London, May 08: Britain’s indecisive election has shown the need for reform of the country’s voting system and of procedures that are wide open to abuse, observers from developing countries said on Friday.
Britain is fond of criticising democratic failings in developing countries. But the boot was on the other foot on Thursday as 11 monitors from Commonwealth countries, observing British elections for the first time, saw how hundreds of voters were turned away from busy polling stations on Thursday.
Britain’s first-past-the-post system, in which the candidate who gains most votes in a constituency wins a seat in parliament, failed to produce a clear result for the first time since 1974.
The opposition Conservatives, who won more seats than the ruling Labour Party but fell short of a majority, offered to work with the smaller Liberal Democrats in government.
“In general, we found the results reflected the will of the people and that the voting process ran smoothly … While one of our teams heard about bullying and intimidation, the atmosphere on election day was generally calm,” the observers said in a statement.
Innocent Chukwuma, a civil rights activist from Nigeria, said the observers had seen a lot of trust in the British system and no sign of corruption.
“But is the system susceptible to corruption, vulnerable to abuse (and) malpractice? Yes,” he told a news conference. “Maybe it’s high time the system is looked at again.”
“No democracy, however well established and old, is infallible,” he said.
PROBE
Britain’s electoral watchdog launched an investigation on Friday after hundreds of voters were turned away from busy polling stations. A late rush left some stations unable to handle queues of voters before the 10 p.m. (2100 GMT) closing time, sparking confrontations with officials.
Ababu Namwamba, a Kenyan member of parliament, praised the integrity, calmness and civility of the election but highlighted vulnerabilities in the system.
He said voters were not required to show identification, postal votes were open to fraud and insufficient staff at polling stations could easily be overrun at busy times.
Lisa Hanna, a member of parliament from Jamaica, said Britain’s first-past-the-post system had not thrown up a winner in this case as it was designed to do. “The need for electoral reform and to revisit the debate about the electoral process has to now come into play,” she said.
Electoral reform could be crucial to negotiations on forming a new government. The Lib Dems have long pressed for a switch to a system of proportional representation so that their strength in parliament would better reflect how many votes they won.
The Commonwealth groups 54 countries, mostly former British colonies. The observer team was sponsored by the Royal Commonwealth Society, a cultural organisation, and the British arm of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, representing legislators, not by the Commonwealth itself.
—Agencies