Tag Archives: first past the post

Mary Reid

Tactical voting works both ways

By Mary Reid | Thu 11th July 2024 - 1:41 pm

I want to thank all those Labour supporters who voted Lib Dem to ensure that a Conservative was not elected in their constituency.

I also want to thank all those Lib Dem supporters who voted Labour for the same reason.

The first time I ever voted it was for Labour. I had been a Liberal supporter from my teens, but my preferred candidate had no chance in my area in South West London. Labour selected a doctor who was black as their candidate, and he came in for all sorts of nasty racist dog-whistle and overt attacks during the election campaign. He seemed a decent man to me so I voted for him. Sadly he did not win, although I was pleased to see him take his seat in the Lords some time later.

The next time I voted I was living in Kingston where I have never had a reason to vote tactically.

Voters have become increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of First Past the Post and tactical voting. We have to thank all the vote switchers for holding their noses, in some cases, and backing the person most likely to defeat the Tory candidate. It worked.

So I was rather taken aback to see comments on social media from some party members moaning about the low Lib Dem figures in some non-target constituencies and complaining that the candidates didn’t do enough campaigning. They assume that the single figure percentages reflect our true base vote. This, of course, flies in the face of our clearly enunciated election strategy, and also the underlying assumption that Lib Dem voters should vote Labour where it would have the desired effect.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 31 Comments
Zagham Farhan

Our elections are broken. Let’s fix them!

By Zagham Farhan | Wed 10th July 2024 - 7:37 pm

I’ve always detested First Past the Post. As a child getting into politics, one of the first things I did was learn about all the voting systems out there, and each one I learnt about seemed better than FPTP. 

This election has brought home to me just how flawed this system is, and how rigged it is in favour of the political establishment. I’ve spent much of the last couple of the days reminding people that Labour got just 34% of the votes in this election. Just over a third of voters endorsed Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, but he’ll spend much of the next five years behaving as if he has the full confidence of the entirety of the British public, and an unlimited mandate to behave as he wishes. We must remember that he simply doesn’t have the confidence of the majority of the British people, and to hold Labour to account as such. 

The biggest losers to our electoral system this time around were Reform UK and the Greens. Both those parties’ seat counts don’t accurately reflect their national support in the slightest. Our system is deliberately exclusive, shutting out parties who aren’t able to geographically concentrate their support, and keeping the two main parties in power. In my opinion, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. 

While FPTP suited us excellently this time around, we need to ensure this doesn’t make us forget our core beliefs. Constitutional Reform has long been at the centre of the Liberal Democrat agenda, and it needs to continue to be. We’re a large block in parliament now, and that gives us a platform. We need to work with whoever might be willing, to ensure our elections are truly representative. 

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Richard Wood

First Past the Post failed English local democracy this year

By Richard Wood | Thu 20th June 2024 - 4:53 pm

This May the Liberal Democrats made remarkable gains in local elections across England. From winning the second highest number of seats in councils up for election (pushing the Conservatives into third place) to returning to third place in the London mayoral election and winning our first ever London Assembly constituency seat, the Liberal Democrats are on the cusp of regaining our place as Westminster’s third largest party come 4 July.

That rise is a major story of the 2024 local elections, one deserving more media attention. But the story of how the elections were skewed by First Past the Post must also be heard.

Once again our archaic voting system distorted the link between citizens and their representatives, an outcome that will be seen again in July. Take a look at Fareham council where the Conservatives secured a majority of seats on just 41% of votes cast. Then there’s Plymouth where Labour won a majority of seats up for election on 44% of the vote. Lib Dem-run councils aren’t immune from this either. That’s not to take away from the hard work of local campaigns across the country (if anything we often have to work harder under the current voting system and two-party system to win seats!), but to recognise we operate within a flawed system. First Past the Post consistently warps the link between seats and their votes just as much at the local level as at Westminster.

Furthermore, this May we also saw the consequences of the government’s Elections Act, which abolished the Supplementary Vote for mayoral and Police and Crime Commissioner elections. The Supplementary Vote was far from perfect – preferential voting would be preferable for single-member executive positions if we are to have them at all – but it gave mayors and PCCs a broader mandate than they otherwise would have. In the first ever York and North Yorkshire election this year, Labour’s David Skaith became mayor on just 35% of the vote – on a turnout of less than 30%. If we are to have directly elected executive mayors, it is vital they have a broad mandate to represent their region effectively. The status-quo isn’t delivering but there are alternatives to our failing First Past the Post system.

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Alex Hosking

FPTP is worse than you realised

By Alex Hosking | Wed 1st May 2024 - 8:17 pm

As we approach another election, it’s worth noting just how flawed First Past the Post (FPTP) voting is as a system for electing candidates in single-winner elections. David Cameron saw his career destroyed by not supporting Alternative Vote (AV), and now it appears Rishi Sunak will witness the rise of The Reform Party, potentially increasing the Tories’ losses at the election.

