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Chapter 6

Counting the Votes: Differing Electoral Systems

In This Chapter

Explaining first past the post

Winning a majority of votes

Looking at proportional representation

Elections are a big deal in the UK (and in all democratic countries around the globe for that matter). From deciding which party is to form the national government to who’s going to be in charge of the local council, elections embody the democratic process in all its Technicolor glory.

Although election campaigns can go on for weeks and even months, the vote itself is squeezed into one day when electors are invited to attend a polling station and cast their votes. Election day is the people’s chance to make a difference by saying who they want to represent them, as well as their opportunity to kick politicians out of office who they feel aren’t doing a good job. For election day, read judgement day.

Get your calculator out now, because in this chapter I peer into the polling booths and explain exactly how people elect their politicians.

Listing the Big UK Elections

When you think about British elections your mind probably turns to a general election, with the high-profile national politicians going head to head and the airwaves crackling with all things political. However, the UK has lots of different elections in which you have a right to vote. Here’s a quick guide to the UK’s election scene:

General elections: These elections are considered the biggies, with seats up for grabs in the UK parliament. Traditionally, these elections have the biggest turnouts and receive the most media coverage. Prime ministers (PMs) used to be able to call elections whenever they wanted, but under a new law introduced in 2010 general elections now occur once every five years, setting in stone five-year fixed-term parliaments.
Devolved elections: The Scottish parliament and the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies are big deals to the millions of people living in these parts of the UK. These bodies have lots of powers and in some ways are more important to people living within their compass than the UK parliament. Elections to these bodies take place once every four years and the system used is partly first past the post and partly proportional representation (check out the later sections ‘Coming Up On the Rails: The First-Past-the-Post System’ and ‘Examining Proportional Representation’, respectively).
Local government elections: From county, parish and community councils to mayors, across the UK almost every year a new set of elections is held. These elections may not have the glamour of a general or devolved election but they’re important, because local government is responsible for many of the nation’s public services, as well as raising council taxes and business rates and approving or turning down planning applications. Chapter 17 has more on the inner workings of local government.
European parliamentary elections: In some ways European elections shouldn’t be last in this list of elections, because many of the laws governing the life of Britons come from the European Union (EU). Turnout tends to be low – usually only between 30 and 40 per cent of people registered to vote bother to do so – and they take place once every five years, under a complex system called the D’Hondt method (see ‘Dividing in the D’Hondt method’, later in this chapter). The last European election was in 2014, and so the next is scheduled for 2019.
In total, 766 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) sit in the parliament building in Strasbourg, France. Of this number, 73 come from the UK, which slightly under-represents the UK’s share of the total population of the EU. The UK has a population of just over 60 million, which works out to roughly one MEP for every 850,000 citizens, whereas Malta, for example, with its total population of just over 320,000, has six MEPs.

UK general elections are pure theatre. The monarch officially dissolves parliament – which makes the king or queen sound like some dastardly Doctor Who villain but in reality just involves signing a piece of paper. When parliament is dissolved all the MPs return to their constituencies to campaign for re-election. This period is called the short election campaign and lasts between three and six weeks. During this campaign, politics receives almost blanket coverage across the media, with politicians being quizzed by journalists and debating policy with each other.

Pick of the bunch: General elections

General elections are the stars of the electoral show. They can be a real watershed for British politics, with genuine policy changes of direction following soon after. The following list highlights some of the big turning-point general elections of relatively recent history:

