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The difficulty with electoral reform is that the people who will decide the change, and who put forward arguments to the people, have their own interests in mind. Any change to the way politicians are elected will cause politicians to seek the method which perpetuates their existence. So the first question is who can we trust?

The second question is which system is best? There are many systems ranging from first-past-the-post (single member plurality) to various forms of proportional representation, including top-up lists, additional member systems and many more. Most electoral systems were originally based on first-past-the-post (FPTP) because it was easy to understand, easy to administer, and focused on the constituency rather than the elected body as a whole. Now the debate tends to be whether to move to proportional representation (PR) which focuses not on the constituency but on the elected body. The principle that elected representation should reflect votes is a nice catchy idea but not necessarily meaningful: the body should only be proportional insofar as the body is taken as the most important element, if the local MP/Councillor/Representative is taken as the important element then it is how they are elcted that matters.

I consider the constituency link to a single MP representing me as most important. This keeps politicians accountable and ensures they have the freedom to defy their party whips. PR invariably means the party gains power at the expense of the individual and no politicians is directly accountable to anybody. So rather than focusing on the composition of the elected body, we should turn attention to how the Representative is elected. FPTP leads to tactical voting and puts minority parties at a disadvantage when elections are usually seen as a 'two horse race'. A move to some form of transferable vote system, a preferential system, whereby voters can rank candidates in order of preference, with their second and third preferences re-distributed if their first choice is eliminated, would be a good move. This would encourage voters to vote for their true beliefs, safe in the knowledge that their vote is not wasted.

Reform of the elected body is a flawed argument due to the fact that the governing party would need to implement the change but the governing party has secured a majority under the present system and so any change would disadvantage them. Electoral reform should focus on the method of election rather than trying to re-write the rule book, and doing this might just lead to some reform.

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