The format for this year’s Election Nights on TV in the UK was set in the 1970s. Since then it has got glitzier with computer graphics, but all the original ‘horse race to power’ defects have persisted and got worse, as social media now does a far better and quicker sorting out of what matters. LSE’s Patrick Dunleavy offers eight suggestions to cut out some of the repetitive blah blah of Election Nights – and offer all voters better quality information on the results and on how the UK’s flawed voting system works.

We are days away from the PR blitz by the BBC, ITV, and SKY about how their Election Night offerings will be bigger, better, glitzier than ever. But the truth is that all three are wedded to a format that has not changed substantially since the 1970s and will yet again produce some of the most boring and pointless television moments. These will include:

• The first ten minutes will give us the Exit Poll prediction solely in terms of a likely majority for Labour and vaguer projections about Conservative or Lib Dem seats. On the basis of the awful 2019 performance (criticized by Pippa Norris and me here), what the broadcasters solely relying on Exit Poll data will not tell viewers for the next several hours (for some unfathomable reason) is what the party national vote shares may be – not even with a margin of error. Apparently only seats won or lost will matter, despite the wholly artificial inflations or deflation of parties’ representation accomplished by the first-past-the-post system.
• The first two whole hours of the programme will then feature wall-to-wall chat sessions by politicians or pundits offering gems like

–        ‘Of course, the Exit Poll is only a poll, it’s real votes in real ballot boxes that       count’.

–         ‘Here’s how our battlefield graphic will work once we get some results in’.

–         ‘We’re not taking anything for granted’ [but I can’t disguise my smugness].

–        ‘I don’t think we should read too much into the Sunderland South result’ (but let me do it anyway.)

–         ‘The night’s not over yet – let’s wait and see how my party fares in a region with only very late-night results’.

• When the results start to flow in faster (following the 2019 pattern), announcers will rush to verbally read out the actual numbers of votes scored by every party in the Lower Throgmarton Marsh constituency and show a complex numbers graphic of that as well – even though no one watching knows anything about the place. This year even the people who live there will have a hard time knowing what to make of these numbers, because “The recent constituency reorganization moved some wards out to neighbouring Upper Throgmorton and Wilbraham”, as someone around the table will hasten to tell us. And, of course, since turnout levels and constituency electorate sizes themselves vary, viewers can learn next to nothing from the raw numbers of votes cast for parties. Most of us I guess are reduced to puzzling through the fresh-from-the PA- phone call in the constituency numbers slide to find which complex number is actually largest before it disappears from view.
• Finally, the morning-after shows will feature endless repeats of just the “seats won and lost” tables. Commentators will do everything possible to NOT ever tell viewers what the parties’ actual vote shares were. On current opinion polls this will involve a lot of over-excited talk of a Labour landslide out-Blairing Blair or Thatcher, and a crushing Tory defeat. All of it will be fueled by every journalist’s absolute ‘horse race’ conviction that elections only matter in terms of their power outcomes – not what happened to voters’ sincerely cast ballots, nor what the outcomes say about our democracy or contribute to its future health.

An ‘extreme’ result?

These missed opportunities to do something more intelligent on the most important night for UK democracy in five years really do matter. In 2024 they matter more so than usual because the omens suggest that a very unusual night for UK democracy (one needing a lot of careful explanation) is about to unfold. It seems likely that Labour may win power by a seats landslide on (say) 37 per cent of the vote. The Tories on (I’d guess) 28% and the SNP (maybe also on 28% in Scotland) will lose masses of seats in former ‘strongholds’.  The Lib Dems will gain significant numbers of seats on (say) 14 per cent of the national vote; but Reform with the same vote share will win no seats or maybe one seat (as did UKIP before it).

The UK’s ‘plurality’ voting system currently promises to behave almost as unstably in how it awards seats across parties as it did in Scotland in 2015 – when the SNP gained 56 out of 59 Westminster seats in the country on 50% of votes, and the other three ‘big’ parties in Scotland won just one seat each. Another parallel may conceivably be the Canadian election of 1993 when the unpopular ruling Conservatives (holding 169 seats  out of 259 seats, won on 43% of votes at the previous 1988 election) saw their vote plummet to just 16 per cent, giving them exactly 2 seats.

So the UK’s voting system will very probably generate an extreme and wholly artificial outcome in terms of seats. I expect that as many as 40 per cent of UK voters will find that their votes have got no recognition at all in their nation or region – either because their party has won no or few seats anywhere or because of ‘wall-to-wall’ single party dominance in the regions where they live (such as the UK’s biggest urban areas this time).

How will the gleeful journalists gifted with such a dramatic story treat it? There will be absolutely no careful explanation of how the voting system wreaked its outcomes – only the uproarious ‘slam dunking’ of “You guys won and you guys lost”, “You got nothing, etc., etc”. The message from every TV channel and broadcaster will be that the powerful are fully legitimized, the losers are rightly humiliated, and the people who voted Reform or for ‘no hope’ parties in their area are rightly presented as ‘wasted vote’ absolute losers whose wishes deserve to be binned outright.

