Murkrow
Says "also" and "or something" a lot
- Pronoun
- he
This is mainly about the state of UK and US politics and I'll use UK terminology for the most part, but feel free to chime in if you're from somewhere else. If you do have a different voting system, do you think it works better or worse than First Past the Post? You may also want to discuss adjacent topics such as compulsory voting, reducing the voting age, etc.
People who know me know that the one hill I will die on is that the voting system in the UK absolutely needs to change. Please excuse me as I indulge my feelings of righteous indignation about it typing out this thread.
First Past the Post, as it is called*, is a very simple system to understand: everyone gets one vote which they can put towards one candidate only. The candidate with the most votes wins. It's so simple that when explained like that, it's hard to see why there is anything wrong with it. Here is what is wrong with it:
There are certainly more reasons why it's a bad voting system which I could rant about for years, but that's enough for now.
Alternatives
There are a great many alternatives, most of which resolve or at least limit the impact of the issues I listed above. Unfortunately it's quite hard (at least for me) to explain them via text - which is possibly one reason why it's hard to get people on board with the idea of changing the voting system. In the UK, we had a referendum on one (and only one, despite what many people claim) such alternative. The campaign against this, as well as implying that babies and soldiers would die if it were to happen, consistently claimed that other ways of voting are too complicated.
The simplest way of improving the outcome would be to keep it as it currently is, but after the fact, give extra seats to the party which is currently the most under-represented until the pie-chart showing the breakdown of your elected house matches as close as possible the way people voted. It's not perfect, and my least favourite aspect of this method is that the party gets to choose the candidates who are elected after the fact, meaning it may be impossible to vote out specific individuals who are unpopular, so long as their party gets the votes.
My personal preference would be Single Transferable Vote. It keeps a link between every elected candidate and a constituency, it's not as easily gerrymandered, independent (non-party-affiliated) candidates still have a chance, and the results are much more (though not necessarily perfectly) proportional to the nationwide vote share.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that is very hard to change, because anyone with the power to change the voting system necessarily benefited from the current system, and thus has an incentive to keep things the way they are. People also often take a stance on this issue in line with how it benefits or harms the party they personally support. If someone ever tells me "you only support electoral reform because the result didn't go your way", what I hear is "I only don't support electoral reform because the result did go my way". It isn't about what result I want, it's about what the result everyone wants. What the result should be.
* First Past the Post isn't even a good name for it. It's supposed to conjure an image of a race, where the first person who passes the finish line wins. This is not at all how the voting system works. If races were conducted in the same way as FPTP it would mean whoever is in the lead at the moment when the total combined distance ran by every runner added up to be equal to the distance of the track, is the winner. Imagine if a marathon were decided that way.
People who know me know that the one hill I will die on is that the voting system in the UK absolutely needs to change. Please excuse me as I indulge my feelings of righteous indignation about it typing out this thread.
First Past the Post, as it is called*, is a very simple system to understand: everyone gets one vote which they can put towards one candidate only. The candidate with the most votes wins. It's so simple that when explained like that, it's hard to see why there is anything wrong with it. Here is what is wrong with it:
- If there are more than two candidates, "most" votes does not necessarily align with "over 50%". If you have three candidates, one can win with as little as 34% of the vote. The more candidates you add, the worse this gets. A candidate can win even if most people voted against them.
- A useful word to keep in mind here is "plurality", which means more than any other but not necessarily a majority.
- In an election where there are multiple constituencies each elected under FPTP, it's possible for a party to win even if there's another party with more votes than them overall.
- It leads to a two-party system and encourages tactical voting. If you vote for a third party, it means a party you dislike is more likely to win, so you have to vote with a "lesser of two evils" mentality. The more political diversity there is on the ballot paper, the worse the outcome can -and probably will- be.
- Gerrymandering is possible. If you don't know what that is, gerrymandering is when constituency boundaries are redrawn to swing the result in one direction or the other, even if the voting behaviour of the electorate doesn't change. It's hard to explain via text, so here is the diagram used on Wikipedia, which should hopefully explain it better.
- There are "safe seats". If a candidate is expected to get over large majoirty of the vote in a constituency (like over 60%), there is little incentive for any party to offer anything to appeal to these voters. If one party is definitely going to win, the winning party don't need to appeal to them since they're already ahead, and the opposition already don't stand a chance (remember: if there's more than two parties here, that 60% majority probably needs to be decreased to something even lower than 50% for the result to change). Your vote matters more in marginal/swing constituencies.
- A narrow win gets the same result as a landslide. If you live somewhere who elected a representative with 100% of the vote in your consituency, you get no more representation than somewhere who elected theirs on 30% of the vote. So similarly to the last point, people who live in marginal constituencies get more representation, relatively speaking. Any votes cast after the winning threshold is met is essentially wasted, as are all the votes for a losing candidate.
- Due to the above reasons and more, it leads to voter apathy. If you can't vote for who you actually want, or you know in advance you vote won't matter, why even bother?
- Because it leads to a two-party system it leads to us-vs-them thinking. You can't support one policy from one party and one policy from another, it's all-or-nothing. It shrinks all political discourse into a one-dimensional line where you're either on one side or the other or a "centrist".
There are certainly more reasons why it's a bad voting system which I could rant about for years, but that's enough for now.
Alternatives
There are a great many alternatives, most of which resolve or at least limit the impact of the issues I listed above. Unfortunately it's quite hard (at least for me) to explain them via text - which is possibly one reason why it's hard to get people on board with the idea of changing the voting system. In the UK, we had a referendum on one (and only one, despite what many people claim) such alternative. The campaign against this, as well as implying that babies and soldiers would die if it were to happen, consistently claimed that other ways of voting are too complicated.
The simplest way of improving the outcome would be to keep it as it currently is, but after the fact, give extra seats to the party which is currently the most under-represented until the pie-chart showing the breakdown of your elected house matches as close as possible the way people voted. It's not perfect, and my least favourite aspect of this method is that the party gets to choose the candidates who are elected after the fact, meaning it may be impossible to vote out specific individuals who are unpopular, so long as their party gets the votes.
My personal preference would be Single Transferable Vote. It keeps a link between every elected candidate and a constituency, it's not as easily gerrymandered, independent (non-party-affiliated) candidates still have a chance, and the results are much more (though not necessarily perfectly) proportional to the nationwide vote share.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that is very hard to change, because anyone with the power to change the voting system necessarily benefited from the current system, and thus has an incentive to keep things the way they are. People also often take a stance on this issue in line with how it benefits or harms the party they personally support. If someone ever tells me "you only support electoral reform because the result didn't go your way", what I hear is "I only don't support electoral reform because the result did go my way". It isn't about what result I want, it's about what the result everyone wants. What the result should be.
* First Past the Post isn't even a good name for it. It's supposed to conjure an image of a race, where the first person who passes the finish line wins. This is not at all how the voting system works. If races were conducted in the same way as FPTP it would mean whoever is in the lead at the moment when the total combined distance ran by every runner added up to be equal to the distance of the track, is the winner. Imagine if a marathon were decided that way.