Put simply, British elections are unfair. Some would argue that the current electoral system has beneficial effects regarding simplicity and how government is run, but there’s no denying that it produces quite a disproportional outcome between the votes that are cast and the seats that are gained, especially hurting minority parties. In order to consider how we can fix this disparity, we need to look at why it is the case in the first place.
This chart shows the difference between parties’ vote share and seat share in the 2019 election. The greatest source of disproportionality is between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives; the Lib Dems have a vote share of over 11% but only around 1% of the seats. Note that this is broadly representative of the most common outcome in disproportionality: since 1988 the overall disparity has mostly been between the Lib Dems and the winning party.
We initially have to understand two key elements of our voting system. Firstly, we use a system of ‘First Past The Post’ (FPTP) which simply means that each voter gets one vote and the candidate with the most votes wins. Secondly, and more importantly, the country is divided into 650 constituencies which each elect a single MP who is in theory a local representative. However, since parties need 326 seats to govern with a majority, party affiliation is generally the most important thing in an election, so most (if not all) members belong to a national party.
To get to grips with the issue of disproportionality, we have to consider that if there is a disparity between the total votes cast and the seats that are won as a result, some of the cast votes must not count - ‘wasted’ votes so to speak. There are predominantly 3 ways in which a vote for a party does not count towards its national result or help to elect an MP for that party.
The first is perhaps the most counter-intuitive concept, but one that is most valid: votes for the losing candidate do not count and are thus wasted. For example, in Boris Johnson’s constituency of Uxbridge and Ruislip South, the 37% of voters who cast a vote for the Labour candidate did not get a chance to help the Labour Party’s national result - they were not in sufficient number to oust incumbent Tory Johnson. Millions of votes are wasted because the vote share across the country is fragmented between small constituencies: anywhere where a Labour candidate didn’t win, Labour votes were down the drain, and anywhere where a Conservative didn’t win, Tory votes were likewise wasted.
Of course, in many cases these wasted votes largely cancel out - in 2019 Labour were not under nor over-represented in seats compared to their vote share. But this cannot be taken for granted: for example, in February 1974, Ted Heath’s Conservatives got 200,000 more votes than Wilson’s Labour Party, but Labour had a few more seats (although not a majority, and an election had to be called later in the year).
With just 52% of the vote, the Conservatives win 100% of the representation because the winner has to take all with just 1 seat up for grabs. But this means that the other 48% of the electorate does not have their views represented. (Almost like another recent electoral event…)
The second way of votes being wasted can be illustrated by looking at Jeremy Corbyn’s seat of Islington North. The fact that a candidate can win a whole seat with just 40-50% of the vote means also that there is no extra benefit to a candidate who wins with the support of a higher proportion of their electorate. Corbyn did just that - winning with 65% of the vote in 2019 and an even higher nearly 75% in 2017. But he was not rewarded for this strong support and from the point of view of his party, votes were wasted: the 26,000 people who need not have turned out for him in Islington were very much needed in the marginals across the rest of the country where Labour were losing key strongholds, with the collapse of the so-called ‘Red Wall’.
However, I would argue that this way, not being able to capitalise on strong local support, is only an unfairness on paper. It is important, if a party is to govern for the whole nation, for that party to be supported across the whole nation - it would be bad if a party very strong in some areas (like London) were to be able to rule despite dissent amongst voters elsewhere. This was essentially the fate of Labour in 2019; they had still fairly strong support in London and some other cities, but were losing support in the Midlands, the North East and Wales.
With 65% of the vote, representing a majority of 26,000 votes, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had no trouble retaining his London seat. However, these votes were not able to be distributed where they were most needed, and some of his colleagues in other areas did not fare so well.
The third way in which votes can be wasted is by far the most commonly highlighted and in some ways the most important. The reason minority parties like the Lib Dems are routinely underrepresented is because minority party votes are so often wasted. This is in effect a derivation from way 1, that losing votes cannot count towards national totals. The issue is that a party (like the LD) can get 15-20% of the vote in every constituency, but if it does not have the most votes in any single area, it could theoretically get no representation at all, despite all these votes, which are wasted.