The biggest issue with FPTP isn’t merely that it encourages dishonest voting or that the concept of ‘most votes wins’ seems intuitive. Rather, its main flaw is that it can result in the election of the least popular candidate.

I have previously pointed out that first-past-the-post voting can indeed lead to the election of the least popular candidate. While discussing this in a forum with supporters of electoral reform, I was told, ‘That’s not true.’ It wasn’t that they insisted on this misconception; they simply assumed it couldn’t be the case until it was explained how. This isn’t an opinion, it’s a mathematically provable fact.

Unfortunately, some people, despite favouring other forms of single-winner elections, still view FPTP voting as at least an acceptable method for conducting elections.

In an election, our aim is to identify the most popular candidate, right? There’s an assumption that the FPTP winner is the most popular, while an AV winner might be more of a compromise. This narrative was propagated by the NoToAV campaign in 2011, with insufficient opposition from the Yes campaign.

In reality, the winner under AV is much more likely to be the most popular candidate. While FPTP often does elect the most popular candidate, it can also fail to do so. Although less common, AV can also fall short in this regard; however, it cannot elect the least popular candidate.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 36 Comments
David Green

The Independent View: Our voting system’s rubbish

By David Green | Wed 15th March 2023 - 11:30 am

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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Posted in The Independent View | Also tagged | 12 Comments
Chris Northwood

Why electoral reform and Black Lives Matter go together

By Chris Northwood | Thu 11th June 2020 - 6:57 pm

In a fair, free and open society, we would expect the makeup of our parliament and councils to reflect the demographic makeup of the area in which they serve, however this is not always the case. When some groups are over-represented, and others not, this can be symptomatic of systemic inequality, a potentially vicious cycle where an under-representation of voices from those the victims of this inequality means solutions to address it are not championed and prioritised.

By design, First Past The Post is designed to amplify many small majorities into a large majority on a representative body. By and large, many consider this feature to be unfair, but analysed through the lens of a system which already causes inequality, it also means the amplification of inequality such that those who either benefit by, or at least not penalised by, such a system are then over-represented on our electoral bodies.

This flaw of First Past The Post is one that’s not easy to rectify. When looking through a lens of gender, the mechanism of the All Women Shortlist was created to address this inequality, and by one mechanism it appears to have been effective – certainly within our parliamentary party, women have not only achieved parity, but have exceeded it! And in parliament as a whole, female representation has continued to rise. But the All Women Shortlist also has many critics, and puts into tension an individual freedom by suppressing a free and open selection process from all suitable candidates, with the systemic freedom of removing hidden barriers to entry for all genders.

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Liam Trim

Opinion: Voting reform must take a back seat to maintain #LibDemFightback momentum

By Liam Trim | Sun 12th July 2015 - 9:30 am

Standing at a North London bus stop the evening after Britain went to the polls, I overheard a man give his take, on David Cameron’s surprising majority, to a friend:

You see people that don’t live in cities just don’t understand…they’ll always vote right-wing.

As someone from the countryside who has now voted for a hat-trick of different parties, I took offence in a quietly British way to his throwaway analysis of the left’s failure to make gains outside of London. And yet of course he had a point, too.

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Matt Smith

Opinion: why the voters are right to be annoyed, but not at the Lib Dems

By Matt Smith | Fri 5th November 2010 - 3:20 pm

So, another week, and more policies announced that are definitely not Liberal Democrat in origin. Particularly one close to my liberal heart on the issue of paying for University education. Now that debate will rumble on and on, but I want to look more closely at whether the Lib Dems did indeed “sell out” on their principles, or whether they …

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Iain Roberts

Iain Dale’s voting system confusion

By Iain Roberts | Mon 23rd August 2010 - 8:33 am

Iain Dale yesterday posted a piece attacking the Alternative Vote system which doesn’t bode well for a well informed campaign.

That’s a shame because there’s a sensible debate to be had – with Lib Dems being the first to admit that the Alternative Vote system isn’t the best of all possible options, though most would rate it as a great improvement on what we have now.

Dale writes

There’s a reason only one other country in the world uses AV. It’s a half way house. It tries to be a PR equivalent of the First Past the Post system, but in reality

…

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Mark Pack

A graphical demonstration of just how broken our electoral system is

By Mark Pack | Thu 15th April 2010 - 10:20 am

I’ve blogged before about how if you are under 40, nearly half the seats in the country have never changed hands since you were born. That isn’t a system that gives real power to people’s votes. Nor is it a system in which MPs are held accountable for their behaviour.

Now this great map has been put together illustrating the point (click on map for larger version):

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