First Past The Post Voting System.

[Gromit]

Nigel F is on the warpath after UKIP is predicted to come second in 100 seats, but will probably get 4 or 5 seats.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage/11457471/Nigel-Farage-attacks-bankrupt-voting-system-after-predictions-Ukip-will-come-second-in-100-seats.html

Is first past the post that terrible, we've had it for decades?

[Svejk]

-Talbot- /// Are you sure you said 'a handful' mikey?///

Obviously didn't notice your question, Talbot.
I can tell you, he's been predicting 0 UKIP seats until very recently. Then it was 2 and now it's a handful.
I think people, including bookmakers & pollsters, are in for a surprise come May. It's inconceivable that the sheeple will keep voting Liblabcon when you consider the mess we're in.
An unsustainable mess, as people will be finding out in the next few years.

[mikey4444]

I agree 100% with your last sentence. The only reason that we had a referendum on AV was because Cleggie had to be offered some kind of sop, to guarantee that he held his nose and went into a minor so-called coalition with the Tories. The referendum was doomed to failure from the start, and always will be unless sufficient pro-change numbers stand up and be counted amongst the Tories and Labour. And I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Perhaps it doesn't pay to be too pessimistic, as the Welsh Assembly, Scottish Parliament and the EU are all operated under something other than FPTP.

But I am still unsure if people would understand anything other than FPTP, in regards to who their local MP is. In the Welsh Assembly, these are my AMs

http://www.assembly.wales/en/memhome/Pages/membersearchresults.aspx?constituency=21

So I voted for one and got five ! Farage has indicated that UKIP may put up candidates in future Assembly elections, so, who knows...perhaps next time I will get six !

[ToraToraTora]

jim: “All of these things are possible to deliver in a voting system before you even go near PR”
I’m all ears, the criteria is to produce a clear winner in the election that’s all

“The first step to a better system, though, is simply to allow voters to express some level of preference. If, as is the case for many voters, it's essentially a toss-up between two parties, that close decision could be reflected by being able to express a 1st/ 2nd preference, or some weighted preference, or some such. The possibilities for improving the system are almost endless, TTT.”
Again how are you going to produce a clear winner?

I accept there are countless ways to produce a governement that reflects the voting percentages but that would not produce a clear winner. Ref any country with PR, and that is what you are talking about, they have 5 times as more electiions as us eg Italy and never produce a majority government, result impotence.

[jim360]

The problem with the "clear winner" criterion is that increasingly clear winners are being delivered on a lower and lower vote percentage. At some point you reach a place when yes, fair enough, we are getting a strong government, but the public don't appear to want that government. The expectation in 2015 is that Labour will get a little less than a third of the vote, and the Conservatives about the same (possibly a bit less). If either of these parties goes on to win an absolute majority it would be as unrepresentative of the electorates' wishes as you can get. This is only going to get worse because this represents the latest low figures in a steady drip-drip of voters switching to other parties. At what point does this become a large enough part of the population to recognise that majority Labour/ Tory rule is no longer what the public want?

The present coalition may not have been particularly brilliant, but as I have argued elsewhere this too is a by-product of FPTP. By denying the Lib Dems anything like their rightful share of seats that left only a Lib-Con coalition as the stable option, denying the Lib Dems any negotiating power along the lines of "Look, guys, we could just make a deal with Labour so you'll need to give us a lot more than that". Under AV, there would have been the genuine possibility of a Lib-Lab coalition, which makes a difference to how things would have played out. And, well, sorry TTT, but the Conservatives were not given a mandate for running the government themselves.

Delivering a strong government is all well and good, but if the public doesn't want that particular party to be so strong then this is at the very least an acknowledgement that FPTP is not about what the public wants, and at worst a blatant admission that nobody should care. But the overriding point is that these days, with so many players in the elections, the mandate the winner receives is increasingly hollow. There are only really two ways to strengthen this: reform the system such that the winning candidate is more legitimate (by changing to AV, or some other preferential voting system); or to reduce the number of candidates per constituency to just two.

[EDDIE51]

We can argue about it till the cows come home but it has total ZERO chance of happening so what's the point?

[jim360]

Nonsense. Basically no chance in the immediate future, perhaps, but then the point of campaigns like this is they have to be long-term. .And people can change their minds on this, too.

Nigel Farage made his mind up on FPTP sucking after the 2005 election, but prior to that he'd been a firm supporter of that system. Why? Because it delivered strong government -- an argument made on this very thread by TTT. Unfortunately no-one listened to him back in 2005-2011 as frankly UKIP was an irrelevance until recently, but as its support rises (and I guess I have to hope that it stays that way into the coming election) then suddenly it is not an irrelevance at all and we have instead cross-political calls for voting reform. If that carries on, then at some point the noise made about change becomes too loud to ignore, and we can have a second attempt to change things after the damp squib of a 2011 referendum that nobody cared about.