In Cornwall, which was in 2010 a Lib Dem stronghold, the representation was surprisingly equal, except that the minority Labour and Green representation was ignored in seat terms.
However, in 2015, after the Lib Dem vote halved, they lost all of their representation and the area was very disproportional, with the Conservatives having 43% of the vote but 100% of the seats - because they won by a small margin in every seat.
So there are broadly 3 ways in which votes are wasted: votes for a losing party, excess votes for a winning party, and minority party votes. These votes being wasted all stem down to two key facts: that we have single-member constituencies and that, as a result, the winner takes all within a constituency.
Just having one member per area is key to all of this; because a candidate can win with 40-50% of the vote and have 100% of the one seat, half (or more) of the electorate is unrepresented. When we look at what countries with fairer electoral systems have, this is an important difference.
These three constituencies are included just to show how the electoral system allows the winner to take all - in each area a party has around 50% of the vote but has won 100% of the seat. This is particularly striking when presented graphically in this way.
So - how do we solve this issue? Well, as strongly alluded to, multiple-member constituencies are needed to provide a proportional result both locally and nationally. And Ireland provides an example of this done fairly well. It elects between 3 and 5 members to each of its 39 constituencies, and provides a relatively proportional outcome nationally, as a result.
A map of the 2020 Irish general election. Notable is the fact that no area is fully represented by 1 party - simply because no area is so heavily in support of a single party that all of its seats are taken by it. The British electoral system however, would imply that every area is completely in support of one party, because there is only one representative.
The Irish system uses the single-transferable vote to elect the members in each constituency. This is in effect a voting system specifically designed to address the problem of wasted votes, by transferring the voter’s single vote when it becomes wasted. In an area with 5 members, voters get 5 preferences. Based on the turnout and number of seats available, a quota is calculated and if a candidate gets that many first preference votes, they are immediately elected.
But then, to address way 2 of wasted votes, any excess votes beyond this quota are redistributed to the next preference. To address ways 1 and 3, votes for a candidate once they cannot win, are also redistributed to the next preference. There are as many counts as are needed until all seats are filled. This provides a largely proportional result both within that area and across the country, ensuring that few votes are wasted.
Australia is one of a few countries to use STV in some elections. In this constituency, 5 seats are up for grabs so the voter gets 5 preferences. The big parties have put up all 5 candidates, whilst some minority parties have just 2 or 3 candidates, with the hope that their voters will put another party as a 3rd or 4th preference.
It's still worth considering that, whilst having 3 members is better than 1 member, higher numbers of members per constituency still allows for better proportionality, up to a point at which the negatives outweigh the positives. I would argue that having 5 or 6 members per constituency is around the correct number: any more (by having fewer constituencies over a larger area), and extremist, very minority parties risk being represented. Some argue that First Past The Post has an advantage as a voting system by keeping out very minority groups, but this can definitely be retained with a more proportional system, as rounding still keeps out the smallest parties.
My calculation based on 2016 and 2020 Irish general election data, is that areas with 4 or 5 members fare better in terms of proportionality than the 3-member constituencies. With higher numbers of seats, there is more scope to split the representation up further, allowing for a closer parity between votes and seats. As a result, we would expect to see 6 or 7 member constituencies having an even more proportional result.
This is particularly obvious when we consider a simpler system based on FPTP, in which multiple areas are joined and the seats are awarded based on percentage of the vote. Rounding means that having just 2 or 3 seats is quite meaningless especially in British constituencies where there might be 3 parties each with 25-40% of the vote - rounding could potentially lead to an equal representation between the parties (1 seat each) when there is actually quite a difference in the number of votes achieved.
This is the 2019 result totalled across the whole of Cambridgeshire. If there were just 3 seats for this area, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives would each get 1 seat, despite the fact that the Conservatives got over 50% of the vote, much greater than that achieved by the Lib Dems or Labour. Having between 5 and 10 seats would be much more representative. Having too many - 20 seats - would lead to representation for the minority Green Party, and over-representation at that.
Up until this point I have overlooked the issue generally most talked about by electoral reform proponents: the spoiler effect. This effect, known also as vote-splitting, allows a candidate to win with less than half of the vote, because the other half is split between 2 or more candidates. If a party wins with 40% of the vote, they then claim that the candidate has won with a 60% disapproval amongst the voters, which is to some extent true.
