Becoming Prepared for Electoral Reform -- Britain's 1917 Conference on Electoral Reform saw striking endorsement for PR for members of the British House of Commons
- Tom Monto
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
from article "Electoral Reform and Preparedness"
in Canadian Municipal Journal May 1917
Proportional Representation
The principle of Proportional Representation was approved of, and if the recommendation of the Conference are carried out, one quarter of the members of the House of Commons will be elected by the Proportional Representation system.
[In those days, Proportional Representation meant Single Transferable Voting, and the article sets out some of the political advantages of the Hare system (STV). These advantages are mostly shared with list-PR systems.]
Political Advantages of the Hare System
Encourages Voting by Making Votes Count.
Increases interest in public affairs by giving each voter a share in the election of a member of the representative body.
Permits Voters to Express on their Ballots Their Real Will.
Under the old-fashioned system not only are many ballots ineffective in helping the candidates marked, but many ballots are not even marked according to the real will of the voters who cast them. To mark your ballot according to your real will under the old system would often be merely to throw it away.
Under the Hare system, you can express your real will on your ballot, even to the extent of voting for a candidate who, you think, has no chance of election, without fear of wasting even a fraction of your voting power. Under the Hare system, political parties cease to be the masters, and become the servants, of the rank and file of the voters.
Discourages Corruption.
Under the old-fashioned system - election by single-member districts - members can be elected by a mere majority or plurality vote in the district, so that the opportunities to turn the scale in close districts, both in the final election and in the primaries, are very inviting to the corruptionist.
Under the PR system, on the other hand, the corruptionist is discouraged at the outset, for to elect even one member under this system requires polling enough votes to deserve a member, that is, about as many as all the votes in one of the old single-member districts.
Reduces Incentives to "Pork Barrel" Legislation - in cities, petty ward politics Under the old-fashioned system, each member of the representative body is dependent for re-election on the voters of his petty districts, and they are not united except on the prosperity of the district.
Faguet, the biting Frenchman, said that "democratic government is a cult of incompetence", but that does not mean that we should be dissatisfied with democracy, but rather with democratic government as now organized.
Professor H.A. Overstreet puts it well when he urges the necessity of getting great big common denominators - as big as we can get them He points out that we must find the groups where there really is some measure of common experience and common judgement and make these groups our political units, our social brain-centres that are now wards and counties.
Square miles of space inhabited by heterogeneous crowds have nothing deeply and continuously in common.
Is Professor Overstreet too severe when he says, "Until we tap such centres as these, we shall remain as we now are, socially and politically brainless.
Proportional representation will help us to tap our social brain-centres."
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The article states that at the Conference were representatives of the various shades of political opinion in both Houses of Parliament in Great Britain.
Thirty-two distinguished men were in attendance, of which just two were known to be confirmed supporters of PR - Earl Grey and Aneurin Williams.
The article written by prominent Canadian lawyer Howard S. Ross, K.C.
Ross observed that the fact that "such a group of distinguished men should, during the war, devote their time and thought to this matter shows the urgency."
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