1945: Goodbye Churchill, hello Attlee. Prime minister Winston Churchill may have been instrumental in the UK winning the Second World War but electors still turfed him out at the 1945 general election. The Labour Party, under leader Clement Atlee, promised new schools and hospitals, as well as the construction of a more generous welfare state. These policies proved hugely popular with Britain’s war-weary voters. Labour duly won and over the next six years the National Health Service (NHS) was set up, key industries nationalised and higher and more wide-ranging welfare benefit payments brought into being. British politics has never been the same since.
1979: The Iron Lady takes residence. In the spring of 1979 Britain was ready for a change. Decades of economic underperformance, union militancy and a breakdown of the post-war consensus between the Conservative and Labour parties (meaning that they followed similar economic and social policies, on the premise that the government should manage the economy) led to the election of the radical reforming Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady, as she was nicknamed, went about reforming the unions, privatising former state industries and cutting taxes. As a result, the country boomed in the late 1980s but relapsed into economic difficulty in the early 1990s.
1997: Labour promises ‘Things can only get better’. After 18 years of Conservative rule, first under Thatcher and then John Major, the country was again ready for a change. The UK was wealthier than in 1979 and Labour said it wanted to use this newly created wealth to improve the lot of society’s less fortunate. Under the leadership of the charismatic Tony Blair, Labour, which had done badly at the previous four general elections, won in a landslide. Blair acknowledged victory at a televised party to the accompaniment of the pop song ‘Things can only get better’.
2010: Love-in at the Rose garden. Unusually, no single party achieved an overall majority in the 2010 general election, and as a result the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government. The two party leaders, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, were interviewed by the world’s media in the Rose garden at number 10 Downing Street (the PM’s residence). The obvious rapport the two leaders felt was dubbed the ‘Love-in at the Rose garden’ and the two leaders worked closely in government together. However, many of the MPs and party activists in the coalition have had a far less loving relationship as the two parties disagreed on policy.

Meanwhile, across the country thousands of party workers go canvassing – trying to drum up support for their party’s candidate by knocking on constituents’ doors, setting up stands in shopping centres, holding public meetings and so on. On election day itself, the polling stations are open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., allowing tens of millions of people to vote. The votes are then counted and usually by the following morning the party winning the largest number of seats is clear and it gets to form the next government.

Coming Up On the Rails: The First-Past-the-Post System

The UK parliament is an ancient institution and its members (MPs) are elected by a system that goes back a long, long way.

This long-used system is commonly known as first past the post, because it has all the characteristics of a race. Here’s how the system works in general elections to the UK parliament and in local councils: voters cast their ballots on election day, putting an X by the name of the candidate they want to elect. All the votes are counted and the individual with the largest number is declared the winner.

The number of votes by which the winning candidate wins is irrelevant – just one suffices (as has happened on the odd occasion). More often than not, though, the winning candidate has a majority (the number of votes more than the next finisher) in the hundreds or thousands.

Table 6-1 shows the City of Chester candidates for its member of parliament and the vote totals from the 2010 general election.

The result is that Stephen Mosley (Conservative) won the seat with a majority of 2,583 votes (18,995 – 16,412).

Crucially, under first past the post, you don’t need a mathematical majority of votes to win the election, just the largest number. For example, in the election for the City of Chester that I outline in Table 6-1, the Conservative candidate won despite getting only around 40 per cent of the vote. Look at that figure from another angle and nearly 60 per cent of voters in Chester voted for a different candidate than the person who won!

The race theme is also applicable to the forming of a government in parliament. If a party acquires more than 50 per cent of the seats in parliament, it holds a majority – which means that if all the party’s MPs vote in the same way it can’t lose the vote – and the monarch then asks it to form the government.

A constituency where the winning candidate enjoys a very large majority – over 10,000 votes – is referred to as a safe seat. On the flipside, a constituency where the winning candidate has a small majority is known as a marginal.

Looking at the advantages

First past the post has been around for a long time, which means that it must offer something that people like. Here’s what’s good – from some people’s perspective – about first past the post:

Strong government: A political party can win a majority of seats in the House of Commons without getting a majority of votes cast. For example, in the 2005 general election Labour enjoyed a 66-seat majority but only gained around 40 per cent of all votes cast. Holding a majority in parliament means that the governing party has a virtual free hand to carry out its legislative programme and often leads to a strong government.
Under other systems, such as proportional representation – which I explain in ‘Perusing Proportional Representation’ later in this chapter – parties often have to work together and form coalitions to get legislation through their parliaments.
Community-centric: Voting for an individual candidate to represent them in parliament allows voters to feel more ownership of their MPs. In fact, although MPs nearly always belong to a political party, they sometimes put the interests of their constituents over that of their party. For example, MPs may vote against their party over plans to close a hospital in the constituency. What’s more, MPs meet regularly to hear constituents’ concerns, regardless of whether the constituents voted for them or not. Under other election methods, such as the candidate list system – see the later section ‘Varying PR: Candidate list system’ – this connection between sitting MPs and their constituents is less strong.

A coalition government consists of more than one political party. Coalitions are rare in the UK because of first past the post, although one did occur in 2010. They’re much more common in countries that employ proportional representation.

