Letter: The Real Problem Is First Past The Post

Published on: 23 Jul, 2018
Updated on: 23 Jul, 2018

From John Perkins

In response to: Opinion: Unnatural Selection

The problem with our democracy, as I see it, is not so much party politics as the First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system.

This is often defended by claims that it leads to strong government – though strong can easily become tyrannical. Regardless, the system has returned few strong UK governments in recent years and the current one is particularly weak.

In fact, the difficulties caused by FPTP far outweigh any possible advantage. It’s erratic, with some parties getting more than their ‘share’ of seats while others get less, leading to governments with minority support – it’s possible for a party to gain power with less than a third of the vote and no government since 1935 has received more than 50%.

It can present an insurmountable barrier to new or small parties. Up to two-thirds of votes cast are “wasted” because they do not affect the result. Safe seats need not be contested by the incumbent, meaning the views of their constituents can be ignored. Where a seat is uncontested those who do not support the candidate effectively have no vote. And so on.

In local government, FPTP is a very poor way of handling elections because the number of voters is smaller, so the problems are magnified – those of over- and under- representation particularly so.

Even worse is multi-member FPTP. Further exaggerating the problems, it also breaks the principle of “one-man-one-vote” as a constituent in a 3-member ward gets three votes. In Guildford 17 of the 22 wards or about 90% of the electorate are multi-member, ie represented by more than one councillor.

An illustration of how it works is the council election in South Ash & Tongham in 2015. The three winning candidates, all Conservatives, garnered over 2,000 votes each, 21-23% of those cast. It’s reasonable to assume that many Conservatives voted for all three and there was little cross-party support, so probably no more than about 25% of the votes cast supported a Conservative.

25% of the votes cast in the ward is about 1.6% of those cast in the borough. Even positing that 33% of voters supported one or more Conservative candidate in the ward, the Conservatives gained 6.3% of the overall council seats from no more than 2.1% of the overall vote.

A Single Transferable Vote system, such as has been used in local elections in Northern Ireland for more than 40 years and Scotland for more than 10, would likely resolve all such imbalances.

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