Weighted Votes: A summary of the arguments

The purpose of democracy is to make our legislators focus on the happiness of the greatest number. The better the electoral system does that, the better it is.

Plurality voting systems, such as our current one, distort this process by making a small number of voters’ votes crucial and the vast majority irrelevant.

Weighted Votes is a proposal for a system that corrects that distortion. It makes it worth a party’s while to campaign, even in unwinnable seats. It makes it worth your while to vote for your preferred party, even in unwinnable seats. It corrects for unequal sizes of constituencies, it discourages tactical voting in favour of honest voting, it can retain the constituency link while avoiding having two classes of MP, and it creates near-perfect proportionality of representation.

The way it works is that, in an election, all votes cast for each party – whether in seats they won or seats they didn’t win – are counted and divided by the number of seats that party has; the result is called the party’s weighting. Their MPs, when they vote in a parliamentary division, then have their vote counted with that weight.

For example, in the 2015 election the Conservatives got 331 seats for 11,334,920 votes, so each Conservative MP would get a vote worth 11,334,920 divided by 331, or 34,244, to cast in the division lobby. Likewise, every Labour MP's vote would be worth 40,290, SNP 25,972 and LibDem 301,986.

This can be combined with any electoral system – STV, AV+, pure list systems, Score Voting, whatever – as those systems are about who gets chosen to be a representative, while Weighted Votes is about how influential that representative is.

I am going to lay out my arguments for WV. I will start with some philosophical underpinnings, because I think decisions about electoral systems need to to be based on things like what democracy is for and why voter equality matters.

Once I’ve done that, I will then describe the system in more detail, along with what its good effects would be.

On Weighted Voting

The purpose of this modest series is to propose a form of Proportional Representation that has not had a great deal of attention, but which I think has so many advantages that we should be seriously advocating it above all others.

I will start by analysing why we want democracy at all, and then why proportionality is the right way to do it. Then, on that basis, I will describe the Weighted Votes (WV) system, explain its benefits, and suggest how it might be implemented.

In brief, the Weighted Votes system applies to votes in parliament. Rather than making the number of MPs for a party reflect their share of the vote in the country, it makes their parliamentary voting strength equal their votes in the country.

I will put up a new post at noon every day from tomorrow, Monday 31st October until Saturday 5th November. The following week I will start to post a series of objections to WV, along with my responses to them.