Smoke

So, one hundred and fifteen cardinals have been carefully locked away till two-thirds of them agree on the identity of the new pope. As election processes go, this has much to commend it, though it is probably impractical to lock up the entire British electorate for, say, the next parliamentary general election or a referendum on whether we stay in Europe (as opposed to moving to whatever other continent takes our fancy: Australia would be sunnier, if nothing else). It would never work on a large scale: shut away with the rest of the voting population for perhaps weeks or months or years on end, we would likely never reach a consensus. And there would be no-one left outside the conclave to keep the country running, or send in food parcels, apart from small children and visiting foreign nationals. And prisoners, though presumably they would still be in prison, and hence not much use with the food parcels.

But the idea of just keeping going till you reach a result that most people are happy with, or at least – once they have lost interest with the whole process – resigned to, is attractive. Compared to our usual first-pass-the-post system, it takes away the temptation for tactical voting, at least until it becomes clear that no front runner can command a majority, at which point a compromise candidate begins to look attractive. I always thought it was a pity that we never went for a more proportional voting system when we last had a referendum on the subject: it seemed a sensible way forward, despite politicians from the main parties proclaiming it was the first step on the slippery slope to the breakdown of civilisation. But they do tend to exaggerate these things. And then they slipped in an alternative voting system into the recent election of police commissioners. And society didn't descend into anarchy. As far as I can tell.