In my last article I reported on the results of the 1st Card Vote and there’s some interesting insights to be learned.
Firstly the Affiliates and CLP votes are counted seperately, normalised as percentages and then added together, and expressed as a percentage. The Affiliates have 50% and CLPs have 50% of the final result.
1.84 million affiliate votes were cast, and ~385,000 CLP votes. That’s a lot of CLP votes missing. The card vote values should be based on membership (individual members in good standing) as at 31 December 2017, which was 564,000. (That seems a bit high based on press reporting, but the source is the Electoral Commission).
32% missing!
This means that ~32% of the membership were not represented. I was to hear later in he week that only 17 Scottish CLPs are in attendance. My CLP is fortunate in that it could fund a large delegation and considers that policy formulation is important but it’s clear that many CLPs either cannot afford to send a delegation and/or do not consider it important enough. In my evidence to the Democracy Review I argued that the cost of conference should be borne by the NEC, As Diana Holland, the Tresurer reported last year and was to report later; the Party is now debt free.
I know that some CLPs were initially allocated low delegate entitlements; I wonder if in some cases this was not spotted and the lowball numbers used on the card votes.
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Further evidence that my fear in the 1st comment is warranted; we were allocated about half our conference delegation to which we were entitled for London Region Conference. I think we are going to check the card vote.