The Electoral Systems in the UK and the USA - Coursework Example

The Electoral Systems in the UK and the USA The United s and the United Kingdom are two of the leading and established democracies in the world.Ironically, when it comes to the election of their highest officials, these two countries follow a seemingly less democratic system compared to their less developed counterparts. Whilst other democracies elect their topmost officials through direct voting, these two have adopted a system of indirect election where ordinary voters are precluded from voting and casting their ballots in favour of the persons they deemed fit to govern them. The US, for example, elects their president and vice-president through an Electoral College, a body of electors chosen statewide and whose vote represents that of their respective states. The UK electorates, on the other hand, are allowed to directly vote into Parliament their respective representatives called Members of Parliament (MPs) but do not directly vote into office top-level government hierarchy. The systems followed by these two are not without their share of controversies, especially in the light of recent events that had put these systems under the spotlight. Nevertheless, these electoral systems have survived for years, a testament that they are working and are not really seriously perceived as unfair. The US Electoral System The American president and vice-president both serve a term of four years and hence, these officials are elected every four years. The American president is elected by a system called the Electoral College. Electors are to be chosen from a list of citizens in a state, equal to the number of Senators and representatives allocated to it by law. The majority of the states elect their electors by direct statewide elections whilst a few states use a combination of direct statewide and by popular vote in the Congressional district. Each political party then nominates the names of their candidates for the presidency and the vice-presidency to the chief election official of every state for inclusion in the general election ballot. The people of the state then cast their votes on the first Tuesday of November in a presidential election year, to choose the party slate that should represent them as electors in the Electoral College in the presidential and vice-presidential elections. The actual voting for the president and vice-president happens on the first Wednesday of December of the presidential election year by the members of the Electoral College of each state which gather together in the state level. On January 6, following the presidential election year, the President of the Senate opens the electoral votes in the presence of the members of the House of Representatives and read them out. The candidate with the most number of votes and an absolute majority wins. In the event no candidate gets the absolute majority, the House of Representatives, elects from the top three candidates. Failing that, the Senators must cast their vote from among the top two contenders (Election Information: U.S. Presidential Election Process - The Electoral College). The UK Electoral System The electoral system used by UK national elections is called the “first-pass-the-post” (FPTP) system and is a plurality vote, meaning the candidate who gets the highest vote, whether representing a majority or not, wins the election for that voting area. A candidate is nominated for the MP elections by a proposer, a seconder and eight other electors, although actually most are nominated by political parties such as the Labour, Conservative and the Liberal Parties. In addition, he must pay a deposit of £500, which will be refunded to him/her if he gets at least 5% of the votes cast. There are 659 constituencies or voting areas in UK and a candidate who wins in his/her district by plurality vote becomes the MP of that area to the Parliament. The party with the most number of MPs is given the hand to form the government. General elections for MPs are called every five years but a general election may also be called if Parliament is dissolved before its fifth year of existence by the Queen at the advice of the Prime Minister to take place within 21 days after the announcement of dissolution (Durkin & White 2; Electoral System: UK; Peele 2004 261). In the event an MP seat becomes vacant prior to an MP General Election, a by-election or special election is called specifically for that post (Peele 2004 257). Criticisms against the US and UK Electoral Processes The US electoral system follows an indirect type of voting because of the existence of the middleman, the Electoral College, which comes between the citizen and the candidate. When an elector votes, he votes for the entire state. This deprives, to a certain extent, the citizen from exercising his right to choose and vote for the candidate he wants, a practice assailed as not truly reflective of democracy. In addition, the US electoral system is characterised by the winner-take-all rule, except the states of Maine and Nebraska, which is perceived as unfair. This rule provides that a candidate, who gets the most votes, whether by an absolute majority or a mere plurality, takes all the votes statewide. The implication of this is that an elector, who represents the state’s voters, may end up voting for a candidate he/she did not vote (Maisel 2007 13-16). The 2000 presidential elections, for example, engendered much controversy, not only because it was a neck-to-neck race but because there was a disparity between the electoral vote and popular vote results. The top two contenders, George Bush and Albert Gore, split the elections between them, with Gore taking the popular