How We Mark Our Ballot Paper Can Affect How We Feel About Voting. Here's Why

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Have you ever left a polling station feeling that your mark on the ballot paper didn't quite say what you wanted it to? Perhaps you liked two candidates but had to drop one, or backed the one who might actually win over the one you preferred.

Our feelings about democracy are important. Who wins matters, and so does whether an election feels fair. But there is another, less obvious factor: what the ballot paper allows us to say.

In his first party conference speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham announced a national commission on electoral reform and promised that Labour's next manifesto will contain a pledge to change the voting system. Public opinion is moving his way: about 53% of voters now support a change, up from 27% in 2011.

The commission will debate whether votes should translate into seats more proportionately, and which electoral system might achieve that. But a second question deserves a place at the table: what are voters actually asked to do in the voting booth?

Putting one cross next to one name, ranking candidates or ticking every candidate you'd be happy with are very different ways of expressing political preferences. Under“pick one”, any voter who likes several candidates has no way to say so. A single cross records your first choice – not who else you would support, nor how strongly you feel.

This matters to anyone who has ever voted tactically, who felt their vote did not reflect what they think, or who stayed at home on polling day because no single option spoke for them.

The alternatives – approving multiple options or ranking candidates, for example – are known as“smarter ballots”. These deserve serious consideration in any debate on electoral reform, as they could bring both benefits and risks.

In a 2020 study I conducted with colleagues, we asked 1,977 people living in the UK to vote on COVID lockdown policies. When asked to pick just one option, only 2% were able to cast a ballot that matched their true preferences. When using a“smarter ballot” that allowed them to express more preferences, 72% were able to make a choice that corresponded to what they wanted to say.

Research on elections has yielded similar results. In field experiments in two German elections, around 2,400 voters cast their official ballot, with one vote for a candidate and one for a party. They then filled in an“approval ballot”, where they could back as many as they liked. Roughly four out of five people used that freedom to back more than one candidate or party. Today's methods may therefore be doing a poor job of capturing what the electorate wants.

If you could better express what you think, you might feel more satisfied with your vote – in principle, at least. Yet some people appear to have a taste for simpler voting rules and to stick with what they know. The latter tendency is known as“status quo bias”.

In the German study, one voter who had backed the same party for years asked the researchers why they should change their voting behaviour. Status quo bias is particularly acute among older citizens, who are typically used to established electoral rules and may resist change.

However, smarter ballots appear to appeal to young people, as well as to politically sophisticated voters. The UK's own history fits this pattern. The 2011 AV referendum asked UK voters whether they wanted to switch to the“alternative vote” system, where voters rank candidates in order of preference. The proposal lost heavily, but about 48% of 18 to 34-year-olds voted Yes, against 30% of those aged 35 to 65 and 19% of those older.

Ballots can change results

In 2012, in experiments across three French cities, 2,340 voters tried out smarter ballots where they could approve or grade several candidates.

France's usual two-round system favoured“exclusive” candidates – those who are strongly liked by some voters and strongly disliked by others. The smarter ballots, however, favoured“inclusive” candidates who win broader support. In other words, the smarter ballots favoured broadly acceptable candidates, and pushed polarising ones down the list.

The German experiments point the same way. In Konstanz, the left-libertarian Pirate Party won just 4% of the official votes in the polling stations tested, but 21% of participants approved of it when using approval ballots. The Greens topped the approval vote, while the official winner, the CDU, fell to third in this alternative poll.

Transposing this on to a UK by-election, it's possible to picture a race where Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens split the vote on the centre and left. As a result, a right-leaning candidate could win with just a third of the votes. With approval ballots, the outcome could be different. Supporters could back all three of the centre and left options, and the winner might be more broadly acceptable to a larger share of the electorate.

Smarter ballots might even increase turnout: voters who feel heard may be less likely to stay at home on polling day. My experimental evidence hints at this, but it needs to be tested in real elections.

There is a real tension at play here. Rules that let voters express their views with more nuance than a single vote may run contrary to what they feel comfortable with, because some voters have a taste for simplicity and for what they already know. Tactical voting, which already exists under“pick one”, may take new forms too.

For smarter ballots to work for more than a small part of the electorate, and to overcome status quo bias, they may need to be easy to use and introduced gradually.

But the benefits for democracy could be significant: better representation of voters' views, less polarising results, higher voter satisfaction and, potentially, higher turnout. To understand these potential benefits and risks, we need more evidence, ideally from real UK elections.

Whatever the electoral reform commission decides, it should look beyond proportional representation and ask what voters are actually being invited to say. Next time you are handed a ballot paper, ask yourself: does this piece of paper let me say what I really think?

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