GENERAL ELECTION IN BRITAIN

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29016, 3 October 1959, Page 10

GENERAL ELECTION IN BRITAIN

Early Returns As Pointer To Final Result

[By Dr. JOHN BONHAM, a Reuter Correspondent} LONDON, September 29. Britain’s 35,000,000 electors will choose either a Conservative or a Labour Government on October 8 —but at the polls they will have to rely on their memory to remind them which party they are voting for. At the polling stations they will find that the parties are not recognised by law. Each elector is handed a ballot paper with the names of the candidates in his constituency. The paper will state each candidate’s full name and address and also his or her occupation (including “married woman” if that is her only job). But nowhere will it tell the elector who is Conservative and who Labour, or any other Party designation.

It thus becomes an important part of the task of party workers to impress on the voter’s memory the name of their candidate. This is done by constant repetition by loud-speaker vans, hand-bills, posters and also by “window bills”—printed sheets which are supplied by the parties to their supporters to display in the windows of their homes.

The parties also use distinctive colours—blue on white for the Conservatives (faithful Conservatives are said to be “true blue”) and black on yellow for Labour (Labour avoids red because it is associated in the public mind with the Communists). But these colours do not appear on the ballot papers, which come from the official printers in uniform black on white.

Similarly, when it comes to counting the votes, the official in charge of the election in each locality (the returning officer) must scrupulously avoid mentioning parties when he announces the result. He says something like this: “Here is the result: John William Smith 22,534, Henry Arthur Jones 18,725. I declare Mr Smith elected.” To him it is a contest between Jones and Smith for the honour of representing his town at Westminster, continuing a tradition of great antiquity going back at least 700 years when knights and burgesses were bullied into making the dangerous journey to London to speak for their fellow citizens. But everybody knows it is a choice whether the Conservatives or Labour shall govern the country for the next five years. A Simple System In Parliamentary elections the British system is extremely simple. In each of the 630 electoral areas only one member is to be chosen by an average of about 60,000 electors. The voter, therefore, has to make only one mark (which must be in the form of an X) beside one name in a list which usually contains only two (a “straight fight” between Conservative and Labour) though this time thebe will be third candidates in nearly half the constituencies (“three-cornered contests”). Apart from the Liberal Party, which intends to fight more than 200 seats, there will be some Communists and Independents, so that on a few sheets there will be four names, but it is extremely rare to have more. Men have been known to become Members of Parliament by less than 10 votes in a total poll of over 40,000. There have also been instances where the winning! candidates polled only just overi one-third of the votes in a close three-cornered result. This situation has had two important consequences. Two Main Parties First, the dice are heavily I loaded against all parties other! than the two main ones and particularly against independents. No Independent has been elected to the House of Commons since 1945. Apart from the relative position of the top two candidates, all other votes are so much waste

paper and it is very difficult to persuade people to support someone who is going to be even a good third. The Liberals would like to change the system and have some way of adding up all the votes gathered in various places by the minor parties. Equally understandably, neither of the big parties favours such a change. Secondly, even a small move[ment of opinion in the country is I magnified in terms of party strength in the House of Com--1 mons. In any election there may be anything from 50 to 100 disi tricts in which the candidate won the previous election by less than 1000 votes in a total poll of say 50,000. It needs only 500 voters (1 per cent.) to change sides and the position is reversed as completely as if 20,000 had gone over. Study Of Elections In the period since 1945 the study of elections has become a very active branch of social science. Opinion polls have obtained a high degree of accuracy in relation to the actual result. From the percentage preferences of the whole nation as revealed by the polls, it is possible to calculate the probable result In terms of Commons Seats. How is this possible in view of the anomalies of the marginal seats? The answer is that at all elections held since the war the movement of opinion in the nation has been roughly uniform in all parts of the country. Political mathematicians could therefore assume that if, for example, opinion polls show a national swing of 1J per cent, in favour of the Labour Party, that swing will apply on the average to all the seats both “marginal’.’ and “safe.” So you can range all the 630 seats in descending order of favour to the Government and draw lines across different levels of swing. If there is a swing of 1 per cent, in a certain direction then a certain number of seats will change; if 2 per cent, then so many more. Swing Theory A table drawn up by one of Britain’s leading electoral statisticians, Mr D. E. Butler, shows, for example, that if in the coming election the nation as a whole swings 2 per cent, in favour of the Labour Party, Mr Macmillan’s Government will lose its majority in the Commons. A swing of 3 per cent, will be necessary to give Labour a small working majority of 25; on the other hand, a 1 per cent, swing in favour of the Conservatives would increase the Government’s majority of Commons Seats, at present 62, to over 100. Another of the uses of swing theory is to calculate the official outcome on the basis of the first few districts which announces their results. This is of particular interest to

newspapers because on the day of the poll there may be only a dozen seats which have finished counting by 11 p.m. and complete results are not known until the afternoon of the following day. In the past, Reuters chief statistician, Sydney Gampell, has produced from the first half-dozen returns the final result of the election with the seat distribution very near to what was finally announced some 18 hours later. Assumption Justified Such calculations must always be subject to the proviso “if these first returns accurately reflect the average movement of opinion in the nation as a whole.” Hitherto, this assumption has been justified and the latest word from the swing experts is- that there is no reason to suppose this election will be any different in this respect. As each 1959 result comes in, Mr Gampell’s analysis desk will calculate the result of the whole election based on declarations so far made, and it will revise the calculation as necessary with subsequent declaration. The conclusions will be reported progressively in Reuters world service. In the past the result so established by the first half-dozen declarations has been so accurate that subsequent results have merely confirmed it. Mr Gampell says: “It is not occult. After half a dozen declarations one is analysing how a quarter of a million people have actually voted, much surer ground than public opinion polls of how a couple of thousand people say they are going to vote.”