In the Cities of London and Westminster, Conservative Nickie Aiken was returned as MP with just 40% of the vote, because the other 60% was split between the Lib Dem and the Labour candidates. However, it is basically wrong to consider those parties complicit for not cooperating, because LD and Labour is not a hive mind. I would attribute the newfound LD success to their having drawn away some of the Tory vote in a generally pro-European area. These new LD voters wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to vote Labour, so it is wrong to combine them.
The issue with trying to solve the spoiler effect is that it wouldn’t make elections more proportional and in many cases wouldn’t even change the result. The problem of disproportionality is inherent with single member constituencies and it in some way doesn’t matter whether the winner gets 40% or 50% of the vote - still most of the electorate are not represented and their votes are wasted.
But nevertheless, electoral reformists have tried to fix just the spoiler effect, with the voting system known as the ‘Alternative Vote’. This, which was put to the public in a referendum in 2011, would allow the voter to rank the candidates ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’, and if the winning candidate doesn’t have 50% of the first preference vote, second preferences would be looked at. This would definitely solve the spoiler effect, but, as the UK Electoral Reform Society points out, it is not a form of proportional representation and would in some cases (like 2015) produce a less proportional result. The people voted quite overwhelmingly against its adoption in the 2011 referendum.
In Australia, where it is used for the House of Representatives, AV is known as ‘full-preferential voting’, because the voter ranks every candidate. The winner must have 50% of the vote.
There are several reasons why AV wouldn’t improve proportionality but it should be obvious that there would still be a problem that only one party’s votes are in the end represented, even if they do have to get more than 50% of the vote. Also, it should be understood that AV wouldn’t change the result much, especially within England. In 2019, only 150 (of 550) seats in England had a winner with less than 50% of the vote and in most cases the original winner would just scrape through with AV. Most superficial analysis of seats where the spoiler effect came into play rests on the assumption that people vote just on where they sit on the political spectrum, suggesting that all Lib Dem voters would second-choice Labour or all UKIP voters would second-choice the Conservatives. This assumption cannot be relied on.
However, AV must be admired in the fact that it allows for a more complicated preference to be expressed by the voter. This would be particularly welcome in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the politics of those areas’ constitutional status comes into play. For example, in Scotland, some voters might vote for all 3 Unionist parties (Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives) before voting for the SNP, or they might prefer the SNP and other left-wing parties, compared to the Conservatives. This is a complicated view that can’t necessarily be expressed with a single preference, and thus Scottish Westminster results are very disproportional.
The great unfairness in Scotland is that the SNP are massively over-represented: the fact that 80% of Scottish seats are SNP would imply that Scots are overwhelmingly in favour of independence, despite the fact that only 45% actually voted for the SNP. All 3 Unionist parties are under-represented, especially Labour, who have double the Lib Dem vote share but only 1 seat.
In conclusion, it is quite obvious that the current system is unfair and disproportional, and changes are needed to improve our electoral fairness. But the argument in favour of electoral reform is severely misguided and disunited. Nick Clegg argued for the AV referendum in the 2010 Coalition deal, whilst others like the Electoral Reform Society see this as a bad system, instead in favour of STV.
This is all whilst it is understood that significant electoral change is something that will have to be supported by a majority of the general public. This is problematic for a movement that was unable to get many people to turn out for AV in 2011, with the majority not voting or voting in favour of what they perceived as a simpler status quo. The idea of AV in the UK was reportedly conceived by researchers of Blair’s Labour government, not as a fully proportional system but as a stepping stone to something better. However, this was hardly going to work because changing voting system is a once-in-a-lifetime event - we have used the same system for hundreds of years.
In order to get people behind electoral reform, the movement needs to turn away from promoting complex obscure methods of voting and instead open people’s eyes to how votes are wasted, and how single-member constituencies underpin this. Getting people to understand the harsh reality that losing votes should count and that the system can produce very misrepresentative results, is most important. Once people understand this, they will be more receptive to the debate between the intricacies of different voting systems.
Comments