On May 4th, the one third of voters in England who can be bothered will traipse off to their local polling stations to vote in this year’s round of council elections. They will cheerfully sign away their democratic rights with an X and, if they think of it at all, many will assume that, if a party polls 4 out of 10 votes, the voting system will ensure that they win 4 out of 10 seats.
Unfortunately, our inefficient Victorian First-past-the-post voting system fails to achieve this, with disastrous consequences for English local government. On most English councils, seats taken fail to match votes cast.
And crucially, because the relevant statistics are not readily available, these injustices are not published by the media, and so go unnoticed by the electorate.
Accordingly, in an endeavour to draw attention to the damage being done to local democracy by continued use of the First-past-the-post-voting system (FPTP), I have compiled an Awful A-Z of English Council Election Disasters, comprising a summary of the results for all English local authorities listed in alphabetical order.
This list is available to view at www.supervote.org.uk which is a small website I run in aid of voting reform. While it is essentially an amateur compilation, I believe this is the first time that a snapshot of the disparities between seats won and votes cast in all local elections across England has been attempted.
I am afraid the overall picture is quite shocking; some of these results are not so much undemocratic as downright obscene, far worse than the worst Westminster results.
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