vote by 500,000 votes, more or less, whilst Bush took the electoral votes. Since the electoral votes, which follow the winner-take-all rule, officially determines the outcome of the election, Bush was ultimately proclaimed the official winner. The unfairness is evident because while the popular votes consist of the votes of individual voters, the electoral votes which do not determine the election outcome (Singh 2003 118-120). Table 1 US Presidential Elections Results, 1996, 2000, 2004 (Source: Presidential Elections) The British electoral system, on the other hand, has been assailed as disproportional and bias, a criticism stemming from the characteristic uniform single-member constituency in the UK. And in the UK milieu, constituencies vary considerably. The Isle of Wright, for example, has 104,000 electors, whilst the Western Isles has the smallest with 21,900. The ideal representative system should be one that is proportional to the size and number of the population, a practice unfortunately not rigidly followed in the UK. In the 1995 MP elections, for example, and as shown in Table 1, the distribution of seats is not proportionate and varies from one party to another. Thus, Labour which garnered a plurality vote of 43.3% had 419 seats, whilst the Conservatives which received 30.7 % of the votes had only 165 seats, not even half of the seats gotten by Labour. Reduced to ratio, Labour had 20 seats per 3% votes whilst the Conservatives had only 5 seats per 7% of the votes – indeed a very disproportionate distribution of seats (Johnston 2001 1-2). Table 1 Votes and Seats in the 1997 Elections (Source: Johnston 2001 2) Author Ronald Johnston made a study of the election results in UK from 1950 up to 1997 and concluded: elections between the years 1950 and 1997 were all marked by significant disproportionality; the disproportionality was increasing as the years progressed; both Labour and Conservatives were beneficiaries of this disproportionality as they were allocated more seats than the number of votes they garnered, although the latter had profited more than the former, and; the worst election in terms of disproportionality was 1997, which heavily favoured Labour (2001 2-8). Conclusion Recent events both in the US and UK have revealed that their respective electoral systems are flawed and not exactly the model of fairness. The 2000 presidential elections in the US have shown that a person, who does not represent the majority, or even the plurality, of the Americans can be elected to its highest office. The disparity between the popular vote and the electoral vote in that year is testament to this, an incident that materialised because of the inherent weakness of the winner-take-all rule of the electoral vote. Except in two states, the winner-take-all rule allows a winner by plurality to take all of a state’s electoral votes: a system that is unfair to a party whose following is spread all over and an advantage to another whose votes are concentrated in specific areas with higher electoral votes. A parallelism can be gleaned from the UK electoral system, where government constitution is dictated by the number of seats won by a party in the general elections of MPs. The 1997 MP general elections have likewise placed on spotlight the seeming unfairness, disproportionality and bias of its electoral system. All these stemmed from the fact that there is an unequal allocation and distribution of seats among the different constituencies, a distribution that is not proportional to the size and number of population. This disproportionality is to the advantage to certain parties which are strong in constituencies that are allocated more Parliament seats as shown in 1997, where Labour took 20 seats for every 3% of votes cast to their favour whilst the Conservative were given only 5 seats for every 7% votes they garnered in the election. Despite these inherent flaws in the respective electoral systems of the US and UK, these systems nevertheless, work and sustain their democratic nature. This is evidence by the fact that these electoral systems have survived through the years and were not enough to be major focal points of constant controversies except for the time when their weaknesses came to be highlighted. In the US, for example, its controversial nature came to the fore only twice, in 1888 and 2000. Except for these cases, American elections were normally peaceful and quiet. In the UK, the disproportionality and bias were highlighted by the 1997 elections but such weaknesses are often accepted or ignored as a mere price for other advantages that the system bring like a “strong government with clear mandate (Johnston 2001 198). References Election Information. http://www.uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/ Electoral System: UK. http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/electoral+system:+UK Johnston, R J. From Votes to Seats: The Operation of the UK Electoral System Since 1945. Manchester University Press, 2001. Great Britain: Ministry of Justice. The Governance of Britain - Review of Voting Systems: The Experience of New Voting Systems in the United Kingdom Since 1997. The Stationery Office, 2008. Maisel, L. S. American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press US, 2007. Peele, G. Governing the UK: British Politics in the 21st century. Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. Presidential Elections, 1789–2008. Infoplease. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781450.html Singh, R. Governing America: The Politics of a Divided Democracy. Oxford University Press US, 2003. US Electoral System Explained. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2236285.stm#power. Read More