of whether you think she should stand down, eventually her term will end and she can stand again, if she chooses, either in her current seat or elsewhere. The electorate will get to have a say even if it is not straight away, but what happens in the Lords?
Even more interesting, what happens if an MEP switches? With MPs and councillors we know that there is an element of personal vote and an element of party vote. The personal vote is nearly always a lot lower than than any elected person would like or would claim – but nobody can ever know what it is. MEPs are voted on entirely party grounds, taken from a party list. If they jump ship is there any justification for them to stay in their job?
Actually I am entirely ignorant on how this is treated under PR, or what happens when an MEP dies in office, maybe somebody can enlighten me. The sensible thing would be for a dead MEP to be replaced by their party from the next person on their list rather than any sort of by-election, but is that what happens?
There was the strange case of Richard Balfe who was kicked out the EPLP when he ran for Quaestor. Later on he joined the Tories. Alas we didn’t get an extra MEP out of it.
With MEPs ceasing to be an MEP – such as the Lib Dems Chris Huhne when he became the MP for Eastleigh at the last General Election – the person with the next highest vote from that party gets elevated.
The one proviso to this is that the Designated Nominating Officer (DNO) from that person’s party has to ok it. In the case of the Lib Dems that is the Party’s Chief Executive (and bye-election agent supremo, Lord Chris Rennard). I’m not sure who the DNOs are for the other parties.
I knew you would know something about it!
Do the same rules apply to all countries in the Euro parliament?
To the best of my knowledge the rules are the same for each country insofar as is practical.
An example of this is the elections for the European Parliament itself. They are held in the same week for all the country’s but are on the days that are normal for that country’s election. In the UK of course that is Thursday and for France Sunday etc. etc.
To prevent the votes in one country influencing the voting in another country results cannot be declared until the last polling station has closed. This prevents the abuse as in the USofA where the results of the voting in the East are hyped by the Republicans/Democrats to influence the West where the polling stations may be open for several hours more. Ok, in this case it’s only a few hours but think what could be achieved in Europe with 4 or 5 days….:-(
Well… put Crawley in charge of counting the votes. Our Thursday poll results wouldn’t be available before the other polls closed on Sunday based on recent experience.