Mike Wright, Head of Communications

“It was clear this was going to be a busy year for the ERS media-wise, with a likely general election and change of government, as well as local elections, making our issues prominent at various points in the year. The first quarter was largely dedicated to preparing for those set pieces to ensure we were able to maximise the coverage and then land effective messaging that resonated with the public. As such, a predominant focus was the messaging project we carried out with research colleagues to ensure we had tested arguments and lines on electoral reform ready for the election. The other key strategic focus for the comms team was building deeper relations with journalists, particularly in broadcast, to ensure we could pre-brief influential figures on our issues before the elections, and this led to better informed coverage when our issues did arise.”

The start of the year was dominated with Liz Truss’s resignation honours list, which put a sharp focus on the House of Lords, peerages and cronyism. The ERS was quoted in the BBC News story on the list, and Jess Garland was also interviewed on a number of outlets, including Channel 4 News, ITV, and Sky. This allowed us to frame the issue of Lords reform as pressing for the then current and next government.

The rest of the first quarter of the year was then dominated by the build-up to the local and mayoral elections, which were seen as a key test for the beleaguered Sunak government and to see if Labour was making serious electoral inroads. There was also a growing focus on our issues and we were quoted in stories on tactical voting in Politico, voter ID in the Express, and Police and Crime Commissioner elections on ITV.

In May, the local elections saw the media take an interest primarily in voter ID as it was the first time millions of voters would be encountering it. ERS spokespeople did numerous broadcast interviews, largely on BBC Local News radio, on how the issue could affect people, with Darren’s comments being picked up by the Express and other news outlets. After the local elections, our analysis showing that mayors had been elected with smaller mandates than previous incumbents due to the switch to FPTP was also picked up by the media.

In the period following the general election, the media focus shifted to the new government’s agenda, with the majority of the media interest being in the reforms to the House of Lords. The ERS has featured in coverage of this issue in a number of publications, from the New Statesman, i News to the Daily Mail. Darren appeared on BBC News discussing the Lords reform proposals in the Kings Speech.

The ERS had over 800 hits in different media outlets over 2024 to date. This is similar to 2023, when there was a high media interest in the roll-out of voter ID for the first time. However, the focus this year, when the spotlight was likely to fall on our issues, was to aim for higher cut-through media outlets, with appearances on the Today Programme and BBC Breakfast as particular highlights.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS member from just £2 a month

Ian Simpson, Research Officer:

“Across this year the research team has continued to conduct independent, in-depth and timely research into the state of our political system. Conducting high-quality research is key to achieving our strategic goals as it provides the evidence base for our policy and campaigns. Research was central to our work on the General Election and provided the basis for our media and digital campaigning. We had prepared for the General Election by mapping the changes that had occurred to the UK parliamentary constituencies following the boundary reviews. This ensured we had a thorough understanding of the electoral landscape prior to the election and enabled us to produce interesting data during the campaign and after the results were announced”
At the start of the year the research and communications teams together drew up a new messaging guide for use by the Democracy sector. This was the final thread of the messaging research project which took place in 2023 in which we engaged multiple research agencies and tested messaging on PR on the general public. We shared this messaging guide with National Campaign for PR early this year and the messaging we created was used during the general election.

In May there were local council elections in many places in England, and once again we highlighted places that saw highly disproportional outcomes, with voters failing to be represented properly. We renewed our call to replace FPTP with STV for English local elections, matching the tried and tested system used for Scottish local elections, which produces outcomes that much more closely match how people have voted in their local area.

There were also Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections across England and Wales and a number of elections for directly-elected mayors, including high profile contests in Greater London, Greater Manchester, West Midlands and Tees Valley. These were the first set of PCC elections held under the First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system after the previous Conservative government scrapped the use of the Supplementary Vote (SV) system for PCCs and elected mayors as part of the Elections Act 2022. We highlighted how this reduced the mandates of the mayors and PPCs who were elected and called for FPTP for mayors to be scrapped. We also gave evidence to the Greater London Authority elections committee on the impact of using FPTP for these elections.