On the other hand, if people admit defeat at this point then it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course there is no chance, if not enough people make it an issue. Hopefully come 2015 all those UKIP supporters will take notice; in the meantime, people singing FPTP#s praises who don't also support UKIP might consider the impending disaster that is SNP's predicted 30-40-odd seats, and the resulting heavily nationalist influence in the following parliament. But never mind, because at least it was a "strong" result. Forced on the rest of the nation because of a local (well, Scottish) issue, and strong results are all that matters. Who cares that the result is a party that is massively overrepresented in parliament, that no-one south of Berwick had any say on?

[New Judge]

“FPTP is a broken, shoddy way to elect MPs.”

Sorry, jim, but I must disagree. The clue as to why is in your very own statement. What is overlooked in all of this is that the UK electorate does not elect a government. It elects individual MPs to represent their interests at Westminster. The Queen then invites whoever she believes is most capable of forming a government to do so. So with that in mind and looking at each individual seat, there really is no more suitable way of electing an MP that to say that the person polling the most votes wins. The alternative would be to introduce some other method of “transferable vote” which would be used in the event of the winner not polling 50%+1 of the votes. Then you end up with situations that the last Labour leadership election threw up which saw Ed elected courtesy of 4th choice votes.

So long as there are more than two candidates there is a very good chance that none of them will poll the majority of votes. So it is with parties – it is likely that the votes cast will not equate to the seats gained. Any alternative will, of necessity, have to break the link between the voter and his individual MP. If that’s what people want then it should be put to them properly but, like many others, I believe that the electorate has largely lost the will to live when it comes to their elected representatives and any such plebiscite will receive a cool reception.

Meantime I'm quite happy to have the services of an MP who gained the most votes in my constituency, even if it is one for whom I personally did not vote.

[jim360]

"What is overlooked in all of this is that the UK electorate does not elect a government."

I have not overlooked that in fact, NJ. But the connection an MP has to his constituency is many times weaker today than it was when the concept of constituencies was first set up. Indeed in the past, an MP was there to represent his constituency. This is far less the truth now, as Parliament business focuses far more on national and international issues than it does on local ones. Sure, MPs have time to raise local issues and still do so, but devolution to the Scottish Parliament/ Welsh Assembly has meant that those two parts of the UK now have some level of self-rule and Parliament often keeps its nose out; while local issues figure more prominently, or at least ought to, at the local election level (in practice local elections turn into referenda on the current national government, but this too could be fixed by making local councils more relevant or abolishing them entirely).

Because parliament is increasingly about national issues, then what is happening nationally should have more of an impact than actually happens. Instead FPTP locks in and grossly exaggerates local variations; so that, in particular, all those small-ish inner city constituencies return Labour again and again independent of how utterly crap the leadership is (referring to 1983 again, one wonders how Michael Foot's disastrous set of policies managed to get any support; as it was, a set of ultra-left wing morons held on to a third of the house, despite deserved outright rejection in many other places).

If you are happy being represented by someone who has a significant minority of support, well, that is your choice, but it is not one that many people share and the result is a large set of disenfranchised voters; never mind the decrese in turnout, most notable in Labour safe seats, as so many people can't even see the point in voting.

And there remain ways to improve the voting system that still preserve the link between an MP and his constituency, if that is really so important. AV is one such system; there exist several others, and if done properly they can even reinforce that link. Unfortunately, some people are so caught up in the concept that either we have FPTP or "pure" Proportional Representation that they, as you have, overlook the massive amount of space between these two extremes that genuinely exists.

FPTP is, by almost any measure, among the worst system of electing MPs and governments that it is possible to have. It's a relic of an age when there were only two choices; now that there are more, the system should change accordingly. It's sad that people cannot recognise this, so concerned are they about strong results that they overlook the point that people don't seem to want this any more, or so focused on winning by a nose that they ignore the ludicrous possibility of people winning despite a vast majority of voters who would reject that particular person.

[New Judge]

Yes it’s quite true that most issues debated by MPs are national rather than local, jim. But the problem with Party politics is that voters have essentially two (or arguably three) packages to vote for and local considerations are not taken into account in those packages. MPs should vote on each issue in accordance with their constituents’ wishes, not according to the Party whips. They represent the people in Parliament, not their parties.

The AV system, certainly as proposed in the recent referendum, is a ridiculous animal. It means that second choice votes for the candidate who came last can effectively swing the election away from the candidate who polled the most votes. It is effectively re-running the election, eliminating the candidate placed last, until one candidate gains 50% of the vote.

The clamour for these changes seems to be driven by a reluctance to allow the most popular candidate or party to succeed unless they gain 50% of the votes. However the poll is conducted, to achieve that aim will involve manipulation of the vote away from voters’ intentions. It suggests that a successful candidate cannot claim legitimacy unless he has 50% of the voters behind him and engenders the view that because more voted against him than in favour, his victory is not valid. But a vote against Candidate A is not a vote for all of those standing against him. For all its faults the FPTP system has the advantage of returning the candidate for whom most people voted (as their first choice) and it retains the link between constituents and voters. Alternative manipulations seem to be aimed at returning the candidate that the “fewest people don’t want”.

