The claim:
“If you look at the number of people who cast their votes, I got more votes than any other candidate. If you looked at this as a one-member-one-vote system, if you like, I got I think 170,000 votes, which is more than anybody else.”
Ed Miliband, Labour leader, BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show, 26 September 2010
The background:
Yesterday, the trade union vote and transfers from Ed Balls handed Ed Miliband the Labour crown by a whisker over brother David. It’s ignited debate about the election process again, with more calls for the party to adopt one-member-one-vote.
But, Ed Miliband argued this morning in an interview with Andrew Marr, he still won more votes than his brother overall, and added: “More people voted for me than for David Cameron in his election.”
So would a different system have been so favourable to the new leader?
The analysis:
Ed Miliband took 175,519 votes to David’s 147,220, which on the face of things does back up his claim, and means he got more votes than David Cameron who beat David Davis in their leadership race by 134,446 votes to 64,398 in a postal ballot of Tory members.
But things are not as simple as that.
The Labour voting splits down into three different categories – MPs and MEPs, Labour party members and affiliate members (mainly trade unions).
And a vote in each category is not of equal value. The votes are weighted so that each set of votes make up one third (33.333 per cent) of the final result, as shown in the diagram below. The number of votes cast for each candidate in each category is then worked out as a proportion of that 33.333 per cent (for example, 10 out of 30 votes would convert to 11.111 per cent) and the percentages across each category are then added up to give a total percentage of all votes cast for that candidate.
But that does mean that members can vote in more than one category – David Cameron’s parting shot to Harriet Harman in their final PMQs confrontation across the dispatch box was about the “beauty” of Labour’s democracy when she had four votes in different categories and her husband had a further three.
If you just look at the votes of Labour party members, the numbers tell a slightly different story – once the three other candidates had been eliminated, David had 66,814 votes compared to Ed’s 55,992. David was also ahead in MP & MEP votes – with 140 to 122.
It was the votes cast in the unions’ category that showed a real surge for brother Ed with 119,405 to 80,266, but, as Gary Gibbon found out last night, even their turnout was low.
The verdict:
So it’s true that Ed Miliband did win more votes overall than his brother, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he would have won if the system was different. Perhaps some of the top brass of the Labour Party who supported the elder Miliband wish the achievements the list from their time in office included fixing the voting system while the sun shined.
