Alternative Voting Systems & Voters: Is Democracy Broken?
The thing about democracy is that more than half the people are getting what they want, more than half the time. Or that’s what American journalist E.B. White thinks. But let’s dig below the surface a little bit… Is that what’s actually going on?
In the recent General Election, the difference between the vote share (the fraction of votes each party received) and the seat share (the fraction of seats in Parliament each party received) was 5.2% averaged over all parties. In 2017, this average difference was 3% and in 2015, 7.7%. Going back further, it stays around 6%. So, this doesn’t seem too bad right? On average, the vote shares are pretty close to the seats each party receives. But the averaging is hiding something quite important here.
In 2019, the Tories won 11% more votes than the Labour Party. However, they won more than 25% more seats than Labour. The Lib Dems had it even worse, winning 11.5% of the votes, but only a measly 2% of the seats. You’ll spot similar patterns in pretty much every other General Election. Look at it this way – in 2005, when Labour won 55% of the seats in parliament, they only won 3% more of the votes than they did in 2019. In actual numbers, they won 1 million more votes in 2019 than in 2005. Looking more worldwide, you almost definitely saw that Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
So why is this happening? Is democracy just not working anymore?
As usual, the answer is just a bit more complicated than that. We get the results we do because we have an electoral system known as first past the post (FPTP). This is the second most popular electoral system, used by 58 countries including the USA and India. It has its pros and its cons, and in this article, I’m going to try to tell you about what they are, as well as the other voting systems that exist. I’m not trying to convince of which one is best, I just want to talk about them.
First Past the Post
There are variations of this, but ultimately in this system the candidate with the highest number of votes wins, with no requirement to get an absolute majority. In the UK, this means that in each constituency, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins that constituency (even if they only have 1 vote more than the second-place candidate). So what’s good about this?
It’s by far the easiest method when it comes to actually counting up the votes and working out who’s won.
By extension, this also means it’s the easiest system to explain to people. Complicated electoral systems disenfranchise people that don’t understand them.
FPTP preserves the order of the parties – generally the party with the largest vote share wins the most seats (a notable exception being the US presidential election). Also, it produces the candidate that most voters want on the constituency level.
But there are cons:
The number of seats each party wins is usually disproportionate to the vote share. This means that smaller parties are starved out and voters in certain constituencies have no realistic chance of seeing their chosen candidate win.
This system is extremely vulnerable to gerrymandering – where parties redraw the constituency boundaries to give themselves more seats. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering for a better explanation.
Pure Proportional Representation (PR)
This is the most common electoral system and is also by far the simplest. In this system, vote shares and seat shares are deliberately matched. For example, if we applied this to the UK in 2019, then the Labour Party would win 209 votes (+6 from the actual result) and the Tories would win 283 seats (82 less than they did). It can also be applied on a regional level (e.g. the vote share that parties get in London divides the seats available in London). This is essentially the system used for the 2016 Brexit Referendum and for European Elections. So what’s good about it:
The makeup of politics is exactly chosen by society. This is arguably the most democratic system. This is a big perk, but it’s perhaps easy to favour it because it would lead to an outcome that you might personally want (the Tories not winning is something I would quite like).
More voices get heard – generally, this system would lead to more minor parties having a role. A potential downside here though is that it potentially allows extremists into government.
PR ensures that parties have to appeal to all of their voters, and not just those in “swing” constituencies.
What’s bad:
You don’t elect a person, you elect a party. Therefore, you never really get a connection with politics, local issues tend to be ignored, and voter turnouts tend to be very low. Some countries with PR make voting compulsory to deal with this.
PR tends not to produce an outright majority, often coalitions have to be formed, which makes decision making slower. This also leads to compromising, which you might think would be a great thing. So in some ways, this falls in both categories.
Single Transferable Vote (STV) or Alternative Vote (AV) Systems
These are sometimes called preferential systems. They can be very complicated but in all of them, instead of picking just one candidate, you rank all candidates in order of preference. Then the votes are counted. If no single candidate has a majority, then the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed among all the other candidates. This keeps going on until one candidate has an absolute majority. This is the system used in Ireland, Australia, or many other countries.
There are two common variants – in AV, candidates are elected on the constituency level (so in the UK, it would be same, except you would rank candidates instead of just picking one). In STV, bigger constituencies are used with multiple MPs (multi-member constituencies), and the reallocation of votes in each round is done in such a way to ensure that the vote shares are proportional to the number of seats each party wins.
Again, pros?
Fewer votes are wasted in these systems, they are more representative than FPTP.
Both systems encourage candidates to seek first preference votes, so the effect of negative campaigning is reduced. This can cut things like fake news and scaremongering.
There are no safe seats in these systems, parties must appeal everywhere.
There is a closer link between candidate and constituency than in pure PR.
Cons?
In sparsely populated areas, like the Scottish highlands, this system can require huge constituencies.
It’s hard to overstate how complicated this system is to count. Our current infrastructure for counting votes just wouldn’t work. It would be expensive to convert to this system.
Similarly, it can be quite hard to explain to some people how the system works, potentially causing disenfranchisement.
You’d still get coalitions, like in PR. So that means compromises and no “strong and stable” government.
So there we go. 3 different electoral systems, 3 different forms of democracy. I should probably mention that there are plenty of countries (Australia for example) that use a combination of all 3 of them. Some parties, usually the smaller ones such as the Lib Dems, have proposed electoral reform as part of their manifestos. Hopefully having read this, you have a better idea where you stand on the different versions.
A final word of caution – it’s tempting to say “in a PR system, the UK wouldn’t be Tory” or something like that. But this is a very difficult conclusion to draw for the simple reason that in a different electoral system, people vote differently. The impact of tactical voting, the way parties campaign, the impact of local issues; all of these things change. I leave it up to you to decide how you think they will.
Written by Griffin Farrow
I’m Griffin – hi! I’m a PhD student in Physics in London, and yep, that makes me about as boring as it sounds. In my spare time, I try to work out what to do with myself. I’m new to this writing thing, so please be sympathetic!