Taking in the disadvantages

Every argument has two sides, and that’s certainly true when considering whether first past the post is right for the country. A lot of commentators simply don’t like the system, because it:

Often ignores the majority of voters: MPs are regularly elected with a minority of the votes cast. Therefore, a majority of voters end up with an MP that they’ve voted against. Many suggest that this outcome is undemocratic.
Aids the two major political parties and marginalises minor parties: Apart from the coalition government of 2010 until 2015, and a brief period in 1974 when the Liberals and Labour also formed a short-lived coalition government, for the last 75 years only one of two parties has been in government – Conservative or Labour. The two-party nature of parliamentary election results is no doubt aided by the first-past-the-post system, which makes one party gaining a majority in parliament and thereby forming the government that much easier.

The prominent Labour turned Liberal Democrat politician Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) was a long-standing proponent of reforming the UK electoral system. After a long career in politics, Jenkins was asked by new PM Tony Blair in 1997 to produce a report on reforming parliamentary elections. Unsurprisingly, Jenkins recommended getting rid of first past the post and replacing it with proportional representation. Blair, equally predictably, ignored the recommendations of the report because he owed his majority in parliament to the first-past-the-post system. Even at its most popular, Blair’s Labour Party never polled more than 43 per cent of all the votes cast in a general election.

The majority of votes in a general, local or European election are cast in person at the ballot box in the traditional way. However, in recent years the rules limiting postal voting have been relaxed to the point that anyone who wants to vote by post instead of through the ballot box on the day can do so. As a result, an increasing number of people are choosing to vote by post, which leaves the system open to the risk of fraud (see the nearby sidebar ‘Hanging chads to rotten boroughs: Dubious election results’, which also details other election shenanigans).

Hanging chads to rotten boroughs: Dubious election results

Whatever electoral system is deployed, no process is ever foolproof. Mistakes happen, controversy arises and sometimes even electoral fraud takes place. A quick delve into the electoral chamber of horrors brings the following problems to light:

Rotten boroughs: Going back a couple of hundred years in the UK, lots of what were called rotten boroughs existed. Rotten boroughs were parliamentary constituencies containing very few voters – sometimes as few as a couple of hundred – who were often controlled by a local nobleman or landowner. The said nobleman or landowner could nominate who he wanted as a candidate and be assured that he (it was always a he in those days!) won hands down. Some rich and prominent noblemen and landowners had several of these rotten boroughs in their pockets, which provided – indirectly – quite an influence in parliament. After all, the MP who sits in the rotten borough seat is always going to act on the say-so of his benefactor. This abuse continued for years until the Reform Act of 1832 swept away many of the nation’s rotten boroughs.
Gerrymandering: An American term, gerrymandering involves the drawing of electoral boundaries to favour a particular political party at election time. The drawing of boundaries is often in the hands of the state governor or legislature, and so gerrymandering wasn’t an uncommon practice in the past. In the UK, gerrymandering is a far less frequent occurrence because the boundary commissions are independent bodies. However, the 1960s and 1970s in Northern Ireland saw loud accusations that gerrymandering had taken place with the aim of reducing the impact of the Catholic vote in favour of the Protestant one. These accusations helped fuel Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement and are believed to have inflamed the conflict between the Catholics and Protestants.
Hanging chads: The US presidential election of 2000 was a very close-run race. At first count, the Republican candidate George W Bush had defeated his rival, the Democrat candidate Al Gore. However, in the aftermath of the count, reports of voting irregularities in the state of Florida – whose governor just happened to be Bush’s brother – emerged, with accusations that many votes for the Democrats had been discarded unfairly. So began the hanging chad controversy, so named because up to 70,000 ballot papers were rejected by machine counters because a hanging fragment of paper (or chad) was where a clear punched hole should have been. A hanging chad on a ballot paper meant that it was discarded and the individual’s vote went to waste. Eventually, after lots of legal to-ing and fro-ing and a Supreme Court decision, Al Gore conceded the election and George W Bush was declared the president of the United States.
Postal fraud: The UK doesn’t have hanging chads or counting machines but moves have been made towards more postal voting – allowing people to cast their votes through the post. Some people welcome this development, because it makes voting more convenient and improves turnout, but others point out that more postal voting has led to electoral fraud by some supporters of the candidates standing for election. For example, postal votes have been tampered with and, in some cases, individuals have found that their votes have been stolen – they turn up at a polling station and are informed that they’ve already voted by post. Of course, they haven’t – a fraudster has! In 2005 at an enquiry into voter fraud in Birmingham, Justice Richard Mawrey said that the UK’s voting system was ‘an open invitation to fraud’.

