NI PR system is flawed, claims academic

Northern Ireland’s PR voting system – known as Single Transferable Voting (STV) - needs to be reformed because it does not treat all voters equally, a leading University of Ulster academic has claimed.

Professor Vani Borooah, Professor of Applied Economics at the School of Economics and Politics, said an anomaly in the system means that many voters’ second and subsequent preferences are disregarded when the votes are counted.

Under STV, voters rank candidates in their constituency in order, putting a ‘1’ against their first choice candidate, ‘2’ against the next and so on.

Professor Borooah pointed out that, in last year’s Assembly elections, 54% of the voters had only their first preference votes taken into account. Their other preferences were disregarded because their first choice candidates were not elected on the first count.

The system, therefore, favours parties who have candidates elected on the first count. In the Assembly elections of November 2003, the DUP received 15,186 more first preference votes than Sinn Fein and won six more seats (30-24). The Ulster Unionist Party received 5,827 fewer first preference votes than Sinn Fein yet won three more seats.

Professor Borooah said: “At least part of this can be ascribed to the fact that the preferences of DUP and UUP supporters were more effective in making their way through the electoral system compared to the preferences of Sinn Fein supporters.”

He said the STV system is said by supporters to be fair because it allows each voter to express preferences over all the candidates in a constituency and it takes account of those preferences in determining who is elected.

But, he argued, the second point is not true. Some voters have more than their first preferences taken into account; others have just their first preferences counted. Implicit in the system is an unequal treatment of voters.

“In essence STV creates two classes of voters,” Professor Borooah said. “So while all voters may express their preferences over all the candidates, such expression is meaningful for only some voters and meaningless for the remainder.”

If this system had been used in the last NI Assembly elections Sinn Fein would have won six more seats, the UUP would have had four fewer and the smaller parties would have lost two seats. The final party strengths would have been: DUP and Sinn Fein 30 seats each; UUP 23; SDLP unchanged at 18 and Other Parties 7.

Professor Borooah concluded: “What I am pointing up is the inequality among voters that the present STV system creates. How serious that inequality is in terms of results will vary from election to election.

“There are ways to overcome the anomaly that exists in the present system. One builds on the current system and the other, while giving voters a more limited expression of preferences, ensures all votes have an equal influence on the result of the election.”

(MB/GMCG)