back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

I’m going to take a look at the checks and balances within the Strictly Come Dancing Electoral College. The purpose of the College is to select the couple who will leave the competition. I think there is a slight systemic bias in favour of weaker couple. This is probably reduced in practise by a correlation between the popular vote and the quality of the performance.

There are four elements to the Strictly Come Dancing Electoral College.  The judges’ scoring, the public vote, the combination of the these two elements and the dance off.

The judges’ scoring is very straightforward. Four judges award marks from 1-10 based on whatever criteria they like. The scores are amalgamated to give each couple a score from 4-40.  There is no special role for any particular judge. A point is worth a point regardless of how it is given or by whom.  Four 9’s are worth the same as  two 8’s and two 10’s.

The judges’ scores inform a leader board, top scoring couple at the top, lowest scoring couple at the bottom.  Points are awarded based on this ranking. The highest scoring couple scores points equal to the number of couples remaining in the competition. So if there were 8 couples left the top couple would score 8 points. The second place couple would score 7 and the lowest place couple would score 1. Couples who are tied, tie up, i.e. the two couples are awarded jointly the best place.  Two couples on the same score, 1 point behind the leader get joint second, rather than joint third. Everyone else moves up a place.  This tends to favour weaker dancers. There is a good chance that two or more couple will end up on the same score. This pulls the bottom placed couple up and they end up with more than 1 point. We’ll see how this works to their advantage when we turn to the public vote.

Four judges scoring independently provide a bit of balance to each other.  The judges’ scoring also give the public votes something to mill on.

The second stage of the Electoral College is the public vote.  Couples are ranked in order of their public vote on the night.  This ranking is converted into points in the same way as the ranking from the judges’ scores are converted into points. Given the very small possibility that couples will be tied on votes the rules on tie-ing up don’t favour unpopular couples in the way they favour poorer dancers.

This gives us two leader boards both converted into points.  To create the final leader board the points are added together to create a Combined Leader Board.  This balances up the professional opinions of the judges with the popular view of the public at large. (Sort of, I’d prefer that we used preferential voting for each round of the public vote.) In practise it is difficult for someone who finishes top to end up in the dance off.  It’s actually fairly easy for the bottom placed couple to avoid the dance off.

The bottom two couples enter the dance off. There are no tied places here.  In the event of a tie the couple with the largest public vote ranks higher.  This is where the rules on tie-ing up favour weaker dancers too.

Firstly, a couple who finish bottom of the judges scoring but top the popular vote will finish ahead of a couple who top the judges scoring but finish last in the public vote.  In a week with 8 couples the top ranking dancer would score 8 from the judges and 1 from the public vote. The bottom ranked dancers will pick up 1 point from the judges leader board and 8 points from the public vote. Both couple score 9 in total. The weaker, more popular dancers ranks ahead based on the public vote.  In situations where the top ranked for dancing couples are close on Combined Points with the weak dancers the stronger dancers must necessarily have performed worse in the public vote.

The second way the College favours weaker dancers is that they are more likely to be advantaged by the way tied couples tie-up.  In a week with 8 couple and two ties, say for 2^nd and 4^th spots, then the bottom ranked dancer takes 3 points into the Combined Leader Board from the dancing.  There is no way the top ranked dancer can score more than the maximum points, but the bottom ranked dancer could score more than the minimum points. Imagine a tie between the top two couples and the bottom two couples in an 8 couple week..  In this case if the best two dancing couples finished bottom and second bottom of the popular vote and the bottom two topped the voting they would end up with a combined scores as follows. Top Dancers, Lowest Votes, 8 +1 = 9, Top Dancer Second Lowest Vote, 8 + 2 = 10. Lowest Dancers, Top Vote,  3 + 8 = 11 points, Lowest Dancer, Second Top Vote, 3 + 7 = 10 votes. Both of the top dancers go into the dance off.  

If I were reforming the Strictly Electoral College I would change the way the judges’ leader board deals with ties by creating a tie-breaker. I’d probably start with highest numbers of 10’s, then 9’s in this week’s scoring then cumulatively.  So a couple with two 8’s and Two 10’s beats a couple with four 9’s.  Starting with the cumulative number of 10’s might also work as it favours couples with consistently good scoring.

The two bottom ranked couples go in to the last stage of the College which is the dance off. They perform again. The judges vote on who to save. There are in effect five votes. Len as head judge has two.  This will tend to favour stronger dancers. The judges have the final filter and will, by definition save the best couple of the two in the dance off. Whether they save the best couple on the night or the best couple over all is a matter for their conscience.  However, they can only save the best of the two couples offered up to them. As we’ve seen with John Sergeant and Anne Widdicombe popular but poor dancers can avoid the dance off all together for weeks.

