Blog: What is going on with Island Wide Voting?!

For nearly two full days now deputies have debated not how they should be elected, but how the way they are elected should be decided.

That's a sentence the Plain English Campaign wouldn't like very much. Let me try to break it down. We're talking about island-wide voting. For years the States have tried and failed to come up with a system of island-wide voting that works.

• How could Guernsey's Island Wide Voting referendum work?

Why do they want one?

Well, they are pretty sure there's a public appetite for it. Voters would rather have greater choice when it comes to elections, and will want to support candidates they believe in, who aren't standing in their particular parish.

So the next question is how to create a system that offers that choice to voters, but is also easy to do in practice.

That has often been the criticism of 'full' island-wide voting, where on election day we can cast one vote for every seat in the house, which is 38 in total. That's a lot of votes. After you cast the first 10 or so, for people you genuinely support, what do you do with the rest?

Plus there's the issue of having to read the manifestos of every single candidate, rather than just those standing in your district. It's likely to be 70 or 80 manifestos and, honestly, who can bothered with that?

So goes the argument against 'full' island-wide voting, and those arguments are precisely what's stopped it being introduced in the past.

And that's what has got us to today's situation. The team tasked with bringing in island-wide voting feel the only way to get a decisive answer is to present islanders with several options, and hope one of those options finds enough support in a referendum to be declared the undisputed winner.

But that presents it's own risks. Firstly, we may not get a clear winner, and we know how people feel about a close-call referendum, it doesn't really put the matter to bed (i.e. Brexit). Secondly, if the referendum is too complicated because of the multitude of choices, people won't even bother taking part.

That is why some are calling for a simpler referendum, with just two options: the status quo or island-wide voting. But that takes us back to square one, where it is left to the States to decide what island-wide voting looks like and how it can be made to work, and we've already dealt with the problems that throws up.

Still, today the States will have to choose which type of referendum they want, so at least - after years of going round in circles - we should get a decision which will ultimately put the future of our electoral system in the hands of the public.

Here's another questions on island-wide voting that isn't addressed often enough: would it actually change the make-up of government?

The answer is arguably yes, but only a bit. I think the difference it would make is often over-estimated, but I can think of specific cases where an island-wide voting system would have meant a different outcome for a particular candidate.

One example that immediately springs to mind is former Education Minister Robert Sillars. He could confidently point to a lot of successes during his last term, including the introduction of free pre-school education, and significant improvements in GCSE results and validation reports at the island's High Schools.

But he had made one decision that enraged some of his electorate in the South-East: the closure of St Andrew's Primary School. I think closing that school cost him his seat in government, a seat he probably would have held onto in an island-wide election.

But those cases are the minority, and I would be surprised if island-wide voting would make a dramatic difference in the overall make-up of the assembly. Those who top the polls in their districts, would probably score highly island-wide. Most (though not all) of those who fail to get in on a district basis, would also struggle island-wide.