New figures show that there have been only 57,000 new applications for Voter Authority Certificates (VACs) meaning over a million voters risk not having an accepted form of ID on July 4th.

Voting is a fundamental democratic right and one person being stopped from casting their rightful vote is one too many. 

Government figures from the day after the deadline show that since the election was called there have been just 57,418 applications for VACs, which can be used at polling stations as proof of identity by people who do not have any of the accepted forms of ID needed to vote.

The deadline for VAC applications was 5pm on Wednesday, June 26th. The figures also show that there have been 214,051 applications for VACs since January 2023, when they were introduced. However, that figure is still dwarfed by the nearly 2 million voters estimated not to have an accepted form of ID, which means over a million voters risk being locked out of participating in the general election.

That is a completely unacceptable situation in a modern democracy. 

Risk of confusion at polling stations on July 4 

There is also a risk that we see voter ID rules cause further confusion at polling stations on election day after thousands of voters have already been caught out by voter ID rules at local elections. This will be the first time that millions of voters will have to show ID, notably in Scotland.

This will also be the first general election where voters will be required to show ID, meaning more voters will likely be encountering the rules for the first time, as general election turnouts tend to differ from local elections.

At least 14,000 people were prevented from casting their vote at the 2023 local elections due to a lack of accepted ID, according to the Electoral Commission. During this year’s local elections, we again saw people being caught out, including a decorated Afghanistan veteran who was unable to use his veteran’s ID card, and even Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister who brought in the voter ID laws.

The issue of veterans’ ID is a particular area where there could be confusion on July 4th as the Government pledged after the local elections to add veterans’ ID to the list of accepted ID, but the Electoral Commission has said new forms of ID won’t be added to the list acceptable ID for this coming general election. 

It is clear that voter ID rules are having a disproportionate and damaging impact on our elections and should be scrapped by the next government. At the very least, the list of accepted ID should be drastically expanded to ensure as many voters as possible can cast their ballot.

The next government should repeal voter ID rules

Add your name: One voter turned away is one too many.

In the last week, the current defence secretary, Grant Shapps, has been appearing in the news to warn about the supposed dangers of a Labour ‘super-majority’. He told Times Radio “You don’t want to have somebody receive a super-majority” going on to say that “if Keir Starmer were to go into No 10… and that power was in some way unchecked, it would be very bad news for people in this country”.

Grant Shapps is right that an effective opposition is vital in a democracy, as you need people to scrutinise legislation that aren’t from the governing party. When people mark their own homework, the incentive is always there to skip over any mistakes.

The important fact that’s missed from this discussion though is that you don’t need a big majority of support in the public to win a big majority of MPs. It’s one of the problems with the way we elect MPs to Westminster.

Big majorities on less than half the vote are a constant danger with Westminster’s First Past the Post Voting system. So, you may think that if you were worried about a super-majority, you might look at changing the system that produces them. But, unfortunately (although perhaps predictably), Grant Shapps was merely suggesting people vote for his party.

What is a super-majority?

The phrase ‘super-majority’ is commonly used in the USA to describe what is technically called a qualified majority. Qualified majority provisions are used to entrench important pieces of legislation by setting a higher bar than a simple majority to pass legislation. Commonly, this level might be 2/3rds.

In the United States of America, Congress can overturn a presidential veto with a 2/3rds vote.

In New Zealand, if the parliament wants to change the length of a parliamentary term, the electoral boundaries or the voting age, they need a 2/3rds vote in the chamber.

The Scottish and Welsh Parliaments also requires a 2/3^rd vote in favour to pass changes to how their members are elected.

These are some examples, but what would a super-majority mean in Westminster?

In Westminster, a simple majority is enough

Parliamentary sovereignty is a key principle of the UK constitution. Parliament can make or remove any law with a simple majority vote, and can’t pass any legislation that binds the hands of future parliaments.

Whenever parliament does pass a law that restricts their activities, they can simply pass another law to let them ignore the previous law. The Fixed Term Parliament Act, for instance, set a 2/3rds threshold for calling an election early. Unable to reach this threshold in 2019, parliament simply passed the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019 with a simple majority to call an early election.

Looking back at the international examples, there is nothing to stop parliament voting to change the way they are elected on a simple majority of the vote. When it comes to Westminster, a party with a majority of one can legislate on anything it likes, as long as it can keep its back benchers in line, just as a party with a ‘super-majority’ can. A massive majority doesn’t grant any extra privileges or powers.

