School Board Elections in England and Wales, 1870–1902: An Electoral Experiment?

Abstract The 1870 Elementary Education Act enabled the creation of school boards in England and Wales. Members were directly elected by the cumulative vote. This method gave each individual voter as many votes as there were seats on a school board, in some cases up to fifteen. The system allowed individuals to cast multiple votes, potentially giving all of them to a single candidate, and facilitated the election of candidates standing on their own, or supported by organized minorities. Cumulative vote elections endured until the abolition of school boards under the 1902 Education Act, by which time 2560 boards had been formed, comprising more than 15,000 members. As no central record of school board election results was maintained, individual results remained hidden in the pages of local newspapers until digitization has made their retrieval possible. This article is based on an original corpus of over 2500 election results from almost 300 school boards. It assesses the characteristics of this peculiar voting method as applied to school board elections, to what extent it achieved its aims and how these elections served as a testing ground for the development of electoral processes. It argues that the cumulative vote created an electoral environment which required strategic adjustment by candidate groups and emerging political parties in their organization and campaigning strategy, resulting in an impact on the development of the broader political landscape.