In May this year we also launched our report Pursuing Parity: Examining Gender Quotas Across Electoral Systems, with a webinar in May for our members and supporters as well as others in the sector. The report laid out how the electoral system can impact the diversity of an elected body and how gender quotas can work in conjunction with different electoral systems to produce more gender-balanced legislatures. This piece of research found that elected bodies which use proportional representation are more likely to have larger numbers of women in their elected bodies than countries which use majoritarian systems.

With the anticipated change in Government came an increase in conversations around the second chamber and ERS published our views on the way to an elected second chamber in our report, Unfinished Business: Routes to an Elected Second Chamber. With the first steps towards Lords reform passing through parliament this year in the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill we have been using our work on options for reform to inform and press the case for stage two.

Following the Electoral Commission estimates of the number of people missing from or incorrectly registered on the electoral rolls, we used census data across England, Scotland and Wales to estimate the numbers of eligible voters missing, or inaccurately registered. This work was used to further our campaign for automatic voter registration (AVR), highlighting to MPs, policy makers and the general public, the vast numbers of eligible voters who could be enrolled under AVR.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS member from just £2 a month

The Most Disproportionate General Election Ever

General Election years are always significant for us, but this one was particularly so with results being the most disproportional in history, and many people voting as if we already had PR.

During the election campaign we highlighted the many barriers facing voters at the polls, from our analysis of the numbers missing from the electoral register, to the challenges of voter ID and of course, the results themselves. Our analysis featured throughout the campaign in the media, in print, broadcast and online.

Many of our members and supporters joined our campaign actions and thousands signed our PR pledge. Our supporter numbers grew extensively in this period.

The election itself provided the strongest case for PR yet with not only the most disproportional result, but also a significant shift away from two-party politics and the second lowest turnout since universal suffrage. We highlighted the failures of FPTP as soon as results were out on our General Election 2024 dashboard. We will be sharing our full analysis in our General Election 2024 report, which will be released in early December 2024.

You can read more on our team’s work during the General Election campaign here.

Winning Fair Votes for Welsh Councils

Three councils in Wales moved to the consultation phase on adopting STV voting systems this year. Gwynedd and Powys voted to move to consultation last December with Ceredigion joining them this year. The response to the public consultations across the board was an overwhelmingly positive one with 67% backing STV in Ceredigion, 72% in Gwynedd and 61% in Powys.

Despite this clear signal from their residents, in Powys, councillors chose not to back the change to a fairer electoral system. In Gwynedd, the result was one vote short of the two-thirds super-majority needed, with over 65% of councillors supporting the change. Ceredigion Council also voted by a majority in favour of the change but again this was short of the two-thirds majority required. All three councils failed to reach the high bar of a two-thirds majority, despite the majority of the public backing moving to STV and the majority of councillors in two councils also backing the change.

This has been a significant piece of work for the ERS this year. We have been working with councillors in the three consultation areas for nearly five years now and ran significant campaigns in each of the areas to encourage residents to respond to the consultations. The evidence is clear, there is appetite to improve local democracy from both the public and councillors in Wales, but the piecemeal approach of the Welsh legislation and the high threshold needed remains a barrier to change.

You can read more about our team’s work on the Wales STV campaign here.

140 Years of the ERS

On the 16th January 2024 we celebrated the 140th anniversary of the Electoral Reform Society.
Across those 140 years, the Electoral Reform Society was involved in the successful adoption of the Single Transferable Vote in the Republic of Ireland, and helped to defend it twice against politicians’ attempts to return to Westminster’s electoral system. The Society was also involved in the adoption of the Single Transferable Vote in Malta and aided the campaign in Australia.

In the UK, our advocacy for proportional representation paid off with fair elections now held in Northern Ireland for the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont and all local councils. In Scotland, proportional systems are used in the Scottish Parliament and for all local councils, and in Wales, a proportional system is used for the Welsh Assembly and councils have won the right to choose STV. London also now has an assembly elected on a fair basis.

Over the last 140 years of our advocacy, First Past the Post has changed from the default electoral system to an outlier.

