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June 24, 2008
Govt vs ERS on Radio4
'Constitutional Renewal' Minister Michael Wills and Chief Executive of Electoral Reform Society Ken Ritchie went head-to-head (or rather pre-record to live interview) on Radio 4's The World Tonight to debate the merits of weekend voting, a consultation for which has just been launched by the Government. Listen to the interview here.
Ken's main points:
"The problem is not that people are working too hard on Thursdays and can't go out to vote. The problem is that when it comes to elections people don't see politics as being sufficiently relevant to them and to their lives; they don't see how going out to vote is going to amke a difference; they don't believe their vote is likely to affect the outcome. So there are much more fundamental things that we have to change"
"Why don't we make election day a public holiday and celebrate democracy?"
"There is no point in changing the day if you don't change the nature of politics and of elections. That's why we want to a much more fundamental change, which would be a change in the voting system".
"There is no magic formula ... but if we are serious about trying to tackle the whole nature of politics we have got to change the way we vote. The government promised a referendum back in 1997. It didn't have that referendum, but converted it into a promise to have a review. That review reported earlier this year. There was much more in that report to suggest that there was a case for looking at the voting system than Michael Wills has a case for looking at weekend voting."
That's a killer, that last line. If only Michael Wills had been in the studio so that someone could have reported his reaction.
Posted by malcolmclark on June 24, 2008
Comments
I heard the intervierw with Ken Ritchie and I must say that I was rather disappointed . It is not very often the electoral system is mentioned on the BBC - in fact the subject seems to be taboo; and in my view he missed a rare opportunity to push home aggressively the message about ELECTORAL reform. He kept referring to the "voting" system which people tend to interpret as the mechanics of voting - more postal votes, electronic voting - voting on Saturday or Sunday - etc. Just get more people out and everything will be fine: we’ll have true democracy.
The purpose of elections is of course not to get as many people as possible to put a cross on a voting form, whether or not it counts; it is to represent fairly what the electorate wants and to elect representatives accordingly. All the government seems to worry about is how many people vote regardless of whether or not they are just wasting their time in doing so. The last election produced a record number of abstentions; but even so many more could have abstained and the result under FPTP would still have been the same.
I agree with him that there is "no magic formula" but unless there is ELECTORAL reform and we get the right people in parliament any other constitutional changes will be a waste of time.
Posted by: Joe Patterson at June 25, 2008 10:55 AM
You do have a point here, Joe. Whilst it's true that most electoral reform would "change the way we vote", it doesn't automatically follow that when we speak in a generic way about changes in voting, that people automatically know that we mean reform of the system by which people are ELECTED. These debates might be very familiar to a politically-savvy audience, but it's by no means obvious to everyone.
Posted by: Michael Calderbank at June 25, 2008 03:03 PM
I like John Denham's idea of 'Aussie Rules':- AV for the Commons and STV for the second chamber. Ifwe have PR in both Houses, we may as well only have one chamber of Parliament (and a powerful supreme court).
Posted by: DR ANDREW JOHN KITCHING at June 25, 2008 07:43 PM
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