David Maddox: Smooth voting systems? Don’t count on it

COMPLEX voting systems with machine counting held the day after – this was the blueprint for a bright future offered to voters in the UK by electoral reforms. Apparently we would get better, more transparent and balanced results run more efficiently and speedily.

“Au contraire” is the response to most of those of us who waited into the small hours of Saturday for the London mayoral election result a full 26 hours after the last vote was cast with ballot boxes vanishing and reappearing, machines breaking down and at one point the lights going off.

A similar answer may well have been delivered by Scottish voters in 2007 after what was probably the worst election count fiasco since the days of rotten boroughs.

Meanwhile, the French manage to know who their president is within seconds of the poll stations closing.

But if Scotland 2007 damaged the reputation of modernising how we vote, London 2012 may have sunk any hope for redemption for the modernisers after last year’s humiliating defeat in the alternative vote referendum.

Ironically, modernisation was better supported in London than most of the rest of the UK in the AV referendum, which suggests after last week the result would now be an even more resounding “no!”

The point is that political wonks and members of smaller parties may believe first-past-the-post is unfair and gives an unbalanced result, but the process of electing a single candidate with a cross on a ballot paper has produced clear, fast and understandable results.

Even though there were no hitches in the Scottish council elections count on Friday, the fact remains that one reason it was so difficult to understand whether Labour or the SNP were the biggest winners is because you need at least a PhD in maths to grasp how results are arrived at.

Why is all of this still important? Well, tomorrow, the centrepiece of the Queen’s speech will inform introducing elections for the House of Lords with an even more complex version of the single transferable vote than the one which blights Scottish council elections.

The reform will be met with dogged resistance from a few in Labour and large proportion of the Tory backbenchers. They will use the voting system, one which is only used in New South Wales and involves people being asked to choose parties or candidates but not both, as a means to resist this bill.

Already the question is being asked why British voters should have voting reform forced upon them when they rejected it in 2011.

Ironically, it is the Lib Dems who are so desperate for the reform mainly because they believe it will improve their share of seats. Yet the elections last week with Lib Dem councillors wiped out and their London mayoral candidate pushed into fourth showed that however complex or balanced the system, voters contrived to keep them out.