In 2009 the Conservatives spent £2,482,536 on election expenses for the European elections, just ahead of Labour on £2,302,244 with the Liberal Democrats on £1,180,883.

However, while the Labour figure was up 35% on the 2004 European elections, the Conservatives had cut their spending by 21%. The Liberal Democrat spending was 1% lower.

UKIP spent £1,270,855, a cut of 46%.

In the elections the Conservatives, UKIP and Liberal Democrats each gained a seat while Labour lost five. (Seat change figures based on notional results from 2004 taking into account reduction in number of MEPs in several regions.)

(From the Electoral Commission’s report in to the June 2009 elections, p.26.)

The figures for the different regions were:

South East 68% (+34%)
South West 68% (+33%)
East Midlands 67% (+34%)
Eastern 67% (+33%)
West Midlands 66% (+35%)
Scotland 63% (+39%)
Yorkshire & The Humber 63% (+37%)
North West 63% (+37%)
Wales 62% (+36%)
London 61% (+31%)
North East 59% (+38%)

The Isles of Scilly were the only area where turnout amongst postal voters was lower than that amongst non-postal voters (by two percentage points).

Source: Calculated from Electoral Commission data

Over the last few years a wide range of attempts have been made to raise turnout at elections in the UK. The broad conclusion is very simple: all-postal ballots raise turnout significantly (albeit at the cost of various drawbacks) and nothing else that has been tried does so. E-voting, early voting, voting by text, and many others: all been tried, all flopped.

However, there are signs that moving to voting at the weekend may be coming back on the electoral administration agenda.

It is easy to see why weekend voting may appeal. Fewer people work at the weekend which could mean people are more likely to have time to go and vote, plus in turn candidates are more likely to be able to get volunteers out campaigning on polling day reminding people to vote.

The main drawbacks are also fairly straight-forward. Having weekend voting on only one day would run into religious problems as, whichever day you pick, there will be some people in the UK with strong religious beliefs against voting on that day. If this is accommodated by having voting over two days – which could boost turnout further anyway – then this raises issues of extra costs and of ballot box security overnight.

None of the drawbacks are insurmountable and so the issue really comes down to the question of whether or not weekend voting would really raise turnout. Early voting – allowing people to vote on other days at a limited range of locations, ahead of a conventional Thursday polling day – has been tried and failed, which suggests that making the time and place of voting more convenient may not be that helpful. That is not the same as weekend voting though, so some hard evidence on the matter is needed.

Weekend voting has been discussed for a long time. Back in 1991, for example, the all-party Hansard Society’s report Agenda for Change discussed moving voting to a Sunday and highlighted that the Society of Local Authority Chief Exeuctives (SOLACE) backed this idea. Similarly, in 1997, the Home Affairs Select Committee recommended that weekend voting should be tested out.

Partly as a result of this, the system of election pilots that was then put in motion by the 1999 Home Office Working Party on Electoral Procedures and then the 2000 Representation of the People Act included weekend voting in the list of ideas to try out.

However, in the event only Watford in 2000 tried out weekend voting. It was not a success at raising turnout, though the evidence is arguable. All the other elections that May took place on the preceding Thursday, so the national and regional media coverage seen by people in Watford between the Thursday and their own polling days was that the local elections had already taken place. That media coverage may well have depressed turnout by making people think voting had happened rather than was yet to happen. In addition, six polling stations were moved from their usual locations. The net result is that the evidence is inconclusive – and anyway this was only one pilot.

The idea didn’t die though, and in the 20007 Governance of Britain Green Paper, weekend voting was raised as an idea to consider once again, triggering a consultation paper just on the idea of weekend voting in June 2008.

There is good justification for the continued survival of the idea – weekend voting presents a reasonable prima facia case which is worth exploring – but the fact that the idea has been talked about for so long but with so little actual testing is another example of overall how poorly thought through the electoral pilots were – basic questions were left unanswered whilst other ideas were repeatedly retested long after it became clear they didn’t bring significant benefits.

One reason for the lack of testing of weekend voting is that large discretion was left to local councils to decide what ideas they wished to test. The fact that only one opted to test weekend voting , even though extra government funding was available to pay for the pilots, hints at the administrative difficulties voting over two days poses for councils.

