A victory for democracy?
Promodo
June 29, 2016
When I was asked to write this column before the outcome of the referendum was known, I was imagining that I would want to focus on the way counting officers and their staff had managed the process of planning for and administering the referendum, the pressures the system is facing and how administration of elections is threatened by increasing demand and reducing resources. These are critical points and I will return to them in the future, but the focus now has to be on the wider implications for the democratic process arising from the referendum.
I have long held and expressed the view that participation in the democratic process is not primarily an issue of the administration of electoral registers or the voting process, but has always been a matter of the relevance of the political process to people’s lives and views. This is not a view that has made me popular with politicians more interested in constituent boundaries, numbers of registered voters, the maintenance of parliamentary and local government seats. I thought my point had been made for me in the Scottish referendum where the political debate, the issues and the opportunities and threats caught the imagination of the electorate; including those who were traditionally considered at the margins of the democratic process. Those considered “hard to reach” like young people, on which we have spent considerable resources “reaching out to” found their own way to the electoral register and the polling station. They did so because the issues mattered to them and they felt their opinions could and should matter. The turnout of 84.6% was the highest recorded for an election or referendum in the United Kingdom since the introduction of universal suffrage. And yet the point was soon lost. The status quo had been maintained and in the post referendum period the focus returned to the implementation of the individual electoral registration and the impact on numbers registered.
The EU referendum shares some of the same features. There was a high turnout at 72%, there was interest and engagement across the age spectrum of voters, the issues appealed to the heart as well as the head and issues mattered to people. But the critical difference is the result was to break with the status quo and break with the establishment position. It’s not possible to return to business as usual. The political discourse created a connection with issues of immigration, nationalism and control over priorities. These feelings and issues having been unlocked and will not easily recede because the political campaigning has finished and the result declared. There is a real sense in the immediate aftermath of the referendum that campaigners on both sides are now feeling the outcome and the reasons for the outcome as uncomfortable and inconvenient. The parliamentary petition to call another referendum, the immediate distancing from pledges made during the campaigning, the interest in voter intentions are all expressions of the unease being felt. There is no national focus on the administration of the election in the way there was on registration immediately before the election. There is no national focus on administrative issues or problems that arose on election day. The politics of the decision is deafeningly loud. That’s how it should be. It’s the relationship between the politicians and the electorate which defines democracy not the administration of elections.
An electorate which is increasingly engaged in the democratic process and increasingly demanding of that system will create an appetite for change and improvement in the administration of the registration and electoral process. If politics matters to the electorate then issues of convenience, accessibility, usability, security and resourcing of the system will matter as a consequence. That would be a very different dynamic than most politicians and returning officers have experienced in modern times. Only time will tell us whether the unexpected result of the referendum has unexpected consequences for the health of our democracy.
Dave Smith
Managing Director
Promodo Ltd
29 June 2016
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