The judges can signal their disdain by awarding four 1’s to a dancer but his still puts them in bottom place and gives them 1 or more Electoral College votes in the Combined Leader Board.

I think the rules of the Electoral College slightly favour weaker dancers particularly where they have strong public backing not connected to the quality of their dancing. This does make the competition more of a popularity contest than perhaps it first appears.  In practise this is probably mediated by the general tendency of the public to vote for the better dancers and the fact that over the long term the competition is really a run off voting system. A weak but popular dancer will eventually succumb to the Electoral College as their progress through the rounds begins to threaten better dancers and the vote for better dancers stiffens.

But then John Sergeant did happen.

Two pieces of analysis on the Coming Lib Dem collapse crossed my desk this morning. The first is an analysis of the potential electoral outcomes for the Lib Dem, Conservative and Labour parties if the current polling position for the Lib Dems of about 10% translates into vote share at the 2015 General Election.

The first is from Robert Ford, of the University of Nottingham School of Politics and International Relations, the second is from Hopi Sen, Labour blogger and co-author of In The Black Labour.http://hopisen.com/2012/the-coming-libdem-collapse-and-labour/#comment-13293

Ford trials two scenarios for the shifting of Lib Dem voters and looks at the results.  The first is a universal national swing. Lib Dems lose seats to the Tories, the Tories lose seats to Labour in Con-Lab marginal with high 2010 Lib Dem votes. The end result is that the Labour party ends up 6 seats short of a majority in the House of Commons with the Lib Dems on 11 seats. 

Which allows the Labour Party to form a majority coalition with the Lib Dems, or for the Conservative Party to form a (rather unlikely) coalition with the Lib Dems and the Unionist parties in Northern Ireland.

The second scenario looks at the votes cast if the current split of 2010 Lib Dems votes hold true for defected to Labour, the Tories, to Don’t Know (further re-allocated) and stayed Lib Dem.

This scenario sees the Lib Dems reduced to zero seats in the House of Commons and the Labour party sweeping to a Hung Parliament, 14 seats short of an absolute majority.

The SNP finish on about 7 seats.  I’ll let those with a calculator do that sum.

Hopi Sen broadly agrees with the analysis but questions some of the detail about how Don’t Knows split between Labour, Lib Dems and Conservative. He also asks some questions about UKIP. Things will be messier than just one axis of change.

In real life lots of stuff will happen that goes against the general rub of the green and actual results might vary and in such a close election might prove significant.

On this analysis the results look far from being a Labour landslide.  It doesn't take much to shift for both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party to end up on functionally the same number of seats and for the Lib Dems to end up more influential than they were in 2010.  If this strikes you as a perverse result, well that's First Past the Post for you.

And raises the question touched on in an earlier post of mine, who do you vote for if you want constitutional change and electoral reform?

It seems clear to me that if you want Devo-Max and you concede that the Yes to Independence campaign won’t win the 2014 election then I think the party to vote in any seat where the SNP came second to the Labour Party is the SNP. 

Which doesn’t help me much. I live in a three way marginal, and the SNP are 4^th.

I like to think about strategy and I like to think I’m a hard headed pragmatist. Maybe I am but I’m also sentimental and I’m a story-teller. In recent months I’ve been inspired by two statues, outside two houses, of two men. Really I’ve been inspired by the organisations they built. I’m inspired by how they built their organisations and about the story that tells me about how the Reform Movement can prosper in the UK.

The first is a a statue of John Wesley in Bristol. It stands in the courtyard of the New Rooms, the  chapel and meeting rooms and hostel built by the Methodist community in Bristol. Being a Methodist in Bristol was hard work in the 18^th Century. If you were against slavery Bristol was not the place to go for an easy life. The New Rooms are designed with no low windows, so that it was harder for mobs of irate Bristolians to break them. The pulpit is only reachable by going up into the gallery and then down into the pulpit, to make it harder for irate Bristolians to drag the preacher out of the pulpit and beat him.

The New Rooms are very elegant, simple and beautifully light, they are a lovely place to contemplate God, or in my case Reform. Above the chapel is a hostel and office space. Here the Wesley’s stayed when the were in Bristol. Any one of the hundreds of Methodist preachers could stay there as they criss-crossed Britain bringing their message of faith and social justice to the peoples of Britain. Every Methodist preacher in Britain passed through the New Rooms and ate a meal at the table in the refrectory.

