{"id":2003,"date":"2021-03-20T16:59:26","date_gmt":"2021-03-20T16:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thewitnessexet.wpengine.com\/?p=2003"},"modified":"2021-10-10T15:01:53","modified_gmt":"2021-10-10T15:01:53","slug":"the-problem-with-first-past-the-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/?p=2003","title":{"rendered":"The problem with ‘First-Past-the-Post’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The\nvoting system for the Mayor of London is set\nto change to first past the post<\/a> from 2024, matching what is currently used\nfor general elections. This is a move away from the more proportional system\nused currently, supplementary\nvote<\/a>, which essentially allows voters to rank their top two preferences for\nMayor, and if after the first round of votes no candidate has more than 50%, all\ncandidates except the top two are eliminated and second preference votes are\ncounted. This system enables a result that is satisfactory to a greater\nproportion of the electorate, as the majority of people will have one of their\npreferred candidates, unlike under first past the post where only a plurality\nis needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\ncomparison, first past the\npost<\/a> is relatively simple. You vote for your preferred candidate, then\nwhoever gets the most votes wins your constituency, and the party who wins the\nmost constituencies wins the election. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\nsounds fair enough until you look at how this tends to play out in reality. A\n\u2018safe seat\u2019 is where only one party stands a chance of winning, and so the votes\nfor other parties are worth less than in other constituencies because the\nwinner of the general election isn\u2019t the party with the most votes, it\u2019s the\none with the most seats.  Conversely, in\na less secure seat, you can have the vote split very heavily, resulting in a\nwinner who does not represent most of the constituency- this is illustrated by\nthe 2015\nBelfast South<\/a> election whereby the winner only got 25% of the vote, meaning\nthat 75% of voters in the constituency had their vote mean very little for the\nfinal result of the general election as a whole. As a result of this potential,\na very clear democratic deficit is created as a great deal of people\u2019s views\nmay not at all be represented in Parliament purely because they live in a safe\nseat or simply because their preferred party didn\u2019t win their seat and they\ndon\u2019t feel they can trust in their MP to fight for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is so bad that, at the extreme end of the issue, the overall winner of the general election may not have even won the popular vote- such as in 1951 when Labour won 200,000 more votes<\/a> but still had fewer seats than the Conservatives. In fact, even when the winning party got more votes than the others, the election isn\u2019t always fair. In 2015, the Conservatives got a majority of seats but only 37% of the vote, meaning that not even half of the country actually voted for the government. This result wasn\u2019t even an outlier: since 1970, no government has had more than 45% of the vote. In other words, since 1970, there hasn\u2019t been a government that most people have actually voted for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put\nsimply, first past the post doesn\u2019t work. Of course, to say that it doesn\u2019t\nwork depends on what it actually aims to do, but it is known to contribute to\nvoter apathy, damaging turnout, and also representation. It\u2019s hard to imagine a\nworld in which those don\u2019t qualify the system as a failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\ncan also see the failings of first past the post in the role it plays in\ncreating an apathetic electorate. If you live in a safe seat and your preferred\nparty has no chance of winning, your options are basically either to tactically\nvote for a party that you dislike less than the likely winner, or you have to\nvote for who you want, knowing that the impact is next to nothing.\nUnsurprisingly, this hopelessness has a tendency to breed apathy, further\ncontributing to the democratic deficit by discouraging voter turnout. This can\nbe proven by looking at turnout in elections with other electoral systems, such\nas STV which has\nbeen known to have 13% higher turnout<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, it is abundantly clear that first past the post is deeply flawed, so the fact that it is being expanded into London without the consent of Londoners is catastrophic, and perhaps even symbolic of the issue. First past the post is not a democratic system- it allows the victory of parties that not even half of people like and encourages people in safe seats not to vote. For the system to be undemocratically thrust upon a city could not be a more fitting way of introducing the system. In 1998, 72% of people voted for the system currently used to elect the Mayor<\/a>, yet first past the post has given the government the power to simply get rid of it with no need to consult the people and without having even won most London seats in the election<\/a>, purely because the Conservatives have a majority in Parliament. There are plenty of alternatives to first past the post already in use in the UK, so it isn\u2019t as if there\u2019s no alternative. The unfortunate truth is that first past the post benefits the two main parties by encouraging a two-party system, so change is unlikely to come from them, but that hasn\u2019t stopped campaigns for electoral reform from cropping up, so perhaps one day we can see some positive change. <\/p>\n

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The voting system for the Mayor of London is set to change to first past the post from 2024, matching what is currently <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":2004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,12,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-british","category-latest","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}