We're hopeful that a National Commission on Electoral Reform will be announced after the summer break.

To guide our engagement with the work of the National Commission, and to ensure that this represents our membership, we are inviting our members to join us for a discussion on voting systems on Wednesday 22 July. 

We want to know which systems you support, which you oppose, and what you believe are the most important principles in choosing a new voting system. 

We invite you to prepare by taking a look at the material on voting systems on our website. You may want to consider the following questions:

  • What do we mean by a ‘constituency link’ in PR systems and how important is it?
  • How important is it that people can vote for candidates and not just parties?
  • Would we support multi-member constituencies? – If so, how big should they be? 
  • Some systems like AMS create two types of MP: constituency and regional. Do we want this?
  • List Systems are common in Europe but some use closed lists (ie, it is parties rather than voters who choose which candidates appear high up on the list and are most likely to get elected). Is this acceptable?
  • Open list systems, that offer the voter a choice of individual candidates as well as party, can have much longer ballot papers. Is this acceptable?
  • Systems where electors get two votes (for example AMS) mostly use FPTP for the first vote, but they don't have to - what features of a two-tier system might work best for the UK?
  • Do we need minimum thresholds before a party can gain representation?
    Can we move to a PR system without totally abandoning existing constituency boundaries?

We aren’t going to be able to design a specific system on the night – but we do need to know what our members would find acceptable.

Please register for the meeting and we'll send you a Zoom link to use on the day.