Wales Is About to Hold an Election Most Voters Don’t Understand

In May, Wales will hold one of the most consequential Senedd elections since devolution began. After a quarter of a century of near-hegemonic rule, Welsh Labour faces the very real prospect of being unceremoniously removed from power.

With war waging across the world and the cost-of-living crisis still biting hard, Welsh Labour chose this moment to introduce an electoral system that almost nobody understands – a decision which neatly illustrates just how much the party has lost its way.

According to polling released last week, only 7% of people in Wales know that the next Senedd election will be held under the closed-list voting system. The other 93% are expected to wander into polling stations blissfully unaware of how their vote will actually be translated into representation.

This is not the fault of the public. It is the direct result of the Welsh Government introducing a voting system which might politely be described as the worst of all possible electoral worlds.

Under the new system, voters will no longer be trusted to choose between individual candidates. Instead, they will vote for a pre-approved list of candidates drawn up by political parties themselves.

In other words, voters no longer choose their representatives. They choose a logo, and the party decides the rest.

The people deciding who tops those party lists come from the same small political ecosystems that already dominate Welsh political life – the same circles that decided, with the characteristic confidence of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), that what Wales really needed was a voting system that gives voters less say.

It does not take a great leap of imagination to see who the likely beneficiaries of such a system are. The chances of independently minded or firebrand candidates breaking through become much slimmer – and Welsh democracy will be poorer for it.

Because Wales has a rich history of producing political figures who refused to treat party loyalty as the highest virtue. From S.O. Davies, expelled from Labour but re-elected by the people of Merthyr, to Nye Bevan, who built the NHS while never being shy about confronting his own party leadership. More recently, there were Peter and Trish Law, whose Blaenau Gwent People’s Voice electrified Welsh politics by defeating the Labour machine in one of its safest seats. And today there are figures such as Beth Winter, standing as a Community Independent in Pontypridd Cynon Merthyr after refusing to fall into line within Labour.

What these figures have in common is simple: their first loyalty was to the people who elected them, not to the party structures above them.

Closed lists make politicians of that kind much harder to elect.

Instead, the incentives favour those who have built their entire careers within the political machine itself: advisers, researchers, staffers, and professional insiders whose main qualification is loyalty to the organisation that selects them.

The ideal candidate under this system may soon be someone who has moved seamlessly from university politics to a think-tank internship to a party researcher role – without ever suffering the indignity of a job outside the Westminster-Cardiff Bay ecosystem. Exposure to the real world, after all, can be terribly distracting.

If your ideal legislature is a technocratic one full of highly educated policy wonks who have never had to meet a payroll, run a business, work a night shift, or navigate life outside the political bubble, then the closed-list system may well prove to be a triumph.

For everyone else, the outlook is less encouraging.

Tactical Voting Becomes a Puzzle Nobody Can Solve

The lack of public awareness about the new voting system also creates another, more practical problem: tactical voting becomes vastly more difficult.

Like it or not, tactical voting is now a routine part of our elections. Voters increasingly make strategic decisions to prevent a particular party from winning.

But tactical voting depends on one crucial condition: voters must understand how the system works in order to know who is best placed to stop the candidate they fear most.

When fewer than one in ten voters know how the electoral system will work in May, coordinated tactical voting becomes extremely unlikely.

Even for politically engaged voters, the new system introduces a level of complexity that borders on the absurd. Large multi-member constituencies, multiple parties, and proportional calculations interact in ways that are far from intuitive.

Trying to work out which party is best placed to stop another will require the kind of electoral arithmetic normally reserved for postgraduate seminars in political science.

Expecting the average voter to perform those calculations on the way to the polling station is, to put it mildly, optimistic.

Split the Vote, Change the Result

If anyone doubts how dramatically vote splitting can change outcomes, a recent local election result in Flintshire, North Wales, provides a neat illustration.

In the Leeswood county council by-election, Reform UK won the seat with just 22% of the vote in an eight-candidate race. The progressive vote fragmented across multiple candidates, allowing Reform to slip through the middle.

Yet on the very same day, voters in the same community were also electing a Leeswood community councillor. The contest was much simpler: just three candidates: Reform UK, the Conservatives, and a candidate from the progressive localist party Flintshire People’s Voice.

The result? A landslide victory for the progressive candidate from Flintshire People’s Voice, with Reform UK finishing a distant second.

Same community. Same voters. Same day. Completely different result.

And that example took place under the relatively straightforward First Past the Post voting system.

Now imagine trying to perform the same kind of calculation under a large closed-list system involving unfathomably large ‘constituencies’, several parties, proportional allocations, and a voting system that nine out of ten people do not know exists.

At that point, tactical voting starts to look less tactical, and more like guesswork.

All of this raises the obvious question – why introduce an electoral system nobody outside of Cardiff Bay wanted nor understands?

The answer, of course, lies in the question: Cardiff Bay wanted it, and the Welsh public will have to live with it.

If ordinary voters fundamentally don’t understand the system, they can’t ever really hope to control it.

And that may turn out to be the point.