Securing Over 50 Per Cent of the Vote: Majority Electoral Systems

Nineteenth-century US president Abraham Lincoln summed up democracy in his famous 1863 Gettysburg Address by stating that it was ‘Government of the people by the people for the people’. But can any government that attracts less than half the votes cast (which often happens under first past the post, as I describe in the earlier section ‘Coming Up On the Rails: The First-Past-the-Post System’) really live up to Old Abe’s ideal? Many people think not, and therefore some electoral systems are geared towards ensuring that the winning candidate has the support of over half the voters. This section covers three such majority electoral systems.

A big advantage of these majority systems is that the wishes of those voters whose preferred candidate doesn’t win are still taken into account. These voters may not get their preferred candidate but they may be able to avoid getting their least-preferred one.

Laying bare the two-ballot system

Basically, in a two-ballot system, instead of one vote to decide a winner, two votes are cast on separate occasions:

First ballot: Voters cast ballots for their preferred candidates. If one candidate gets over 50 per cent of the votes cast that person wins and no more voting is necessary. But if no candidate gets 50 per cent of the votes, a second round of voting takes place.
Second round: Only the two candidates with the highest number of votes can stand; candidates who finished third, fourth or lower are automatically eliminated.

The idea is that those who voted for the now eliminated candidates vote for one of the remaining two candidates in the second ballot. Even if they choose not to vote, it doesn’t matter; with only two candidates standing in the second ballot, one of them is certain to achieve over 50 per cent of the votes and thereby win. French presidential elections use this system.

Playing the alternative vote system card

Strap yourself in for an explanation of the alternative vote system – it’s a bit complicated! Under this system, voters get to rank all the candidates on the ballot paper from most preferred to least preferred. If a candidate receives more than 50 per cent of first-preference votes, that person wins the election and everyone can go home – job done! However, a candidate getting 50 per cent of first-preference votes is a fairly rare occurrence, which is where the complexity kicks in.

The candidate with the fewest number of first-preference votes is eliminated from the next round of voting. Ballot papers having that candidate marked as first preference are examined and the second-preference selections of those voters are then redistributed to the candidates remaining in the election. If these redistributed votes push one candidate over 50 per cent, that person wins and, again, job done. If still no candidate has over 50 per cent of the votes, again the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and the second preferences of that candidate redistributed.

The dampest of squibs: AV referendum

For David Cameron the price of forming the coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010 and therefore becoming PM was agreeing to a referendum to change the voting system in UK general elections from first past the post to the alternative vote system (AV). As the third largest party in UK politics, the Lib Dems stood to gain from AV because they’d probably get more seats in parliament.

But the referendum campaign was bitter, with those calling for the adoption of AV completely out-argued. The opponents of AV – and therefore those for the retention of first past the post – said that it would be expensive and people would lose their personal link with their MPs. The Lib Dems were unhappy with the tone and style of the no to AV campaign and even less happy with the result: the no campaign won, gathering a majority of votes. So for the foreseeable future the first-past-the-post system remains for UK general elections and AV stays firmly on the drawing board.

This process of elimination and counting second preferences – and, in some variants of the system, the third, fourth and even fifth preferences – goes on and on and, yes, on, until finally one of the candidates breaches the magic 50 per cent of votes cast.

The election for the mayor of London is carried out under the alternative vote system.

Throwing in the supplementary vote system

The supplementary vote system is a pared down version of the alternative vote system in the preceding section. Fortunately, it’s a little less complex. Here goes: voters fill out first and second preferences. The votes are counted and if one of the candidates gets more than 50 per cent of the first-preference votes that candidate’s the winner – time to open the champagne!

If no candidate gets 50 per cent, however, all but the two highest-polling candidates are eliminated. The second-preference votes are added to the first preferences of the two remaining candidates. This process leads to one of the candidates achieving the magic 50 per cent and is a good deal less long-winded than the alternative vote system.

Perusing Proportional Representation

The concept behind proportional representation (PR) is fairly clear-cut – which is a relief after the systems I cover in the earlier ‘Securing Over 50 Per Cent of the Vote: Majority Electoral Systems’ section. Under PR, parties are assigned seats according to the percentage of the votes they gather, as opposed to winning seats through a series of local election races where the candidate with the most votes wins outright.