100% of the power under First Past the Post

Of course, a massive majority in Westminster doesn’t mean a party has a massive level of support in the country. Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide is often the classic example of a massive majority. In 1997 Labour won a 179 seat majority, 63.4% of parliament, but only won 43.2% of the vote. In 2019 Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party won a higher share of the vote, 43.6%, but only won an 80 seat majority and 56.2% of parliament.

An MP can be elected on a minority of the vote locally, and their party win a majority of seats in parliament on a minority of the vote nationally. That majority in parliament means they can pass any law they like.

A commons majority is a powerful thing

While Grant Shapps might warn of the risks of a ‘super-majority’, all it would take is a majority of one to pass any legislation the next government want to pass. A majority of one which could be won on less than half the vote.

There is a lack of accountability when a party has a massive unearned majority, but the answer is to change the system which creates these artificially inflated majorities – and that system is First Past the Post.

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Read the report: Lessons not Learnt

A year ago this Saturday, the polls opened on the first December election for over ninety years.

At the time this felt like an unusual bookend to an unusual parliamentary term, which had culminated in the Supreme Court ruling unlawful the Prime Minister’s decision to suspend parliament. Incredibly, a year later and those unprecedented events have been overshadowed by even more extreme ones.

So much has changed in this last year – and yet the political dynamics remain the same as ever in our majoritarian system.

Last year’s election gave the Conservatives an early Christmas present of an 80-seat majority, won on just a 1.3 percent increase in vote share – a similar result in 2017 saw the then Prime Minister lose her majority. A quarter of votes went to parties other than the largest two, but they returned less than 13 percent of seats.

At sixty-seven percent (67%), turnout for last year’s December election was relatively high, but nearly half of voters did not get what they wanted – 45% of votes went to non-elected candidates. And in total, over seventy percent (70%) of votes did not directly contribute to the result – either because they went to a non-elected candidate or were over what the winning candidate needed. This is the result of using First Past the Post, rather than a fair, proportional voting system where every vote counts.

We see similar results every UK general election – millions of votes are routinely ignored by an electoral system that is designed to supress those choices in order to create artificial majorities.

This year we’ve seen sweeping emergency legislation put the Executive in full control. In the months following the Covid outbreak, the Westminster system reverted to type, centralising decision-making and, for a while, dispensing with parliamentary scrutiny.

It is often assumed that swift, frictionless decision-making is needed in a crisis – that strong and singular direction created by the dynamics of winner-takes-all voting. This last year has proved the opposite.

Subsequent inquiries have criticised both the approach to, and the detail of, the emergency legislation which was given just a day’s debate in the Commons. And as the crisis developed, we saw countries with more plural political systems, which foster greater collaboration across levels of government, being applauded and rewarded with public trust for their response to the pandemic.

While Westminster continues to plough on with politics as usual, the tide continues to turn on this centralised, winner-takes-all style of government. A recent series of YouGov polls on democracy finds that fifty-two percent (52%) of people think more decisions should be made by local and regional governments and over a quarter (27%) would like to see the Prime Minister have less influence than now.

Only eighteen percent (18%) of people think a two-party system is better for democracy whilst twenty-seven percent (27%) think a greater number of smaller parties would be better.

With the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, how soon we will go to the polls again is not clear. What we do know is that the maths will be the same: votes will be ignored in the service of an electoral system that is both dysfunctional and unpopular with the public.

A year on from a warped General Election, we should do all we can to ensure it’s the last under Westminster’s unjust voting system.

Even with the considerable impact of the pandemic, we’ve had a big year. You can find out what we’ve been up to in our 2020 Annual Report. If you want to help us in 2021, join the Electoral Reform Society today.

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Luke Field is an Irish political scientist specialising in campaigns, elections, and democracy. He recently completed a Ph.D. in Political Science at University College Dublin and lectures in Politics at University College Cork. He tweets here.

Here he launches new research for the Electoral Reform Society on the UK’s December general election and Ireland’s election this February. 

In February, the Irish electorate went to the polls to elect a new set of parliamentary representatives to Dáil Éireann (the Irish lower chamber of parliament).

While turnout was less than in the most recent UK general election of December 2019 (62.9% to 67.3%), comparing the distribution of votes at constituency level among those elected suggests that the Irish electorate – or at least those parts of it who turned out to vote – may have given greater ‘assent’ to their new parliamentarians than was the case in the UK.

When I speak about voters giving ‘assent’, I mean that voters have indicated that they will be satisfied by the election of a given candidate, through including that candidate in their voting choice on their ballot.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the candidate was the voter’s preferred choice, or even that the voter agrees with or supports all aspects of the candidate’s policy platform; only that the voter has indicated that they would be content for that candidate to hold political office. This might also be termed ‘voter accordance’.