Then the preachers would continue with their circuits, gathering their congregations. They would gather their congregations whereever they could find them and talk to them outside, in the sunshine or the rain. They would talk with whomever would listen.

The New Rooms were a nexus for the Methodist movement. It is where the conversations happened.  All the little conversations about who is doing what, and all the big conversations about how their community worked, and lived. They broke bread together and shared their lives, both in word and deed. Then they went out to talk with people who wanted to talk, and to talk with people who didn’t want to talk.

The second statue is of John Cartwright, the Father of Reform. His statue stands in the garden of a square where he made his final home in Bloomsbury.  Cartwright created the London Corresponding Scociety, The Hampden Clubs and others like them, which brought working men and women together, physically and through correspondence to talk about Reform, about Universal Suffrage and how they might achieve it. The clubs and societies he founded were often persecuted and eventually outlawed. He was due to speak at a large public meeting of the Manchester Patriotic Union in 1819. This became the Peterloo Massacre. Cartwright died in 1824, eight years before the Great Reform Act of 1832 widened the franchise and for the first time Britain approached democracy.

What links these men and what I find inspirational about them and useful for the Reform Movement is that they both set out to create spaces for conversation.  Spaces for people to talk who didn’t already have a voice. They each put time and effort into walking the land talking to people, encouraging and facilitating a wide, diverse and deep conversation. They encouraged other people to go out and facilitate their own conversations. Out of that conversation, out of the structures they put in place for conversation grew organisations that lead to profound social and political change in our country.

In the 21^st Century we don’t necessarily need to gather congregations or found clubs. I don’t see myself tramping from town to town for the next ten years.  The method of the 18^th and 19^th centuries are not necessarily the methods for the 21^st.  The lesson I take from John Wesley and John Cartwright is this.  The Reform Movement needs to talk.  The Reform Movement needs to talk amongst itself.  We need to talk about our goals and our aims and our methods. We need to talk about our values and aspirations.  Then, we need to go and talk to people who are not in the Reform Movement. We need to ask them about their values and aspirations.  We need to talk with them about our common goals. We need to have thousands and thousands of conversations.  Conversations between two people. Conversations amongst hundreds of us gathered togethered. Quiet pints in dark pubs, Skype calls after hurried dinners,  rowdy curries after conferences, emails, blogs, pamphlets, facebook status. Conversations with friends, with colleagues, with allies, conversations with those undecided or uniterested or focused on something else, conversations with enemies.

What I take from Wesley and Cartright for myself is this.  My role in this is to be one of the people who helps the conversation to happen.

So, that’s the analysis of the Unlock Democracy Council elections by Constituency.

 West

 North

 East  

London and South East

 Some broader picture points.

Turnout was quite low.

The West had the best turnout at 22.8%, London and the South East 16.9%. Overall turnout was 20.7%.

Whilst the allocation of seats by elector could not be bettered, the allocation of seats by actual voter favours London and disfavours the North with 68.57 votes cast for each seat elected in London and 110 votes cast per seat in the North. This is obviously a feature of the differential turnout.

Spoilt Ballots were 1% of the total cast which compares unfavourably with UK Westminster spoilt ballots of between 0.11% and 0.35% between 1945 and 2001.

Out of 19 members of council, 9 have not served on the council before.

Unlock Democracy operates protected seats for gender (1/3^rd at least of men and women) and ethnicity (at least 2 self-identified ethnic minorities).  All of the gender protected seats fell naturally and one of the ethnic protected seats fell naturally leaving 1 councillor elected as a result of protected seats.

Once again, thanks to Lalland Peat Worrier for his method of presentation

To London and the South East and the worst turn out in a pretty dire set of turnouts for a pro-democracy campaign group. Of 2,845 electors, only 480 or 16.9% cast a ballot.

18 candidates stood for 7 places. Quota of 59.25

Chris Carrigan, who also sits on the Council of the Electoral Reform Society was elected first. He tops the first preference polling with 53 a few votes short of the quota but it’s not until round 6 with the exclusion of Kevin McNamara that Carrigan picks up the necessary votes (60) to be elected.

In a curious twist of the Single Transferrable Vote count Carrigan’s surpluses are not distributed immediately and Tom Miller is excluded. Miller’s preferences break heavily towards Finola Kelly and she is elected with 64 votes.

This is the only constituency where the final ordering of candidates didn’t follow their first preference rank.

Carrigan overtaken by Kelly.  Susan Murray moves from 6^th place in round 1 to 5^th place.  Andrew Blick falls from 5^th on first preferences to 7^th.

