What precisely is wrong with the UK's voting system?
Once you know how the voting system works, you will understand why it's malfunctioning.
To begin with, we may call it a general election but in truth there are 650 separate "stand-alone" elections held on the same day, one in every local constituency, each electing one Member of Parliament who invariably belongs to a political party. The voters in each constituency put an X alongside the name of their favoured candidate on their ballot paper and the constituency's Member of Parliament is the candidate with the most votes. The party with the most Members of Parliament wins the election and forms the government. Simple!
But there's a problem with our Victorian "First-past-the-post" voting system. It still works of a fashion, but it has never been very efficient, wasting huge numbers of votes shoveled into it and producing a rather rough end result. Moreover, this wheezing contraption has never been modified to accommodate the greater political sophistication of today's voters who are more educated, less deferential & trusting, better informed and more eclectic in their politics than they were a century ago.
What is most noticeable, however, is that seats won by a party do not necessarily reflect the level of support for that party, nor are outcomes consistent or certain, as can be seen from the table in the previous web page.
So, let's take a look under the bonnet to see what's wrong and what can be done to put things right.
Blues v Reds- and then Yellows, Greens and Purples!
Up until some time after the last war, consumer choice for the man in the street was very limited in everything from holidays to hoovers - and politics. In the South West Norfolk constituency of 1951, for example, voters there had a choice of just two candidates in that year's general election. The result was as follows:-
| Denys Bullard | Conservative | 16,970 votes | 50.7% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sidney Dye | Labour | 16,528 votes | 49.3% |
In individual constituencies up and down the land in 1951, most voters were offered similar meagre choice: 1,376 candidates stood in 625 seats, an average of just 2.20 candidates for every seat. At least Mr Bullard enjoyed the support of just over half of those who voted.
However, let us fast-forward seventy three years to the 2024 General Election result in South West Norfolk, which showed a very different picture:-
| Terry Jermy | Labour | 11,847 votes | 26.7% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liz Truss | Conservative | 11,217 votes | 25.3% |
| Toby McKenzie | Reform UK | 9,958 votes | 22.4% |
| James Bagge | Independent | 6,282 votes | 14.2% |
| Josie Ratcliffe | Liberal Democrat | 2,618 votes | 5.9% |
| Pallavii Devulapalli | Green | 1,838 votes | 4.1% |
| Earl Elvis of East Anglia | Monster Raving Loony | 338 Votes | 0.8% |
| Gary Conway | Heritage | 160 votes | 0.4% |
| Lorraine Douglas | Communist | 77 votes | 0.2% |
The number of candidates there mushroomed to nine, reflecting the profusion of parties that have sprung up over the decades; there are now (August 2024) about 375 parties registered with the Electoral Commission. Consequently a record 4,515 candidates stood in the 2024 election, an average of 6.9 candidates per seat.
So, while the UK has changed beyond recognition in so many ways since 1951, we are still using the same old Victorian voting system to elect our national government and clearly it can no longer cope with the increased number of parties in the Premier League of British politics, as the available vote splinters into smaller and smaller shards within the confines of a single member constituency.
As a result, South West Norfolk is now represented by a Labour Member of Parliament who squeaked in with the support of just 27% of those who had voted.
Our voting system is only 26% effective!
When you go to the polls for a general election, you have just one vote which is counted only for your constituency's contest. It does not otherwise influence the national result; it is not added to any national total for the party of your choice. So, if you were a Green voter in South West Norfolk at the last election, yours was one of the 73% of the votes cast there that had no effect on the result, nationally or locally.
Is this typical? Yes, it is; in the 2024 General Election, 85% of the MPs were elected on a minority of their constituency vote. Moreover, we mustn't forget that there are other places, known as "safe seats", where the result is a forgone conclusion, like in Liverpool Walton, where Labour's Dan Carden won with a massive 71% of the vote in 2024. As impressive as his majority of 20,245 votes had been, they were surplus to his requirements, they didn't count in any national tally, and so represented wasted votes of a different kind.
Preliminary calculations suggest that 58% of all the votes cast in the 2024 General Election were for losing candidates and a further 16% cast were surplus to the winners' requirements, which means that only 26% of the votes cast nationwide were effective.
650 lotteries to elect a government!
Considering the results in South West Norfolk, Liverpool Walton and all the others in between, it seems more by good luck than good management that past governments have in any way reflected the national vote for parties in a general election, which any man in the street would suppose should determine the outcome. Two models illustrate what can happen when individual constituency results are lumped together to obtain a national result:-
| Albion City Model Election | Red Party Votes | Blue Party Votes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Albion North Constituency | 15,000 | 18,000 | BLUE WIN |
| Albion Central Constituency | 29,000 | 4,000 | RED WIN |
| Albion South Constituency | 16,000 | 17,000 | BLUE WIN |
| TOTAL ALBION CITY VOTE | 60,000 | 39,000 | |
| Reds win more votes... | ...but Blues win more sets |
The "Albion City" model above shows how our voting system can misbehave even in a straightforward 2-party contest in 3 seats. In this model, the Reds' 2 to 1 superiority across Albion in terms of votes is not matched in terms of seats because much of the support for the Reds is represented by surplus votes uselessly piled up for the Reds in Albion Central, so the Blues win more seats.
A similar mismatch actually happened in the 1951 General Election. Back then, the Liberals and Nationalists were not in contention, the nationalists were nowhere, and the Green and Brexit/Reform Parties and the issues that spawned them had not yet entered the political arena. It was a straightforward fight between Labour and the Conservatives but the voting system yielded the following national result:-
| 1951 General Election | UK Votes | UK Seats | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | 13,948,883 | 295 | Labour won more votes... |
| Conservative | 13,718,199 | 321 | ...but the Conservatives won more seats! |
| Liberals and others | 928,512 | 9 |
A slim majority of voters had elected to continue with the post-war Socialist project but the voting system gifted the election to the Conservatives instead.
It gets worse....
The system's creaky enough with just two parties in contention but, once other parties join the fray, it degenerates into a game of chance, as shown in the second model, where 3 parties are contesting 3 seats.
| Britannia City Model Election | Red Party Votes | Green Party Votes | Blue Party Votes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Britannia North Constituency | 12,000 | 11,000 | 10,000 | Red Win |
| Britannia Central Constituency | 7000 | 12,000 | 14,000 | Blue Win |
| Britannia South Constituency | 13,000 | 11,000 | 9,000 | Red Win |
| Total Britannia City Vote | 32,000 | 34,000 | 33,000 | |
| Reds win the least votes... | Greens win the most votes | |||
| Total Brtiannia City Seats | 2 | 0 | 1 | |
| ..but win the most seats! | ..but win no seats at all! |
Clearly there is something very wrong with a mechanism that has the potential to give the party with the least votes the most seats and the party with the most votes no seats at all, even with exactly the same number of voters in each constituency.
