In March 2020, I was invited to give in person evidence to the Senedd Cymru committee on electoral reform during its fact-finding mission to Edinburgh. The Committee were particularly interested in the operation of the single transferable vote (STV) in Scottish local elections, something I have done a considerable amount of research on.

STV has become an important electoral system in the Welsh context. An expert committee recommended its use for Senedd elections as the institution sought to expand and reform. Local councils in Wales are also being given the opportunity to replace the first-past-the-post electoral system with STV in the Local Government and Elections (Wales) Bill 2019.

The COVID-19 pandemic meant that the in-person evidence session was unfortunately cancelled. However, I was invited to submit written evidence. This has just been published and can be found here. It summarises the research I have undertaken into STV in the 2007 and 2012 rounds of local elections, and extends that to the 2017 round. It examines some of the Scottish criticisms of STV, as well as providing evidence that Scottish voters have used their preferential STV ballot in a manner that might be expected from voters with a longer history of using the system.

Alistair Clark, 16th June 2020

In mid-2019, I acted as Advisor to the Scottish parliament’s Finance and Constitution Committee in its Stage 1 scrutiny of the Referendums (Scotland) Bill. The Bill proposed framework legislation for conducting referendums which were within the competence of the Scottish parliament.

The bill was widely interpreted, by the media and critics, as legislating for a second Scottish independence referendum. Indeed, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had, prior to the bill’s introduction, set out an ambition of holding such a referendum by the end of 2020. However, the Scottish government argued that it provided a broad framework for referendums, and therefore had wider application than just a second independence referendum. It was a large and complex piece of legislation, covering calling a referendum, the electoral laws by which any referendum would be conducted, and regulation of campaign financing and conduct.

My new article, ‘More than IndyRef2? The Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020’, just published open access in Political Quarterly discusses this important piece of electoral legislation. It traces the evolution of the bill, through the various stages of scrutiny to being passed as the Scottish parliament’s final decision in 2019. It discusses its final provisions and argues that there are several innovations in the final Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 worthy of broader note in electoral law more generally.

The article can be downloaded and read open access at this link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-923X.12861

Alistair Clark, 9th June 2020