In the UK context, this is a meaningless distinction. The First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system only allows for assent to be granted to one candidate. There is no option for voters to, say, indicate assent to the election of any other candidate who shares their view on issues such as Brexit: they can only pick one candidate, and that candidate is either elected or not elected.

Consequently, in the single-seat UK constituencies, a single successful candidate provides 100% of the representation with the assent of potentially far less than 100% of the voters. Indeed, as successful candidates need only a plurality of votes (your nearest opponent’s vote share plus 1) to be elected, newly-minted representatives may have been denied the assent of a majority of their voting constituents, as recent ERS analysis on the UK general election showed.

Ireland’s PR-STV electoral system offers a radically different set of outcomes in terms of assent, and we can understand this through the abbreviations on either side of the hyphen.

First, representation is not solely vested in a single representative, but instead distributed (somewhat) proportionately amongst multiple representatives (proportional representation, PR).

Second, voters are offered the opportunity to state their voting preferences sequentially through the single transferable vote (STV). Through the use of the Droop quota, and because the total level of representation includes the assent granted to several candidates, the percentage of voters in a given constituency that has granted assent to at least one of its representatives is all but guaranteed to be a large majority.

Assent in the UK’s December election

Calculating the level of assent granted to the representative of each UK constituency is very straightforward, as we need only look at the percentage of the vote received by each successful candidate. The range of these values is pretty extensive: at the top of the pile, the greatest level of assent expressed in the UK was for the Labour candidate in Liverpool Walton (84.68%). At the other end of the scale is the Sinn Féin candidate in South Down, who received the assent of only 32.4% of voters. The mean level of assent granted across the 650 UK constituencies was 54.35%, while the median value was 53.74%.

A considerable number of UK MPs received assent from less than 50% of voters in their constituency; 229 in total, or 35.2%.

Assent in Ireland’s General Election 2020

The range of assent – support for the winning candidates – expressed in each of the constituencies has Dublin Rathdown at the lower end (69.34% assent) and Dublin South-West at the upper end (90.24%). The mean of these assent estimations was 81.7% and the median was 82.3% [1]: in other words, 82% of voters have at least one representative for whom they voted, a stark contrast to the UK figures.

Comparing Assent in the Elections

 Even at first glance, it seems quite obvious that the Irish constituencies invested much greater assent in their representatives than was the case for the UK constituencies: the average level of assent was 25.35 percentage points greater for Ireland, while the median level was 28.56 percentage points greater. The highest level of assent expressed in Ireland was 5.56 percentage points greater than the UK equivalent, while the lowest level of assent expressed in Ireland was 36.91 percentage points greater than the UK equivalent. 

More than one in three UK constituencies gave less than 50% assent to their representative; in Ireland, only one constituency invested less than 70% assent in its representatives. In total, 618 UK constituencies (95.08%) expressed less assent in their representatives than was the case in Ireland’s least-assenting constituency. By contrast, 12 of the Irish constituencies (30.77%) expressed greater levels of assent in their representatives than was the case in the UK’s most-assenting constituency.

More than one in three UK constituencies gave less than 50% assent to their representative; in Ireland, only one constituency invested less than 70% assent in its representatives. Click To Tweet

Conclusions

In every Irish constituency, a significant majority the electorate ‘assented’ to the election of at least one of their representatives. In the UK, a majority of voters in one out of every three constituencies did not assent to their representative’s election. This is a pretty significant gap in assent on the part of Irish and UK voters. It should be borne in mind that, where error in these findings exist, it mostly comes from the underestimation of assent in the Irish case; in other words, if these findings are incorrect, it is only because the gap is even greater. 

The higher levels of assent in the Irish context are facilitated by both the proportional representation and the preferential ballots offered by the PR-STV system. Neither of these is offered by the UK’s FPTP system. If UK electors are dissatisfied with their parliamentary representation, they may wish to consider whether their electoral system is a factor.

[1] Calculating the assent in Ireland’s general elections is slightly more complicated by comparison to the UK. The reason for this is largely due to the issue of the ‘surpluses’ of successful candidates (the number of votes by which a successful candidate exceeds the quota, which can be transferred to other candidates), which can either over- or under-estimate the level of assent when transferred. There is also the issue of votes accumulated by the final candidate deemed not elected in each election, as there is no way to verify whether any of these ballot papers held a preference for any of the successful candidates (thus leading to a further underestimation of assent). However, it is possible to at least approximate this level of assent.