The Best System

To mark the first 100 years of the Society in 1984, the Electoral Reform Society commissioned a history of the Society, modestly called  The Best System. 40 years later, to mark the 140th anniversary, we have made it publicly available once again. The publication is now available on our website, and we published an article to mark the occasion. This is a historic document, reproduced in its entirety. If you are interested in the history of the Society, the earliest records are held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

Read The Best System: An account of the first hundred years of the Electoral Reform Society

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS member from just £2 a month

Darren Hughes, Chief Executive

This has been a seismic year for British politics. We have witnessed a huge change election, but also one that was the most disproportional in the history of the UK. That has thrown a spotlight onto our failing First Past the Post electoral system like never before – a system that is clearly creaking under the weight of shifting voter behaviour.

The ERS was able to play a key role in the days after the election in framing the political narrative as it was one of the first organisations to call this as the most disproportional election on record and make the case for urgent electoral reform. It is clear from the results that people in the UK are already voting as if we have PR: this was the first election where four parties garnered over 10% of the vote, and five parties over 5%.

Our work on the election helped to establish the problem with our electoral system in the minds of the public, political class and media, which is a crucial step in the advancement of PR.

A new government means new opportunities, and the ERS is now gearing up to campaign to repair the damage done to our democracy in recent years as well as to modernise and strengthen it for future generations.

The job of the ERS now is to prepare for such a moment as well as to campaign to bring it about.

The general election also highlighted the damage that has been done to our electoral process in recent years, with thousands of people yet again being turned away from polling stations due to a lack of accepted ID. Scandal and cronyism surrounding the House of Lords has also been a persistent theme throughout the year, corroding trust in our politics still further.

That work has already started with the government bringing in legislation to remove the hereditary peers from the Lords, something the ERS has long campaigned for.

Away from Westminster, there has been significant progress on electoral reform in the devolved nations. In Wales, ERS Cymru has been instrumental in helping secure reforms such as an expansion of the Senedd, which will see it come into line with the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as the introduction of Automatic Voter Registration, which will enfranchise hundreds of thousands of Welsh voters. ERS Cymru has also led on the campaign to have Welsh Councils move to STV.

Likewise, in Scotland, the ERS was deeply involved in the Building a Local Scotland campaign to reform the nation’s democratically stretched council system. Our team in Scotland has also been working on a pioneering citizen’s assembly in Dunfermline aimed at increasing citizens’ participation in the running of their city.

This year saw the ERS’s membership grow again to 7,200, with a particular surge just after the historically disproportionate general election. This is the highest number of members the ERS has had in the two decades we have records for. We have also seen impressive growth in the number of supporters, with 180,000 people now receiving regular updates on our work into their inboxes.

It is to the members I want to pay particular thanks, as none of this would be possible without their support. The contributions they make enable the work we do and the progress we have made. Their passion for democratic fairness fortifies our efforts and is a testament to how deep the desire runs is for a better politics in this country.

I’d also like to record my thanks to the staff team who have worked so hard this year on multiple campaigns and research projects to pursue the Society’s objectives. Through our communications strategy and members and supporters engagement work the team have really broaden and deepened our presence and I appreciate their dedication and enthusiasm to our cause. Thanks are due too to members of the ERS Board who volunteer their time and expertise to the governance of the Society. Their support, challenge and goodwill make the ERS stronger.

Lynn Henderson, Chair

As I come to the end of my first year of as the Chair of the Society, I look back on what has been another significant and turbulent year in British politics.

The ERS turned 140 this year, a momentous milestone. While the political landscape today is utterly transformed from when the Society was founded in January 1884, the importance of its foundational mission remains undimmed: to fight for a democracy that better represents the people it serves. This year we saw a vivid illustration of how much still remains to be done as the UK witnessed its most disproportional general election on record.

The is evidence now that the public mood is shifting, with work from the National Centre for Social Research showing this year that 53% of people now support electoral reform. It is clear the case for PR is advancing and that is down in no small part to the ERS and partner organisations making such a clarion and passionate case for it in recent years.

I would like to put on record my thanks to the ERS staff, whose passion and hard work has shaped the national debate on electoral reform and also won concrete reforms to strengthen and repair our democracy across the country.

Finally, I would also like to pay particular thanks to the members and supporters of the ERS. The Society’s strength comes from the thousands of people who support our work with contributions, but also by signing petitions, sharing our posts and making the case for a fairer democracy every day in their communities.

I look forward to working with you all in the year ahead as we continue to build new alliances for democratic reform and make a compelling case for change.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS member from just £2 a month