I have to give Bernard Jenkin credit for one thing: he takes his correspondence seriously. Not 12 hours after I sent my letter, I received the following reply:
Thank you for your recent email, about the forthcoming referendum on the alternative vote. You wrote in particular about the possibility of my supporting some kind of turnout or yes-vote threshold for a yes-vote to take effect. I have not advocated a particular threshold at this stage, but the Conservatives have always advocated a threshold in referendums which propose major change. The proposed change to the voting system is a very major change, and it would clearly be wrong for such a change to be made without the clear support of a reasonable proportion of electors.
It is true that no thresholds exist for elections, but an election is very different from far-reaching and fundamental constitutional change. Most people agree that it would be wrong to consider a referendum to be valid if very few people actually bothered to vote. Thresholds of various sorts are used in several other Western democracies, including Australia, Denmark, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland, to ensure that the result of the referendum reasonably reflects the considered view of a substantial proportion of the electorate.
Yours sincerely
Bernard Jenkin MP (Harwich and North Essex)
I dislike the phrase “most people agree” as it is impossible to prove. He’s probably right, however, so I respond: “why?”.
A vote abstained should count only as an abstinence, it should not count as a tacit vote for any other option. As soon as you introduce a threshold, a vote not used automatically becomes a vote for the status quo. Just because the status quo is the easiest option, and most people are not sufficiently interested to take action to change it, it is not necessarily the best option. It is hard enough to enact positive change when you are talking about something with the huge inertia of the British political system, surely we should not throw up extra barriers to inovation. If voter turnout is low, that means many people don’t mind one way or another; if that is true, then why not allow the majority of those who care enough to give an opinion to get their way?
I cannot find any argument against making positive changes as soon as we can; if a change turns out to have been a mistake then an agile system can revert to the old way quickly. There are situations where we cannot discover whether a change is good or bad until we have tried them and that fact should not be used as an excuse to retard progress.
Mr Jenkin suggests that referenda on far-reaching constitutional change are different to a general election, however, if a threshold is worth setting, it must be worth setting for every vote. If not, the implication is that votes without or with lower thresholds are less important. I cannot see any justification for the assertion that the votes cast to elect our MPs are less important than the votes cast to determine how that election takes place.
The argument of precedent is no argument either: the referendum for Scottish devolution in 1979 may have failed because a threshold was set and not met, but that doesn’t mean setting it was the right thing to do. In fact, it was a very controversial rule and there were campaigns afterwards declaring the referendum to be undemocratic; it certainly did not add legitimacy to the result.
Finally, and of greatest concern, is the way including a threshold actively rewards “no” campaigners for depressing the turnout. This is against the core principals of a healthy democracy, it is impossible for me to see how a rule that results in such an effect can ever be a good thing.
The Conservative party are strongly in favour of first-past-the-post, which is a simple majority voting system, yet, where changes to that system are involved, they favour a more complex setup, even though first-past-the-post actually works best for simple two option votes such as the proposed referendum. Ultimately, there are no arguments for a good democracy that also support putting a threshold on referenda (or any vote); consequently, anyone campaigning for such a threshold can only be doing it either out of ignorance or to bias the result. Bernard Jenkin seems far from ignorant and he is stridently in favour of keeping the current system, I’ll leave you to guess which of those options I think is the most likely.