The 2008 consultation is listed by the Ministry of Justice as “closed – awaiting response” but now the Electoral Commission looks to be trying to kick some life into the issue again with its report on the June 2009 European and local elections.

In the report the Electoral Commission highlights that, “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.” Such findings have to be taken with a pinch of salt as it’s easy to say that in a hypothetical situation you would be more likely to do something that is generally considered a good thing to do. However, were the number much lower then that would have been a strong argument against weekend voting, so this finding certainly keeps the issue open.

Weekend voting may come with some increased risks of electoral fraud and the Commission’s report provides some important warnings not to be complacent on this front. With the present system, “more than a quarter of people (27%) said that they were very or fairly concerned about fraud at the 2009 European Parliamentary elections” and rather worryingly, “one in five Local Returning Officers, 73 in total, did not meet the performance standard relating to identifying and managing the risk of electoral malpractice.”

On that last point the Commission is pushing Returning Officers in the right direction and the report contains a number of welcome recommendations in that respect.

On weekend voting itself, the Electoral Commission recommends:

The UK Government should publish and consult on its strategic vision for the future of elections and electoral administration, which it had committed to setting out by the end of June this year. Given the interest expressed by non-voters in our public opinion research in opportunities to vote at weekends, the Government should set out its position on advance voting, as a supplement to a principal polling day, as part of its wider vision.

My own view is that – if properly tested – we’re likely to find that weekend voting raises turnout and cost without opening the door to electoral fraud. Whether the raised turnout is worth the extra costs depends on both the figures involved and your view on how important democracy is. But until we have some more evidence, it’s all pretty much guesswork.

The key is to compare like-for-like data. For example, in several parts of England the last European election were run using an all-postal ballot, in which all possible voters were sent a ballot paper that they could then post back. Whatever the drawbacks of all-postal ballots (and there are many), one thing they do is to raise turnout. So if you have an all-postal ballot one time and then a traditional election the next, one would expect a fall in turnout – and that fall in itself doesn’t tell us anything about the public’s increasing or decreasing interest in the election or any change in their willingness to vote.

The other complication is that some of the time, in some parts of the country, European elections have occurred at the same time as local elections. As local elections usually have higher turnouts, putting the two together pulls up the European election turnout. Again, it means that you can’t conclude that the public has got more/less interested in the elections if, between the two you are comparing, the elections got combined/split.

One final complication: the local elections that took place on the same day as the European elections this year were not in exactly the same areas as those that took place on the same day as the European elections last time.

So it’s no surprise that the overall turnout picture is complicated and, even a couple of weeks after polling day, it’s hard to draw an exact picture.

There are though positive straws in the wind. First, of the eleven regions in Great Britain, three saw turnout rise on five years ago, three saw it fall and a further five are clearly special cases. Four saw it fall but had all-postal voting last time, yet not this time, whilst the fifth (London) had the London Mayor and GLA elections on the same day last time, but not this. That’s certainly not a picture of unmitigated joy, but imagine if the journalist cliche was ‘turnout is on the up’. Don’t you think something would have been made of these changes, rather than the near-uniform silence?

Now, you might object that these figures don’t fully allow for the changing pattern of where there were local elections. Fair enough, but then let’s take two clear examples. In both London and Wales there were no local elections this time, there were local elections last time, but there were none again the time before. And how does turnout compare?

London 1999 23.0%
London 2009 33.3% (+10.3%)

Wales 1999 28.1%
Wales 2009 30.4% (+2.3%)

The London figure is particularly striking and (as far as I’m aware) has gone completely unmentioned in election reporting. It’s all the more impressive as there is good evidence from political science research that the more reports say people aren’t voting, the fewer the number of people who vote. Just imagine what the increase might have been had the media story been about increasing turnout.

As I said, there is plenty of nuances to the overall picture, so if you’ve got any further figures to throw in that help make the actual picture clearer, please do post up a comment.

(a) Slipped back to fourth place for the first time
(b) Saw their vote fall
(c) But say they are “pleased” with the result? and hope to “ride the momentum” into next year’s local elections [Updated: as highlighted by a comment below, the newspaper's use of paragraph breaks looks to have presented the last part of the quote from someone else as if it were the start of Richard Merrin's comments.]

(Here’s a clue: his name is Richard Merrin; his political party is the Conservatives.)

