Scotland is one of the world's premier electoral-reform testing labs. From May 2007 there will be four different voting systems in operation: First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) for Westminster, Additional Member System (AMS) for the Scottish Parliament, Single Transferable Vote (STV) for local elections and closed list for elections to the European Parliament.
This voting-system variety has caused some confusion, but it has also enabled observers to see how different voting systems can work in practice in the UK.
For CAER, the opportunity to see STV in action in Scottish local elections from May next year is especially important.
STV was adopted for Scottish local elections as part of the Local Governance (Scotland) Act, passed in June 2004.
Local election wards will return either three or four councillors, with no changes being made to the boundaries of the 32 local government areas or to the number of councillors elected to each Council.
In order to aid the successful implementation of the new system, CAER continues to work with Fairshare, a cross-party campaign originally established with the aim of persuading the Scottish Parliament to implement STV for local elections. In addition, the Society has established a Scottish office in preparation for May 2007. Contact details are available on our contacts page.
After it was decided to adopt STV for local elections, the then Secretary of State for Scotland, Alastair Darling, established the Arbuthnott Commission on Boundary Differences and Voting Systems, under the chairmanship of Sir John Arbuthnott.
The Commission’s remit was to examine the consequences of having four different electoral systems in use in the same country, and of having different sets of constituency boundaries.
The Arbuthnott Report was published on 19th January 2006. Among its recommendations was that future European elections in Scotland should be contested under . It didn’t go as far as recommending that Holyrood elections should also switch to STV, instead opting for a more cautious ‘wait and see’ approach, suggesting that the current AdSTVditional Member System should be kept under review and that STV should be considered as a future change.
Arbuthnott also suggested that consideration should be given to the use of a proportional voting system for Westminster, but did not pursue the issue further, as it was not within its remit.
Since the Arbuthnott Commission's report was published, its findings have been briefly debated in Westminster, with David Cairns, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, promising that "early in the next Session the Government will introduce a definitive response to the Arbuthnott report."
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