However, of the 7 top ranked candidates on first preferences none failed to secure election.

Outside of the top seven there were tussles between Tom Miller and Debbie Chay and between Henderson, Colwell and Walsh with priority changing hands between candidates as transfers swung from round to round. Looking at the kinked shape of the graphs I am reminded of the economics lectures on oligopoly. A somewhat unhappy occurance whilst contemplating Unlock Democracy election results.

Elected for London and the South East

Chris Carrigan
Finola Kelly
Stephen Carter
Rosemary Bechler
Susan Murray
John Stafford
Andrew  Blick

In John Stafford I think we see a rare and very welcome Conservative in the ranks of Unlock Democracy officials.

Starting my brief electoral analysis with the West Constituency, of Wales, South West and the West Midlands.

This election looks to have been over pretty much as soon as the first preferences were counted.

Out of 1,615 voters 22.8 % cast a total of 366 votes, electing 4 members and a quota of 73.2 first preferences saw 3 of the 4 councillors elected.  Mary Southcott top billed with 99 first preferences followed by Eithne George on 83. Round 3 of the count saw the exclusion of Christine Herbert-Mosavie, who in an election with a  ban on active campaigning failed to submit a personal statement and gathered only 3 first preferences.  The final candidate elected on first preferences was Phil Starr, former Chair of Charter 88.

This left Alan Debenham and Philip Davis contesting the last seat.  Debenham had out polled Davis on first preferences by 39 to 23.  Out of a total of 43 redistributed votes he picked up 12.57 to move to 51.57 with Davis picking up 8.08 to move to 31.08.  With only a further 43 votes up for grads Davis would need to nearly ¾ of them to catch Debenham and this proved too much for him. Davis narrowed the gap but couldn’t overturn it. Davis finished on 49.91 votes. Debenham elected with 64.68.

I was asked what I thought of this anniversary of the 5^th May blogpost by Milena Popova.

I don’t disagree with the analysis of the last 18 months. The Yes campaign was badly run. Most of the post referendum analysis started with “It wasnae me.” Unhelpful when you want to re-group and what you need is some discussion on how to keep a mass reform campaign going.  The sort-of-promised support for local groups doesn’t appear to have materilised (1)

So I share the frustration with where the pro-electoral reform campaign is now and how we got here. Does that mean that I agree that we should say the Viaticum over the body of Electoral Reform? I’m not nearly so pessimistic about the longer term outcome, or even the medium term outcome.  As Warren Buffet might say “Look at the fundamentals.”

Current and Future Usage of Electoral System.

The citizens of the UK are increasingly exposed to electoral systems other than First Past the Post(2).  Scotland uses the Additional Member System of PR for Holyrood, the Single Transferable Vote for local elections (and the Alternative Vote for local council by-elections.) Wales uses a form of PR for Assembly Elections. Northern Ireland uses STV for Assembly elections. London has the same electoral system as Scotland for its Assembly elections and uses the Suplementary Vote for Mayoral elections. A few more cities in England will also be using that system for their own mayoral elections over the next few years. Perhaps 1 in 5 voters are already regularly using PR for devolved chamber elections.

For European elections most of the UK uses the D’hondt form of PR to elect MEP’s(3)

So the British electorate is already exposed to a variety of electoral systems.  Directly elected police commissioners and an elected House of Lords increases the breadth of alternative voting methods in use. In fact, so many different electoral systems do we have in use in the UK that barely a year goes by without somebody somewhere using a non-FPTP electoral system and a different one each time. (4) (6)

The British electorate is increasingly able to use different electoral systems. They get to see how different electoral systems affect how their votes turn into representation. They see what different systems do to the choice they are offered and what they do to politicians’ behavior. Politicians too are growing up using and being elected through different electoral systems. They are more used to the compromises required by different electoral systems.

I think the direction of travel is towards more widespread use of different electoral methods. Lords Reform and local councils in England and Wales are both potential next steps.

Using different electoral systems is important for campainging reasons. It removes a number of the stronger arguments of the status quo camp. We’ve always used FPTP, it’s the British way – increasingly we don’t and increasing it isn’t. Other electoral systems are too complex and you can’t predict the results. Millions of Britons now use them annually and do so effectively. You can’t be sure what sort of madmen you will get and the coalitions will be a shambles. I think many Britons can see how their votes translate in the representation they are getting. They can see that in Scotland PR has lead to stable, even dull, government without a swivel-eyed lunatic fringe appearing. (10) They have more experience of the way coalitions work, or don’t work. They can see the differences for good and bad of the different electoral systems.