For example, at the 2005 general election Labour, under first past the post, had a majority of 66 seats and yet only won 40.7 per cent of the votes cast. If the election had been run under the PR system, Labour would still have been the biggest party but wouldn’t have come near to obtaining a majority of seats. As a result, in parliament Labour would have been forced to rely on the support of other political parties to see its bills made into law.

Proportional representation doesn’t always result in a coalition government, but it happens more often than not. In order to have a majority of seats in parliament under the PR system, one party has to poll more than 50 per cent of all the votes cast in the country; looking at the history of UK general elections that’s a very difficult task to achieve.

One of PR’s main drawbacks is that, if adopted for elections to the UK parliament, it would break the bonds between MPs and their electors, because voters vote for the party rather than for individual candidates. Under PR, the politicians elected are drawn from candidate lists drawn up by the political parties. The more votes an individual party gets, the more candidates from its party list get elected.

Some people suggest that coalition governments are a good thing, arguing that they prevent one party from pursuing extremist policies. If no single political party has a majority, it has to rely on the support of another party or two to govern and the other parties in the coalition tend to rein in extreme policies.

Most European countries operate a system of PR and so coalitions are commonplace.

Refining PR: Single transferable vote

Strap yourself in again: this variation on PR is another complex electoral system.

Under the single transferable vote system, the country is divided into voting regions, for example the North West of England. The ballot papers contain the names of all the candidates running for election in that region. The voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. If one of the candidates wins enough first-preference votes to breach a preset quota – for argument’s sake, say 40 per cent – that person’s elected. But when more than one seat has to be filled for the same office – which is common because it’s a whole region and there is a large population that needs to be represented and more than one person is needed to do the job – the second, third, fourth, fifth and so on preferences of those who voted for the highest-polling candidate are now redistributed to the other candidates.

If one of them now breaches the quota level, that candidate is elected. After the second candidate has been elected, that person’s preferences are thrown into the mix, leading to other candidates breaching the quota level and being elected.

A slight variant on this process is that, after the second seat is filled, instead of the other preferences from the voters for that newly elected candidate being counted, the candidate who polled the fewest first preferences is eliminated and lower preferences on the ballots for that eliminated candidate are redistributed to the other candidates, all with the object of pushing another candidate over the quota to be elected.

This process continues until all the seats in the region are filled. This voting system is used in the Republic of Ireland – and it’s clearly the one of choice for mathematicians everywhere!

Varying PR: Candidate list system

In the candidate list system, the country is divided into voting regions containing lots of seats. The political parties submit a list of candidates for election. The votes cast in the region as a whole are counted and seats given out to the parties in proportion to the percentage of votes each party gains.

For example, say ten seats are up for grabs in the whole of East Anglia. Labour and Conservative get 40 per cent of the vote each, while the Lib Dems and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) receive 10 per cent each. So, out of the ten seats Labour and Conservative get four each and Lib Dems and UKIP each get one.

What about those candidate lists? Well, Labour and Conservative see the first four candidates on their lists elected and the Lib Dems and UKIP only the name at the top of their list. Under this system, electors are voting for political parties rather than individuals.

Dividing in the D’Hondt method

Elections to the European parliament in the UK and the Northern Irish assembly are carried out under a variant of the candidate list system of the preceding section, called the D’Hondt method. In this system, the party with the highest number of votes wins one of the seats in the voting region. That party’s number of votes is then halved and a new calculation made, with the party with the highest number of votes winning a seat and then seeing its vote tally halved. This process continues until all the seats are allocated.

Here’s a simple example of a fictional region I call Mercia. Out of 935,000 votes cast, the political parties finish up with the following number of votes:

Labour 400,000
Conservative 300,000
Liberal Democrat 110,000
Green Party 75,000
UKIP 50,000

Under the D’Hondt method, the region’s five seats are distributed as follows:

