Thursday, June 03, 2010
A curious fact about STV
We have abolished it in the UK once already. When the universities had Parliamentary representation, Oxford, Cambridge, Combined English and Combined Scottish were all entitled to more than one seat (e.g.). They used to be elected using a block vote mechanism, but the Representation of the People Act 1918 changed the mechanism to the Single Transferable Vote. When the seats were abolished in 1950 following the Representation of the People Act 1948, Westminster STV died with them.Curiously, the university seats which retained a single member retained the first-past-the-post system and did not change to the alternative vote, the system to which STV reduces in a single-member constituency.The reason the university constituencies died was, of course, that we wished to defend more rigorously the principle of 'one person, one vote': nevertheless, it is an interesting historical curiosity that in addition to multi-member constituencies, which were common in the nineteenth century, we have already had, and already scrapped, the single transferable vote.
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You were clearly writing in the context of the UK Parliament at Westminster, but you might like to note that STV-PR was also introduced and discontinued for three other sets of elections within the UK.
The Scottish Education Authorities: first STV-PR election in 1919; last of four elections in 1928 when the Authorities were abolished.
The Parliament of Northern Ireland: first STV-PR election in 1921; last of two elections in 1924, when the Unionists switched to the Westminster plurality system. STV-PR was re-introduced for the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 and that use continues.
Local Authority councils in Northern Ireland: first and last STV-PR election in 1921, when the Unionists switched to single-member wards and plurality. STV-PR was re-introduced for local government elections in Northern Ireland, for the new District Councils, in 1973 and that use continues.
Note also that all Local Authority Councils in Scotland are now elected by STV-PR - first elections in 2007.
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