Eight suggestions to do better

Last time in response to our critique the broadcasters and their pundits pleaded only, “Election Night was ever thus. What on earth could we ever do differently?” Well here are eight practical ideas for the broadcasters to try and keep their eye firmly on votes outcomes, and to convey more factually and honestly to voters and citizens how UK elections work:

1. For each constituency, report only percentage vote shares across candidates, arranged in a descending numerical progression (winner at top and numbers decreasing down the table) chart. Keep the whole chart accessible – don’t show even a single decimal point. (Actual vote numbers should go on the website, not on the screen).

2. Scale every constituency chart (showing percent votes by parties) so that it shows the 50 per cent line – so all charts are scaled in the same way and viewers can see at a glance who won and how far the winner passed or fell short of majority support in their area. A good addition might be to then show the winner’s vote share against all other parties’ vote shares, with the 50% level prominently displayed.

3. Let’s celebrate and distinguish those MPs who actually have majority support locally. Let’s point out by contrast candidates who win with only minority local support. And show a chart that is regularly updated of how many genuine majority winners there are, versus MPs elected with only a plurality of votes.

4. For every constituency outcomes chart, for goodness sake give us a side-bar UK map with the constituency centroid shown as a blob on it – so that we know where it lies in the country. Every election night blogger on X/twitter can already do this, so perhaps this year the TV channels will be able to catch up? If they were really ambitious, the background UK map could show cities and towns and rural areas in different colours, giving viewers more instant visual information about what kind of area this is.

5. Report national vote shares prominently at all stages of the night.

• If the Exit Poll really cannot be tweaked to offer up a national vote share, then for the first 2 to 3 hours report the average of the last opinion polls done. You can caveat that with verbal comments if the Exit Poll or swings in the early few results suggest any large deviations from that average.
• As the night wears on, try and update the national vote share estimate using real constituency outcomes as early as possible.
• And in the morning after shows, give equal prominence to parties’ national vote shares as to their artificially inflated or repressed seats totals.

6. And please, at long last, let’s get some really sound estimates for tactical voting (from the Exit Poll or last minute opinion polls). Are people backing their first or second preferences parties? And how many people see themselves as being forced by the voting system to modify away from ‘sincere’ voting in order to get a more acceptable local result?

7. At each of the same three stages organize an in-depth discussion of:

• how the voting system is likely to operate (given Exit Poll and before results flow in),
• then how it seems to be operating as results flow in, and why it may be differing from expectations, and
• how it actually did operate (for the morning after shows).
• Get serious commentators on for each of these discussions, who are political scientists, pollsters or intelligent non-partisan journalists who are expert on voting (there are some), plus democratic campaigners and activists. Keep the parties’ ‘blah blah blah’ rigorously away, and don’t use partisan “junk tankers” funded by obscure Tufton Street sources, nor hack journalists who are known to just slavishly tow a party line.

8. Above all, throughout the night the broadcasters need to take seriously the fact that for all voters the election is a battle of ideas, deliberations, hopes and fears for the future, and visions of what millions of ordinary people want our democracy to achieve. This goes far beyond the chat show’s fixed obsessions with tax rises or leadership tropes or campaign mishaps – and yet normally on Election Night we see and hear next to nothing about it. Talking to lots of ordinary voters on Zoom (or even ‘vox pop’ a little bit) about what they hoped for and what they got instead is a great way to shine a light on the multiple meanings of what voters did.

How well broadcasters seek to inform and educate all citizens and voters will be crucial for the immediate future of Britain. If they just do it as before, as another parade of overly complex numbers, or an auto-legitimizing series of “battlefields” graphics and mock-ups of the Commons chamber, then it will just repeat the awful 2019 “horse race for power, only seats matter” productions. Miss this opportunity to do better, and  I am afraid that within as little as six months a Labour government elected on (say) 37 per of the votes could run into the sands of a hostile partisan and pretty-far-right press, who will begin effectively denying their mandate. Plus, the now- further-right Conservatives (and Reform if they are still around) will outdo each other in how far they try to take their uncomprehending (“We were robbed”) supporters down the path of democratic backsliding and over-polarization.

All these points above will be taken very seriously in the blogosphere, by expert folk interested in democratic quality and operating with a tiny fraction of the TV networks’ resources. I guess that most real opinion formers will hang out online for the night, talking to the best of the audience about things that matter, with the ‘horse race blah blah’ on just as background. So, if the broadcasters fluff their 2024 opportunity to do better again, as I sadly expect they will, it will not only be an avoidable dent in the health of our democracy but also another nail in the coffin of terrestrial TV and other legacy media.

This post represents the views of the author and not the position of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Photo by Elijah Merrell on Unsplash