The X Factor double crossing democracy

Readers of Parliamentary Brief may be familiar with Radio 4’s ‘Day by Day’ programme, which replays the news from the same day 20 or 30 years previously. So far the programme has looked back on 1968 and 1989, the two great revolutionary years of the post-war period. Should ‘Day by Day’ enjoy the longevity of other Radio 4 programmes, future producers may want to remind us of the turbulent events of 2009 — the year when radical and far-reaching reforms of the UK political system were promised, but failed to emerge.

The cavernous gap between the reform rhetoric of May 2009 and the political realities of December 2009 would make the programme sound dramatic even if broadcast now. Who still recalls David Cameron declaring ‘this crisis can be turned into an opportunity (…) we can make it the year of reform’ (25 May) or Gordon Brown’s call to MPs: ‘In the midst of doubt, let us revive confidence (…) let us stand together for integrity and democracy’ (10 June)?

In fact, the expenses crisis has spawned … a new regime governing MPs’ expenses, albeit one with tighter rules, greater transparency and independent regulation. Some MPs think even this much is an over-reaction, while others argue that linking the expenses crisis to debates about constitutional reform was always illogical.

I happen to disagree. But even without the expenses crisis, there would be grounds for asking some fundamental questions about our political system. What is it that defines the UK as a democracy? Is the UK becoming more, or less democratic? How would we know if the UK were at risk of ceasing to be a democracy?

Such simple questions raise complex issues. Experts agree that democracy means ‘rule of the people’, but disagree about almost every aspect of how that is best achieved, theoretically or practically.

But instead of trapping ourselves in an academic cul-de-sac, we could instead follow the lead of American political scientist Robert Dahl, who suggests a focus on ‘actual democracy’. If we take ‘actual democracy’ to mean ‘representative democracy’, then the minimal requirements for a country to be considered ‘democratic’ are surprisingly straightforward.

To paraphrase Dahl, in a democratic society, decisions are taken by elected representatives, returned via free and fair elections, with citizens enjoying universal and equal rights to vote, form associations, express their views and access alternative sources of information.

These ‘minimal requirements’ are pretty much how the man or woman in the street would understand ‘rule by the people’. Ask almost anyone to define the basic principles of democracy and they would be likely to refer to concepts like ‘freedom of speech’, ‘the secret ballot’, and ‘one person, one vote’.

The average voter is not an expert political scientist. There is widespread popular confusion about what elected politicians do. Many voters are unable to distinguish between the roles of councillors and MPs and most have a minimal grasp of the issues they are voting on at election time.

But voters know that, for elections to count as democratic in the modern age, they must take place regularly, the franchise must be universal, voters equal, the ballot secret and free from fraud.

Asked to define democracy, most of us would unwittingly come up with a formulation remarkably similar to that in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — ‘periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures’.

Even if the principles are clear, would we know if a country needed to be ‘downgraded’ from its status as a democracy? While there is no political science equivalent of Standard and Poor’s credit ratings for nation states, the work of Democratic Audit offers some valuable insights into how the state of UK democracy is changing.

Using criteria derived from established international standards for democracy, the Audit has been critical of multiple aspects of UK democracy, including the electoral system. But our assessment of the electoral process itself had previously been largely positive. The second Audit, published in 1999 found that: ‘national elections in the UK largely met international human rights standards, being held at regular intervals by almost wholly secret ballot, and being free of bribery, intimidation and other abuses’.

Since then, six months of news headlines in 2007-2008 alone would be sufficient to render our assessment altogether different.

In October 2007 Ron Gould’s independent report on the problems at the Scottish elections that year suggested that ‘the voter was treated as an afterthought’. In January 2008, a Council of Europe report concluded that the United Kingdom ‘delivers democratic elections despite the vulnerabilities in its electoral system’.

In April 2008, finding two men guilty of electoral fraud at local elections in Slough, Richard Mawrey QC concluded: ‘there is no reason to suppose this is an isolated incident (…) To ignore the probability that it is widespread, particularly in local elections, is a policy that even an ostrich would despise’.