In order to provide this approximation, I created an upper and lower limit on assent for each of Ireland’s 39 parliamentary constituencies by modelling the surplus issue in different ways. In order to create the estimator of assent that is most comparable with the UK data, I simply take the midpoint between these two limits. While this value does contain some error for the reasons stated above, and probably under-estimates the level of assent in each Irish constituency, it does provide sufficient accuracy to draw some tentative comparisons between the two elections.

In an election campaign characterised by uncertainty and volatility, it came as a surprise to many that the result would deliver such a decisive majority for one party. The Conservative Party made a net gain of 48 seats – an increase of 7.4 percentage points in their seat share compared to the 2017 general election and the largest majority for the Conservatives since 1987.

Due to the oddities of First Past the Post (FPTP) – or one-party-takes-all results – the Conservative Party was rewarded with a majority of seats (56.2%) on a plurality of the vote (43.6%) – with a 1.3 percentage point increase on its 2017 vote share giving the party a 7.4 percentage point increase in seats. The Scottish National Party (SNP), who support a move to a proportional system at Westminster, also benefited from FPTP, gaining 7.4 percent of seats in Westminster on only 3.9 percent of the vote.

While the Labour Party’s results were much more proportional, the Liberal Democrats were again disadvantaged by FPTP – the party saw an increase of 4.2 percentage points in its overall share of the vote compared with 2017, but actually suffered a net loss of seats at this election.

Once again, smaller parties were penalised by Westminster’s broken electoral system, with the Green Party only securing one seat, despite winning almost three percent of the vote. Brexit Party voters were denied any representation despite getting two percent of the vote.

Last week we revealed how many votes went ignored in December’s general election: 22.6m ballots did not count towards electing an MP.

But behind the headline figures are people’s voices across the country being systematically silenced by Westminster’s winner-takes-all voting system. That system affects people’s representation in different ways across the UK.

Research for the ERS’ Voters left Voiceless: The 2019 General Election report shows some regions saw considerably high levels of votes ignored.

For example, the East of England topped the table, with 74% of votes – 2.2 million – not contributing to the election result. This was followed by London, where 2.7 million voters (73%) of voters were ignored.

Why? Under Westminster’s First Past the Post system – among the least democratic voting system there is – all votes not cast for the one winner in each seat go to waste. Across 650 seats, that’s millions of votes being buried by the ‘winner-takes-all’ politics of Parliament. It might work for horse racing, but for national elections it contributes to polarisation and distrust on a dangerous scale.

But as well as votes not cast for the ‘winning’ candidate going to waste, votes cast for the winning candidate above what they need are also discarded. These ‘surplus’ votes would not go to waste under a fair, proportional voting system like the Single Transferable Vote used in Ireland.

Let’s look at the figures by nation and region

By nation

By English region

Full tables are in the appendix of the report

As you can see, just 29% of votes in England counted towards the result, and less than a third (32%) in Scotland and Wales respectively. The statistics within England paint a similarly bleak picture.

What kind of a political system disenfranchises voters on such a mass scale? The UK is the only country in Europe to still use this unjust way of picking MPs – and it’s time for change.

Ignored votes aren’t numbers: they are millions of ordinary voters like you and me who want their voice to be heard. Sadly, Parliament today represents a startling small proportion of those who voted. Without moving to proportional representation, this problem is going to repeat itself time and again.

Whichever region or nation you live in, when only one party stands a chance in a seat, the issues we care about are easy to ignore. It’s time that voters are heard, wherever they are in the UK. People are tired of having to choose tactics over policies – we need a Parliament that represents all of the voters cast in elections, not just a select few.

Whichever region or nation you live in, when only one party stands a chance in a seat, the issues we care about are easy to ignore. Click To Tweet

These fresh findings are another indictment of Westminster’s current one-party-takes-all system. Under the current system, millions of voters across the country are left effectively voiceless – with all votes not cast for the one winner in each seat going effectively ignored.

It is no wonder trust in politics is at rock bottom. The vast majority of people’s votes are being systematically ignored by a voting system that is morally and politically bankrupt.

What’s the way forward? We have to make seats in Parliament match how people want to vote, through a fair, proportional electoral system. Until we make votes count equally, parties will ignore areas they think are ‘unwinnable’. Nowhere should be seen as a ‘write-off’ by politicians.

Instead, let’s reform Westminster’s broken system and ensure real choice – and a clear voice – for people across the country.

Megan Collins is a placement student at the ERS from the University of Nottingham. 

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