We don’t talk a lot about elections at mySociety: we see our unique contribution as being about the democracy between elections, with a focus on how democratic institutions work (sometimes how they can work better), and the connections between the public and those institutions.
But whatever part of the democratic system you care about, elections shape everything. Rules about elections not only decide the winners, but the incentives that all players operate by. In our work looking at money in politics, we started looking at broken forms and worked our way back to problems in how elections are financed. There’s a lot of good work to be done on small problems, but we need to keep our eye on the big picture too.
This blog post looks at the new government’s new election strategy (which will be the basis of the forthcoming Elections Bill)
This strategy provides some certainty around large-scale changes in how UK elections will work in this Parliament, which is good as we’re at the point in the election cycle when the practical work to make these changes happen needs to begin.
The strategy is a solid foundation to build on, that needs to be followed up with complementary support and legislative action through the rest of the Parliament. There are also areas where the plan doesn’t go far enough – and from the outside we need to be building better evidence and campaigns for change.
Making it easier to use your vote
The big headline changes are:
- automatic voter registration
- expansion of valid Voter ID
- votes at 16.
These are all changes that make it easier for people to vote if they want to.
It is important that these changes are enabled now to facilitate the substantial work that will take years — both within the electoral administration system, and for civil society.
One of the significant hopes for votes at 16 is that it will give more people a first election while they’re in an educational setting that helps them understand and use their new right. But this doesn’t happen on its own: the Democracy Classroom have outlined the work that is required over the next few years to create the environment where young people not only have the right to vote, but the knowledge and willingness to use it.
Election finance and donor caps
There are good foundations on improved electoral finance laws in the strategy. A key improvement is much stronger regulation of unincorporated associations: creating Know Your Donor requirements, and bringing the transparency thresholds into line with donations to parties and candidates. These transparency thresholds are too high (and have gotten higher), but this is an area that could (and should) be redressed through a statutory instrument at a later point.
What this strategy does not go near is the idea of donation caps to limit the power of large donors. As we explored on our Beyond Transparency report, a key blocker in this area is both the comparative lack of public funding of elections in the UK compared to European and Anglophone countries, and a belief that public opinion is an obstacle to a move in that direction (public funding is not popular on its own, but the status quo is also deeply unpopular).
In the spirit of “what is the work needed now to enable change by the end of the Parliament”, our key recommendation is that either government or civil society actors convene a citizens’ forum/assembly to further unblock this line of argument by creating a better understanding of how the public approach trade-offs in this area. There is good reason to believe that, while exactly what it looks like might be open to debate, increased levels of public funding are possible, enabling donor caps and restricting the uneven influence of wealth on elections.
In the absence of this, we are unlikely to make substantial progress within this parliament. We need well-developed answers to the “how are we going to pay for elections then?” question — and to be building those answers now.
The Electoral Commission needs better data infrastructure
A key part of the new strategy is creating much greater enforcement powers for the Electoral Commission, increasing maximum fines and expanding to cover financial offences by candidates and local third-party campaigners.
This implies more resourcing for the Electoral Commission, but also improved data infrastructure.
For instance, basic infrastructure (such as the Electoral Commission having a list of all candidates covered) does not exist in a formal centralised way. This is currently provided indirectly through Democracy Club’s work using volunteers to source hundreds of different statements.
The strategy provides both a need for a better solution, and the framework of how it can happen – through new requirements for Electoral Register officers to provide election information to the government and Electoral Commission. Building on this legal foundation will require important work over the next few years to create reliable flows of data to enable both better public participation in elections, and an effective regulator of candidates and parties.
For investigation of campaign finance offences, the flow of financial information currently has significant problems, not only in terms of external accessibility but in terms of usable data for a regulator to enforce the rules. Our forthcoming report, Leaky Pipes, will explore this problem in more depth, and propose solutions that help support both public transparency and effective regulation.
Abuse and intimidation
The strategy includes a number of elements aimed at reducing the incidence and impact of abuse and intimidation of candidates and election staff. These range from privacy measures such as removing the need for candidates’ home addresses to be published, through making intimidation related to an election an aggregating factor in other offences, and requiring candidate ID checks to avoid sham candidates.
A key aspect of this in the strategy is better guidance on the different parts of the system and creating clearer understanding on roles, available protection, thresholds for action and ways of accessing police support.
A throughline of the Jo Cox Civility Commission report is the potential high rewards of better joining up and signposting existing systems of support. A consequence of creating the guidance may be discovering further opportunities for better joined-up procedures.
This is another area where improved data infrastructure would enable a range of goals, for instance making it possible for consistent updates to guidance to be sent centrally from the Electoral Commission.
Managing scope
A running theme through the strategy is trying to close loopholes that can be abused. However, some loopholes reflect genuine ambiguity that can be hard to address with either creating a chilling effect or problems with enforcement through covering a large number of organisations. One area of concern is the expansion of the need for a digital imprint to cover unregistered campaigners (the name and address of the organisation creating/promoting a viral post), which might bring a huge number of organisations into scope. We would want to see more examination of this as the bill progresses through Parliament.
Character and truth
One interesting element of the strategy is support for the recommendation that the current Speaker’s Conference on the security of MPs, candidates and elections establish a code of conduct for campaigning and coordinating cross-party discussions.
Given the Speaker’s Conference‘s specific interest in s106 (the rule where defaming a candidate’s character can be an election-invalidating offence), discussion of conduct inevitably enters grounds around truthfulness. The problems in agreeing a code of conduct was one of the reasons that the Advertising Standards Agency stopped policing election adverts in 1999 (the lack of regulation here is generally not known by the public).
Progress here could work as an enabling measure for the ASA to adopt New Zealand style rules on policing political ads. But it could also run into problems finding consensus. It is worth campaigners in this area paying attention to where practical progress is possible, and could be enabled by outside research and campaigning.
Electoral Commission independence remains at risk
This strategy intends to use the government’s power to set the Electoral Commission’s strategy and policy rather than abolish that power. Labour was opposed to this in opposition. It undermines all electoral offences if parties have a viable “win at any cost” approach to electoral compliance and then can deprioritise enforcement of rules against them once in government.
As the Chair of the Electoral Commission said, they “remain opposed to the principle of a strategy and policy statement, by which a government can guide our work. The independence and impartiality of an electoral commission must be clear for voters and campaigners to see, and this form of influence from a government is inconsistent with that role.”
This is a change that needs to be made through primary legislation. Failing to do this within this parliament will set a norm where two major parties have agreed that electoral enforcement priorities are set by the winner, rather than reflecting an agreed democratic understanding of the rules.
Improving candidate/voter privacy
In the 19th century, when the franchise was heavily restricted, the list of electors was public so that people’s eligibility could be challenged. This has continued into a big dataset of all registered electors being commercially available to buy from local authorities.
This is out of sync with modern ideas of privacy, and especially the risks of these kinds of massive datasets. The opt-out to the open register was added in 2002, and by December 2018 56% of the register had opted out. The usefulness as a universal dataset has now been broken, and it serves little purpose.
The election strategy says that for automatic voter registration, opt-out will become the default. We would recommend going further to fully remove the register.
This is just one way that electoral transparency is out of step with our current democratic needs. In our forthcoming Leaky Pipes report, we explore how GDPR is both used as an obstacle to useful donor transparency, while at the same time a surprising amount of information on small donors is available for public access.
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Image: Ben Allen