The basic weaknesses in our electoral procedures to which these quotes refer are largely by-products of the Representation of the People Act (RPA), 2000. This Act introduced postal voting on demand and provision for local pilots of all-postal ballots, electronic voting, and electronic counting. Passed with broad cross-party support, the RPA 2000 reflected a wider consensus that urgent reforms were needed to reverse the dramatic decline in turnout.

Under a banner of ‘electoral modernisation’, emphasis was placed on making voting ‘more convenient’ and offering voters a ‘range of choices’ about how they vote.

In this rush to find a ‘fix’ for falling turnouts, concerns about electoral integrity were brushed aside. The (1999) report of the Howarth Committee, which laid the groundwork for the consensus on electoral modernisation, made a single reference to electoral fraud, essentially to dismiss the possibility.

The committee’s assessment was, at best, deeply naïve. While evidence relating to electoral malpractice is sketchy, we know that at least 42 people have been convicted for electoral fraud in the UK since 2000. We also know this is about double the level cited in official statistics, which only record those prosecuted under RPA (prosecutions are increasingly made under more generic anti-fraud legislation). These 42 convictions are widely seen as the ‘tip of the iceberg’. While nobody has any real idea of the size of the iceberg, accusations of electoral fraud are widespread. Since 2000, cases have been reported to all but one of the 49 police forces in England and Wales.

We could debate whether 42 convictions represents an ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ level of electoral fraud, but that would miss the point. The matter is more fundamental. All forms of remote voting, whether postal or electronic, are inherently less secure – particularly when combined with a system of household voter registration highly dependent upon trust. Remote voting also compromises the core principle of ballot secrecy. There can be no guarantee that ballots are cast in secret when ballot papers are distributed to voters’ home addresses, where there is clearly enormous scope for electors to be subject to forms of coercion, bribery or other forms of ‘undue influence’.

These are issues which ‘non-expert’ electors find easy to understand. In June 2004, 33 per cent of those surveyed by the Electoral Commission thought that postal voting was fairly or very unsafe from fraud. Eleven months later, in the wake of five men being convicted for mass postal vote fraud in Birmingham, 46 per cent expressed such concerns.

The notion that electoral modernisation would increase turnout was seriously misguided. At best, turnout has been stabilised by postal voting on demand. In localities where all-postal ballots have been piloted on several occasions, the turnout premium diminished as the novelty of postal voting wore off.

Pilots of electronic voting suggest virtually no positive impact on voting levels — rather it provides regular voters with more options about how to vote. The promise of a quick fix has, unsurprisingly, proved illusory.

Even before the growth of postal voting, British voters expressed the lowest levels of public confidence in elections in any West European country. In 1997, only 57 per cent of those surveyed in Britain expressed full confidence in the fairness of the election result, compared to 73 per cent on Germany and 88 per cent in Denmark.

We have much to learn from our European neighbours. It is no coincidence that levels of public confidence are highest in countries with less income inequality, greater decentralisation, and more proportional electoral systems.

But we also need to revisit the fundamentals of our democratic process, and for that the lessons lie in our own past. It was pioneering late Victorian legislation, aimed at eradicating widespread corruption and malpractice in parliamentary elections, which set the first international standards for democratic elections.

The Corrupt Practices Act of 1854 outlawed electoral practices such as bribery, treating and intimidation and, as consolidated by the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883, placed limits on the election expenditure of candidates. The Ballot Act of 1872 introduced the requirement for a secret ballot, requiring that each elector be provided with a single, numbered, paper ballot at a designated polling station, to be marked by the elector, who was then to placed it in a secure box – all in the presence of a ‘presiding officer’.

So entrenched was electoral malpractice, that it took half a century from the passage of the Ballot Act for law-makers to be confident that it had been eliminated. To the great Victorian reformers, the secret ballot was sacrosanct; the idea that we could show such blatant disregard for it a century later, would surely have horrified them.