by Mark Pack

The political reform agenda is likely to be dominated by a spring referendum on the alternative vote and a promise to bring proportional representation to the House of Lords.

But there are two much smaller ideas the government should look to pilot during the year; 2011 should see weekend voting and increasing the number of polling stations tested out.

Raising turnout in public elections is a widely shared aimed that rapidly runs into two difficulties.



First, though people across parties usually share a general support for higher turnout, when it comes to targeting people living in specific areas or from specific communities, raising turnout rapidly comes with an obvious electoral impact to the advantage or disadvantage of particular candidates and parties.

As a result, state-funded efforts to raise turnout tend to be at the rather general and bland level rather than getting into the sort of individual contact and marketing that you get in other areas.

The second problem is that – courtesy of a long series of pilots tried out during Tony Blair’s time as Prime Minister – we know that an awful lot of ideas do not do much, if anything, to raise turnout. Early voting in supermarkets, voting by text, online voting and many more were tried out – and all failed to raise turnout by any significant degree except for one: mandatory all-postal voting.

That has a major impact on turnout but comes with other questions about fraud and freedom within a household to vote as you wish.

Weekend voting has been once briefly trialled (in Watford a decade ago). It was not a success then, but there are good reasons to try again given the details of how the trial was conducted – especially holding the weekend elections just after the usual national round of local elections, with the result that residents in Watford were seeing in all the national and regional media about how local elections had just taken place.

The Electoral Commission has give the issue a gentle nudge now and again too, pointing out for example that in the 2009 elections, “Thirty-six per cent of non-voters said they would be more likely to vote if they had the choice to vote at a weekend”.

2011 is a chance to put all those beliefs and thoughts to the test with a few well chosen pilots, most likely in council by-elections.

Increasing the number of polling stations is a greatly under-researched area, and has not ever been tested directly in Britain. However, aside from the common-sense thought that shorter travel distance to polling stations may increase likelihood to vote, there is also some practical evidence.

An analysis of voters in Brent over 20 years found: “we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the siting of polling stations”. Research in the US also points to a similar conclusion. (hat-tip Stuart Wilks-Heeg)

It may be that neither weekend voting nor more polling stations raises turnout. But there is good reason to believe that they may – and neither comes with the drawbacks of mandatory all postal voting nor with the well-established track-record of failure of internet and mobile phone voting.

If the government wants to do more than issue vague exhortations to people to vote, it should put both these ideas to the test.