Seat 1 goes to Labour: It has the highest number of votes and the candidate at the top of its party list is a new MEP. Halving Labour’s total vote tally results in the following numbers:
- Conservative 300,000
- Labour 200,000
- Liberal Democrat 110,000
- Green Party 75,000
- UKIP 50,000
Seat 2 goes to the Conservatives: Its vote tally is halved (again the candidate at the top of its party list is now an MEP), and for seat 3 the votes stand as follows:
- Labour 200,000
- Conservative 150,000
- Liberal Democrat 110,000
- Green Party 75,000
- UKIP 50,000
Seat 3 goes to Labour: The candidate second on Labour’s party list is now an MEP. Its voting tally is halved again:
- Conservative 150,000
- Liberal Democrat 110,000
- Labour 100,000
- Green Party 75,000
- UKIP 50,000
Seat 4 goes to the Conservatives: The second candidate on the party’s list is now an MEP. The Conservative’s tally is again halved:
- Liberal Democrat 110,000
- Labour 100,000
- Green Party 75,000
- Conservative 75,000
- UKIP 50,000
The final seat goes to the Lib Dems.

If more than five seats were up for grabs, the process of distributing seats and filling them with candidates from the party lists goes on and on, with even the Greens and UKIP likely to get an MEP. Contrast this scenario with the first-past-the-post system (see the earlier ‘Coming Up On the Rails: The First-Past-the-Post System’ section) in which neither of these parties would win a seat despite the fact that, between them, they command around 15 per cent of the total votes cast in Mercia.

Looking North and West to the Additional Member System

The additional member system, used for elections to the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly, combines the basic fairness of PR with the representative benefits of first past the post. Voters, as a result, still feel a connection with the person they elect to represent them.

The additional member system works in Scotland as follows. Voters have two votes rather than one – lucky them! The first vote they cast is for an individual candidate to represent them as a constituency Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP). This election is run according to the first-past-the-post system, with the candidate scooping the highest number of votes winning the seat. For the second vote, the voters simply have a choice of parties. The votes for the parties are tallied up across eight different regions of the country and seats distributed accordingly.

So if, for example, the Scottish National Party (SNP) gets 40 per cent of second votes cast across the country, it receives 40 per cent of what are called additional members (additional to the people elected through first past the post as constituency MSPs). As for who gets to sit as these additional members, names are drawn from lists of individual candidates submitted by the political parties.

Of 129 MSPs, 73 are elected via first past the post and 56 through the additional member system.

Those MSPs elected through the additional member system are referred to as List MSPs. If one of these List MSPs resigns the seat or dies, that person is automatically replaced by the next name on the party list. If, however, a constituency MSP resigns the seat or dies, a by-election is held in that constituency, with the new MSP decided by first past the post.

Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish electors not only get to choose who sits in their own national parliaments and assemblies, but they also have an MP who they elect, through first past the post, to the UK parliament in Westminster.

The mix of proportional representation and first past the post in the Scottish parliament and the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies means that coalition governments are more likely to form in these institutions than in the UK parliament, which elects via first past the post. However, this situation was turned on its head a little in 2010 and beyond when a coalition government came to power in Westminster while the SNP managed to form a majority in Scotland.

Expanding or shrinking according to the boundary commissions

Society doesn’t stand still, and population patterns in towns and cities across the UK fluctuate over time. As a result, the parliamentary seat map has to change to reflect population moves. Locations with falling populations lose MPs while those with rising ones gain seats.

This ongoing reallocation of seats isn’t done to suit a particular purpose or on the whim of a politician. Instead, every eight to ten years four boundary commissions – one each for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – carry out a review of parliamentary seats. These commissions are politically independent and staffed by civil servants.

The commissions look at each constituency in turn to see whether its boundaries mean it still meets certain criteria. Voting patterns are never part of the boundary commissions’ deliberations. The boundary commission looks at how many people now live in the constituency and its geographic span and decide whether or not it should remain as it is, be split up into two constituencies or merged with another constituency.

If the population of the constituency has declined since the last boundary commission review, a chance exists that it may be merged with a neighbouring one; if the population has increased, part of the constituency may be hived off to a neighbouring constituency or be split into two and a new seat created. Boundary changes were supposed to happen after the 2010 general election, but the coalition partners in government – the Conservatives and Lib Dems – were unable to agree over the size and scale of the boundary changes proposed by the boundary commission. As a result, no changes were made in constituency boundaries between 2010 and 2015, which means that the current constituency make-up doesn’t reflect the latest distribution of UK population.

Following Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution, the job of the boundary commissions has expanded to include constituencies in the Scottish parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies.

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Table of Contents for Chapter 6: Counting the Votes: Differing Electoral Systems

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