Dan 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

🚨IS THE NEW SENEDD VOTING SYSTEM RIGGED TO STOP REFORM?🚨 Many of our followers are excited by the prospect of a Reform UK victory at the next Senedd election. But is it that simple? Under the new proportional electoral system, other parties could work together to keep @RUKWales out. Let's take a look. Currently, there are two kinds of Senedd member: constituency and regional. At the last Senedd election, each elector had two votes - to elect their respective constituency and regional MSs. The constituency members are elected under the traditional first past the post voting system, under which the party that polls the most votes in each constituency wins the seat. At the last election, most constituency Senedd members were Labour, reflecting that party's dominant position. Regional members, meanwhile, are elected via a list system, to bring an element of proportionality to proceedings. The more constituency members a party wins in a given region, the fewer regional members it will elect. The result is that Labour has only two regional MSs, including Eluned Morgan herself. Most regional members are @Plaid_Cymru , @WelshConserv and @WelshLibDems . This system was deliberately designed to make it very difficult for one party to win an overall majority. Indeed, no party has ever done so. Labour has governed for the past 26 years, mostly with the support of Plaid Cymru. This is why we hold Plaid equally responsible for much of the wasteful spending that has occurred. Under the new, expanded Senedd, the electoral system is changing. It will be entirely proportional. Constituency Senedd members, elected under First Past the Post, will be no more. Instead, all MSs will be elected via a proportional list system. This makes the prospect of an outright majority by one party not just unlikely, but practically impossible. Wales will be divided into 16 "super constituencies". They will be created by combining each of the 32 parliamentary constituencies with a neighbouring seat. These constituencies will each elect six Senedd members, elected via a proportional system. In these new constituencies, a party wins seats proportionately to the vote share it achieves. However, it is not quite that simple. There will be a minimum threshold of votes that a party will need to gain in order to win a seat. So what will that threshold be? It's not an exact science, as it depends on the performance of each party contesting the constituency. It will, therefore, vary. However, given that each constituency elects six members, it will sit roughly between 12 and 14 percent of the vote. In practice, this means that a party achieving 14 percent in a constituency will win one seat there. A party gaining 28 percent will win two seats, and so on. Any votes that party gains sitting between these thresholds will essentially be "wasted". They will not count towards seats. Similarly, those votes won by any parties who fail to reach the threshold will also be wasted, as those parties will gain no seats in the respective constituency. But how does this disadvantage Reform? This is where it gets interesting. And it's not just Reform who are at risk of losing out. The polling website Electoral Calculus runs a rolling model of vote share and seat predictions across Britain. They do so by aggregating the data from all opinion polls, and using census and other demographic data to project it onto seats. As things stand, in a General Election they predict Reform will achieve 30.1% of the vote, Labour 20.2%, the Conservatives 16.5%, Plaid 15.3% and the Liberal Democrats 10.2%. Under the first past the post system used at Westminster elections, this would result in a decisive Reform victory. They'd take 25 seats to Plaid's 4. Labour would win just 3 seats and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats would win none. The next Senedd election, though, promises a radically different outcome. A recent YouGov poll put Plaid Cymru on 30%, Reform on 25%, Labour on 18%, the Conservatives on 13% and the Liberal Democrats on 7%. Plaid's higher vote share takes account of the fact their supporters are far more likely to turn out in Senedd elections than than those of any other party. Translated into seats, Plaid would win 35 seats, Reform 30, Labour 19, Conservatives 9 and Liberal Democrats 3. As you'll see, this is not the Reform clean sweep many are expecting. What's more, all parties fall far short of the seat total required to achieve an overall majority. In a 96 member Senedd, a party needs 49 to do so. A coalition will therefore be required. Plaid, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have already ruled out working with Reform, so there are no potential partners there. Reform and the Conservatives together total just 39 seats, so they fall far short. Plaid and Labour's combined 54 seats would, though, represent a comfortable majority. That would result in a continuation of the status quo, albeit with Plaid in first place, not Labour. Hardly the change we've been calling for. But is this new system deliberate? We strongly suspect it is. By choosing six member constituencies, it means there are many more "wasted" votes by parties from the right than those of the left. When it was devised, the Conservatives were the dominant right wing party, not Reform. It's therefore fair to say the system wasn't designed specifically with Reform in mind. The impacts on right wing parties, though? Very possibly. We also note the 12-14% threshold is far higher than the 7-8% required under the proportional element of the existing system. This disadvantages other, smaller parties, including @AbolishAssembly, @propelwales and @Gwlad_Gwlad. Again, it's not unreasonable to conclude this was deliberate. An inbuilt Labour-Plaid hegemony is almost certainly more ingrained under the new system than previously. Many Reform supporters, and those of other parties, may well read this and be disheartened. They may think there is no point in voting at all. We state categorically that this is not the case. If either Plaid or Labour come first, they will attempt to use it as a mandate for the extreme, ideological policies they wish to impose. We cannot allow this to happen. Whether you intend to vote Reform, Conservative, Abolish, Propel or Gwlad, it's vital you go out to the polling station and do so. Staying at home plays right into Labour and Plaid's hands. The reason we've shared this post and analysis is to explain how to new system will operate, and the reasons we suspect it was devised. The Senedd likes to champion its consensual way of doing things, rather than the adversarial nature of Westminster. There's certainly more agreement among the parties than we see in the House of Commons. Our view is this leads to worse scrutiny and poorer public services for us. If Reform wins the Senedd election, and is blocked from governing by a Labour-Plaid cabal, it will be a democratic outrage. It will represent a broken system that is not fit for purpose. It's certainly worth watching how this plays out.