Electoral reform, to some extent, is already happening.

Lords Reform

There are a number of ways Lords Reform is important for electoral reform more broadly.

Firstly, it gives an electoral foothold for a variety of political parties other than Labour or the Conservatives. UKIP, the Greens, the SNP and the Lib Dems could all expect to pick up seats in an elected House of Lords using STV. This is important for two reasons. It gives those parties credibility (7), it gives them paid positions supported by the State in the form of salaried members and staff and Short Money, it gives them a platform. Secondly, each of these parties is in favour of electoral reform in principle.

Secondly, at some point a  UK government is going to be dependent on UKIP, Lib Dem, SNP or Green votes in the House of Lords for something. At some point the quid pro quo for not sparking a vote of no confidence will be movement on electoral reform. 

Thirdly, an elected House of Lords using STV would mean the whole British electorate was using STV for one half of a general election. (8) 

Fourthly, an elected House of Lords using STV already is electoral reform.  That’s STV in use in the UK at a Westminsiter general election. I know some genuine electoral reform activists who would consider that not only good progress but the perfect outcome. Let’s just sit with that for a moment. STV used at a UK general election in my life time.

Broad Electoral Trends.

The electoral trend since the war has been steadily lower turn outs and a steady increase in the vote share of the Not-The-Labour-or-Conservative-Parties-Party.  There seems no reason for this trend to reverse.  I’m sure the Liberal Democrats are going to suffer a drop in vote share at the next General Election.  I expect they will lose many seats (9).  I also expect this to reverse somewhat after the 2015 election. I also expect UKIP to continue to poll well.

At some point we are going to end up with another coalition. Probably not in 2015 but perhaps in 2020. Probably involving the Lib Dems but it might be a centre-right coalition of UKIP and the Conservative party.  If you are negotiating a coalition with one of the main two parties and you have an interest in electoral reform what is the big take away from 2010? Don’t faff about with referenda for your third choice electoral system. Insist on legislating for STV.

The more elections we have where smaller parties poll millions of votes and get a handfull of seats the stronger our case for reform.

Campaigning Network.

A network of pro-electoral reformers and reform organisations was created. It still exists. It needs some careful nurturing.  My experience in Edinburgh was that a fair few people who had never taken part in a political campaign got involved.  I’m still in touch with quite a few of them.  Many of them are still pro-reform campaigners – for a given value of campaigning.

We’re all a bit more experienced. We know better how to organise. We know better what happens if we don’t trust our instincts when we are badly lead. We have a long, long list of things we’d do differently if we had the chance. Next time round we won’t be campaigning for our third choice option.

I don’t want to appear Poly-Annaish about the strength of the existing reform network. It’s in dire need of some attention from the ERS and UD. It could easily evaporate into an effective nothingness, especially if there is nothing for it to do or to celebrate in the next twelve months. However, it still exists. It still breaths.  The evening before the anniversary of the 5^th of May I was at a meeting of the Edinburgh group. I know there are internal reformers actively engaged in making the two reform organisations better at organising reform.

I think the fundamentals are good for electoral reform in the UK. We already have a variety of elections using different electoral systems and we are adding more. We have a big chance and a big success in House of Lords reform. We may have STV introduced next year for elections in 2015. The electoral trends favour our arguments and give us opportunities and we have the remnants of an organisation that is trying to promote reform.

So, is Electoral Reform dead? I’d echo Mark Twain, rumours of its death are greatly exagerated.

(1) and I write this as one of the convenors of one of the more successful local campaigns who has both an Electoral Reform regional office and the former Chair of the ERS in my city. Unlock Democracy have also not picked up the phone to check in.  (Saying that, I’ve not phoned them.)

 (2) or to give it its Sunday name, Single Member Plurality voting.

 (3) NI uses STV – FTW.

 (4) Since 2010 I have used FPTP (SMP)(5), the Additional Member System and STV.

 (5) I’m sorry I just can’t help using the proper name for FPTP – because it says right on the title page how poor a system it is.

 (6) This excludes the large number of people who use different election methods for civic organisations such as University student bodies and Unions.

 (7) if they earn it – BNP local councillors I’m looking at you.

 (8) I know the elections are going to be stagered but still 50% of our chambers will be elected using STV.

 (9) and they may, ironically, end up with as many elected Senators as they do Representatives. I refer interested readers to the history of the Democrat Party in Australia and the dictum of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, “Sometimes influence is more powerful than power.” 

(10) Unless you count Baron Watson of Invergowrie, the notorius fire raiser of that most radical of parties; the Labour Party.