And for a final bit of fun, here’s what Richard Merrin said during the election campaign itself: “Do the Lib Dems really think the Euro election in Hornsey is a fight between them and Lab – the electorate don’t given our support”.

Yup, I plead guilty to being a Lib Dem who thinks that; see (a) and (b) above re. what “our support” really amounted to.

The European Parliament election is a big choice for Britain.

Labour’s arrogance has messed up Britain’s relationship with other European countries

The Conservatives and UKIP think that on its own Britain can face the economic storm, climate change, international crime, people-trafficking and terrorism

Liberal Democrats know effective cooperation creates prosperity – more than 3 million jobs in the UK depend on trade with other EU countries.

Liberal Democrats are working with our European neighbours to protect Britain and catch terrorists and criminals who operate across national borders.

Liberal Democrats know that countries have to work together to tackle climate change.

Vote Liberal Democrat and make a difference.

The manifesto contains an extensive section on how we would make Europe work better, including:

Spend Better, Crack Down on Fraud: Liberal Democrats want to see tougher controls on EU countries and the EU itself for the management of EU money. Both countries and EU institutions should be named, shamed and fined for repeat offences – for example the Rural Payments Agency for England and Wales has a poor track record of using EU funds. The EU must also end unnecessary spending on the organisation of the EU institutions themselves. Scrapping the European Parliament’s monthly move to Strasbourg and basing it permanently in Brussels would save around €200m a year. We do not see the need, in the current context, for any significant growth in the budget’s size, nor the abolition of the British rebate. But the EU budget is in urgent need of wholesale reform so that money is spent only on the things the EU really needs to do and there is a more rational system for contributions by member states. This means in particular further reform of the Common Agricultural Policy.

More Democracy, Stronger Parliaments: We want those who are elected, such as MEPs and MPs, to have greater power so that EU institutions can be held properly to account. That is why we support the Lisbon Treaty which gives extra powers for national parliaments to scrutinise and object to EU proposals. Because protecting our civil liberties is a priority for Liberal Democrats, we want the democratic European Parliament to have the power to scrutinise and amend EU justice and home affairs agreements such as on data protection, privacy and fundamental legal rights. We also seek greater involvement for ministers from Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales at European meetings where there are clear advantages, such as farming and fisheries policy…

Holding MEPs to Account: Liberal Democrat MEPs have been at the forefront of the campaign to reform the European Parliament. It was our MEPs who blew the whistle on the lack of openness and malpractice. Many of the reforms we have argued for will come into effect in July 2009. Liberal Democrats expect the highest standards of public service and honesty from all our representatives. That is why all Liberal Democrat MEPs and candidates have signed a binding Code of Conduct on the use of their parliamentary allowances. This includes making public the names of all staff, including family members, and strict adherence to the letter and spirit of the European Parliament rules. We expect all other MEPs to do the same. We will continue to work to reform MEPs expenses, ensure transparency and end the abuses that have undermined public confidence.

Only the Liberal Democrats have consistently put the case for Europe, doing so even when seeking to hold seats in parts of the country, such as the south-west of England, that are more euro-sceptic than others. Like his recent predecessors, Nick Clegg is unequivocal in his support for the EU. A strong vote for his party would show that parts of the electorate recognise the importance of Britain playing a positive role at the heart of Europe. On that basis alone the Liberal Democrats deserve to perform well.

Throw out bad councils, and vote for Lib Dems in Europe…
The most consistently wise party on Europe, [the Lib Dems] never flirted with Tory press populism, but that principled stand came at a high price. On the economy or crime co-operation, “stronger together, poorer apart” is a good Lib Dem pro-EU slogan. They best deserve the vote of every pro-European on Thursday…

It is bad for local government when councils are voted in or out regardless of quality, and bad too when virtually all councils are of one colour. It should take no nose pegs to vote in good councils and throw out bad ones. But local voters insist on using local votes to throw stones at national parties. So we look set for Conservative hegemony locally and in Westminster and European parliaments. To avoid that, vote whichever decent party locally can best hold the floodgates against a blue wipeout.

The online equivalent is to change your Facebook profile photo, Twitter avatar, instant messaging picture (and so on, depending on which services you use).

There’s a graphic below you can use. Just save it to your computer and then use it to change your profile picture / avatar / icon. You may have seen it spreading quickly already across Facebook and Twitter. So why not take a moment to add your own virtual poster to the display?

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