UK General Election 2017: Why we need to change our method of voting

Key points in this article

We have a broken system of voting where a party with less than 50% of the vote can form a government with 100% rule.

of the vote can form a government with 100% rule. The Conservatives are the party most resistant to electoral reform. Labour is non-committal on the subject. However, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens pledge to introduce alternative voting methods in their 2017 manifestos.

to electoral reform. Labour is non-committal on the subject. However, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens pledge to introduce alternative voting methods in their 2017 manifestos. The Conservatives want to change the way mayors are elected by making the voting process less representative .

. The Conservatives will legislate to force voters to present a form of identification before voting. They say this is to tackle electoral fraud. Ironically, the Electoral Commission found the Conservatives guilty of electoral fraud in the 2015 election over election expenses. They were fined £70,000.

What’s wrong with out voting system?

We have a flawed method of electing a government that fails to represent large swathes of the electorate.

The method of voting we use in the UK is called first-past-the-post (FPTP). It’s a simple system: the UK is divided into 650 regions or constituencies. In each constituency we elect a single MP (Member of Parliament) to represent that area (and party) in Parliament. The candidate with the most votes in the constituency is declared the winner and becomes an MP.

Note: the candidate with the most votes does not mean a candidate with over 50% voter support. Quite the opposite in fact: most MPs are elected with less that 50% of the vote in their constituency.

Here is a randomly chosen example — the result for Bury North in the 2015 general election:

Conservative: 41.9%

Labour: 41.1%

UKIP: 12.4%

Greens: 2.5%

Liberal Democrat: 2.1%

The winner in this constituency: Conservatives. Percentage of voters who didn’t vote Conservative: 58.1%.

A first-past-the-post method of voting simply doesn’t work when you have more than two parties. As the results above show, when the winning vote is less than 50% of voters, there is no representation of the remaining (majority) votes — those votes essentially amount to nothing.

Analysis of the 2015 UK general election by the Electoral Reform Society — an independent campaigning organisation — showed that 331 of 650 MPs were elected with under 50% of the vote in their constituency, and 191 with less than 30% of the vote.

Read more: Election ‘most disproportionate in history’ say campaigners (BBC News, 1 Jun 2015)

Some of the problems in our electoral system

‘Safe seats’

Constituencies that always vote for the same party are described as ‘safe seats’. Some people don’t even bother to vote in a safe seat because they feel their vote will make no difference. In addition, opposing parties might put little effort in to campaigning in those constituencies if they are considered ‘unwinnable’.

Marginal seats

Marginal seats — where the vote could swing from one party to another in a close contest — are where parties spend a disproportionate of their time campaigning. These are the seats that may tip the balance in favour of them winning the election. This also means the attention given to voters is very unevenly (and one might argue unfairly) divided during an election: marginal seats get the lions share of attention while other regions are neglected.

Tactical voting

Tactical voting is another symptom of a broken voting system. Let’s say you live in a Conservative constituency and your preferred party, Labour, have no chance of winning in that constituency. However, another party — the Lib Dems — may just be able to defeat the Conservatives. So even though the Lib Dems aren’t your preferred choice, you decide to vote for them because it would be the best way of defeating the Conservatives. Put another way, you don’t vote for the candidate you prefer; you vote against the candidate you dislike the most.