[jim360]

"It suggests that a successful candidate cannot claim legitimacy unless he has 50% of the voters behind him and engenders the view that because more voted against him than in favour, his victory is not valid."

Well, yes, I guess it does suggest that. Why is this so unreasonable? "Voters' intentions" are, after all, rather subtle -- as you have accepted, I think -- but FPTP cuts through all that subtlety by insisting on 100% support for one candidate with 1 vote. What is the big problem with allowing for such subtlety? People who do indeed feel that only Labour, or the Tories, or whoever, represent them, are perfectly free to continue voting for just one party. Other people, who may feel that multiple parties could represent them, should feel able to say so. But FPTP denies them that voice and, therefore, encourages people to ask the question "Who do I want not to win?", turning therefore to the candidate who is not necessarily their actual preference, but is at least more likely to beat their least preferred candidate.

Tactical voting is, in fact, impossible to eliminate from any single-winner voting system (unless you accept some even worse flaw instead); but systems that reduce its bite are, again, more preferable by most measures.

It is I suppose a matter of perspective. The strengths you cite in FPTP, namely that it delivers "winners" and strong parliaments, are weaknesses in many people's opinions because, increasingly, these winners are winning on tiny majorities or significantly small vote shares -- and as a result Parliament remains under the control of two parties who are more and more unpopular with the people they supposedly represent. That is not a strength. At what point does this become obvious? When Labour and the Tories remain in power with less than half of the vote between them? When MPs are locked into their seats for a full cycle with not even 20% of the vote share?

Compromise is not a bad thing. It's a shame that so many people are still so keen on guaranteeing a decisive result, rather than focusing on what the public are asking for.

[ToraToraTora]

it does seem there is an obsession with the winner only being valid if 50% is acheived. In no other sphere do we think it reasonable that the winner must win by enough that he/she has more than all the others put together. Sport would be very different for example. We continually throw percentages about as arguments or even indications but our system is not based on percentages. For all the points against it I think FPTP is better than all this tedious mucking about with varieties of PR simply because many are obsessed with the magic percentage of 50.

[jim360]

I think you are misunderstanding the role of the 50% margin here, though. In the first place, comparisons to sport aren't valid. This is about how we run our country, not about who wins a horse race. You should very much expect the standards of the two to be different.

More to the point, the reason our system is not based on percentages is, well, because it's not based on percentages. That's an historical accident more than anything else. The whole point of the argument is that it really should be, or at least more so. If you want a system that buries all of the complexities of voter intentions, at the individual level as well as across constituencies and nationwide, then FPTP manages that and provides a simple, clear, compelling -- and wrong -- result.

But these complexities matter. More so now we have not just three parties in the race, but up to 5 or even 6 legitimate parties in some constituencies. FPTP fundamentally cannot cope with that, because it doesn't care about percentages, so long as the winner has at least one more absolute vote than the second-placed candidate. Most of the argument is that this now matters more than ever. We cannot keep up this conceit of pretending that constituency-based, single-winner, single-vote, non-preferential voting system delivers what people actually want. Ignore that, and you are ignoring the fundamental basis of what democracy is supposedly about.

At any rate the 50% margin doesn't have to appear. It's just that it's the target in the AV system. As I have mentioned before, there are other systems out that that improve on FPTP without insisting on this target (not that it's so unreasonable anyway).

At some point people will stop trying to hold on to a dead system. At least with UKIP raising the issue it becomes more than just the left whinging about it.

[New Judge]

Your reasoning is very well thought out and presented, jim, and I appreciate that. But I fear we'll have to agree to differ. I am absolutely against any system of PR because, in the UK at least, it will mean a perpetual Coalition (and the last five years have been more than enough of that for me). Of course Parliamentary expediency should not be the overriding concern when devising an electoral system. But it must play a part and I would suggest that a Parliament formed under PR at the last election (235 Tories, 188 Labour, 150 Libdems and 77 Others) would make a very unwieldy beast indeed.

I think whatever system is introduced it will be hard pushed to break the stranglehold of the "Big Two". And the main reason for that is that they are the two parties for whom the overwhelming majority of people vote (66% last time out). A fundamental drawback with any form of democracy worth the name is that a number of people are not going to get what they want. The driver for reform in our voting system seems to be about minimising the numbers of people that don’t get what they want. But there’s a danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water because as far as I can see a Parliament under PR would almost certainly result in everybody getting what nobody wants.

[jim360]

Many thanks for the compliment, NJ. It's been an interesting discussion, and one I've been hoping for for some time -- nothing like a sharp debate to test your ideas. I've hopefully made my points as clear as I can have. A shame that they haven't been accepted, but then I suppose the whole point is that this idea should only go through if people actually want it to. In my own small way I'll keep trying, though.