There are no perfect choices in human affairs. We are always in the game of trying to find the least bad option. You look at the flawed alternatives, realising that all of them will fall short of some imagined utopian possibility. And then from amongst the imperfect choices on offer, and having weighed the various shortcomings against each other, you pick your poison. In a world of limited resources and near on unlimited human desires this is the only game in town. Picking your poison.

And yet a fair few people seem to overlook this reality of the human condition. For instance, in my professional life as a law professor you’ll find all sorts of legal academics across the Anglosphere who take a rather dim view of democracy and democratic decision-making. They like to point out its flaws. All that electioneering. Compromising. Grabbing half the loaf that’s on offer but forgoing the rest. People less educated than themselves making calls. The list goes on. But what these people virtually never do is to consider the flaws and imperfections of the other decision-making methods they favour. They compare a flawed democracy against an imagined utopia or perfect, idealised sort of decision-making process. There is no careful accounting of the flaws and drawbacks, say, of judicial aristocracy, rule by judges (a much-favoured alternative in the legal academy I can assure you). Because there most certainly are flaws when unelected and unaccountable judges make social policy decisions. Judges are not accountable in any clear way and cannot be removed if they make things worse rather than better. Or if they favour one narrow slice of society over others. Judges also lack information because they lay down rules and make big-picture calls in the course of adjudicating specific disputes with just the two parties in front of them. I’ve always been a Churchillian about democracy – it’s the worst form of government and type of social policy decision-making except for everything else ever tried, including juristocracy, supranational bodies, an unaccountable administrative state, puffed-up Human Rights Commissions, some utopian Voice body, and so on and so forth.

Or consider this general point in the context of the recent election in Britain. Again, there is no perfect voting system. Different democracies choose different voting systems. All of them have flaws and imperfections and the choice a country makes is a ‘picking your poison’ one. Britain (along with Canada and the US) operates the democratic world’s oldest voting system, First-Past-the-Post. It is designed to produce majoritarian governments. Voters only get to tick one box. The system amplifies the rewards of winning votes and seats. A party that takes a fair bit under half the votes often wins a majority in the legislature. There are big minuses and pluses to this. Once every few decades you can get near ridiculous outcomes – Keir Starmer’s British Labour Party recently took one-third of the overall votes and yet won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, a massive majority. (And his Labour Party actually won fewer votes in victory than the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party did twice in defeat in 2017 and 2019. In fact, only a fifth of eligible voters opted for Starmer’s Labour, many choosing not to vote at all.) That’s an undoubted flaw and a big one. But don’t forget the trade-offs. Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science, once said that the most important feature of democracy is being able ‘to throw the bums out’ (something, to editorialise, you can never do with puffed-up, activist judges). Boy-oh-boy does First-Past-the-Post let you do that. And boy-oh-boy did Boris and Sunak and 14 years of useless Conservative Party British governments deserve that fate – for their thuggish Covid lockdowns alone they deserved it. Throw in the fact it’s near on impossible to think of anything the Tories did during that time for their conservative base – a half-executed Brexit excepted – and this voting system was ready to punish them big time once Nigel Farage’s new Reform Party got over 15 per cent of the vote and split the right-of-centre tally.

Now the main alternative to majoritarian voting systems is proportional ones (ie 20 per cent of the votes gets you about 20 per cent of the seats in the legislature) used throughout Europe. These, too, have big imperfections. No party is ever likely to get a majority on its own. So parties can promise whatever they want before the election knowing all the coalition-building happens afterwards. Away from any input by mere voters. (By contrast, in majoritarian systems the big-tent compromising and manifesto-building happens before elections and is available to voters.) So proportional voting systems look ‘fair’ at first sight but put a lot more power into the hands of party elites. Worse, they make it very hard to throw the bums out. A party might go from 34 per cent of the vote to 21 per cent – obliteration in First-Past-the-Post – but just work to be part of a larger coalition of tiny parties. The Prime Minister may well survive.

All in all, and admitting that First-Past-the-Post threw up a woeful outlier of a result in Britain last month, I still prefer it to proportional systems. It lets you discipline the party elites. And it brutally punishes a party that for 14 years promised to cut immigration, lower taxes, and undo the Tony Blair constitutional innovations and never did any of them. Likewise, in the US it gives you a clear, unavoidable choice that the elites cannot fudge.

And that leaves me a few words to mention Australia’s voting system for the House of Representatives. We have a preferential or ranked choice or ATV voting system. This is incredibly rare in the democratic world. Only we and one small Pacific Island state have it. ATV is a close cousin to First-Past-the-Post. It is designed generally to deliver majority governments. When I first arrived here I thought it might be the least-bad of all voting systems. I was wrong. Yes, it measures who voters do not want as well as whom they do. But it has a really big flaw, one that only occasionally becomes apparent and may well explain why no one copies it (the Brits explicitly rejecting it in a referendum under David Cameron). You see if both major parties start taking the same positions on policies there is virtually no way for new Nigel Farage-like Reform Parties to spring up and do well enough to really punish an established party. ATV works as a protection racket for the two main parties. If you put the Libs fourth and Labour fifth you have voted for the Libs. And they know it. In Britain and Canada and the US a conservative voter can really punish a party he or she believes has lost its way by just ticking the box of some insurgent or humorous joke party. You can’t do that here. You have to choose between the two established parties. And my-oh-my don’t the Libs at the state level know it, freeing them up to take no hard positions on anything. Ever.

The voting system poison I’d pick is First-Past-the-Post. But next I’d hold my nose and go for a proportional system. Our ATV system worked when the Libs offered an alternative on Net Zero, on immigration, on not being thugs during pandemics. But these days it’s a protection racket for the two big players. Not a poison I’d pick.