Britain, the so-called birthplace of democracy, has just come through another wasteful, unbalanced, damaging first-past-the-post (FPTP) national election.
And although two-thirds of Britons would have said otherwise back in 2011, now 61 per cent think electoral reform is necessary.
Instead of the UK vote representing the will of the people, it has revealed deep and inherent flaws in the so-called “first-past-the-post” system, which Brits – like Canadians – still cling to like some kind of perverse life jacket.
In this system, getting a single vote more than your opponent means you get in, while your opponent goes home.
Contrast this to a proportional voting system – and there are various types – in which the number of elected members is “proportional” to the number of votes a party gets.
To continental Europeans, most of whom live under a proportional voting system, the voting method used in Britain seems nothing short of “weird” – literally, as this French journalist states.
That’s because once you’ve lived under a proportional system, with its inherent fairness and broad embrace of all points of view, you never want to go back to the old ways.
New Zealand – the very first country, by the way, that first gave women the vote, in 1893 – switched to a proportional system in 1996. Two referenda brought forward since then by disgruntled citizens who wanted to change back to the old first-past-the-post horserace were soundly defeated.
Let’s look at some numbers.
How "too close to call" turned to crushing defeat
Before the UK election, everybody thought the results were too close to call.
Exit polls showed that the Labor and Conservative parties were neck and neck, at 33 per cent and 34 per cent of voter preferences respectively. The Scottish National Party (SNP) had only 4 per cent of committed voters, but estimates based on the current system – remember this is before the election actually took place – suggested that they would win double their proportionate number of seats.
Why so? Because just about everybody who would vote for the Scottish National Party lives, not surprisingly, in Scotland.
The SNP has regional strength, period.
Conversely, the right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) had 13 per cent of committed voters before the election, but under the current system, was expected to win no seats at all. That’s because the UKIP is based all over Britain, and also because it was nobody’s second choice.
If a voter was fed up with the Labour Party, he or she might vote for Liberal Democratic Party (LD). If a voter was fed up with the Conservative Party here she might vote for a number of other parties, but not necessarily the UKIP.
In the first-past-the-post system, people often swallow hard and vote for a party they don’t really want to vote for, because they believe that if they don’t do so they will be wasting their vote. That’s because the candidate with one vote more than the next candidate wins everything.
And vote wasting is one of the biggest problems with FPTP. Typically half or more of all votes in the system achieve nothing whatsoever, breeding cynicism, apathy and sometimes even disgust among voters.
The unfairness of "first past the post"
So what actually happened in the election in Britain?
The Conservative Party did not win because it beat the Labour Party.
It won because the surging, revitalized Scottish National Party, led by a new and charismatic leader, Nicola Sturgeon, which had previously held only six seats in Scotland, swept all the Scottish seats but three (56/59). Most of those seats had been previously held by the Labour Party.
The Labour Party lost 27 per cent of its popular vote in Scotland, but because the SNP was the only alternative party in that part of the world, that was enough to lose the Labour Party all of its seats to the SNP but one.
This is exactly what happened in Canada, of course, when in previous elections the Bloc Québecois (BQ) gained regional prominence in Québec. Despite having no strong interest in or connection to politics in the rest of Canada, the BQ gained a dominant number of seats because it was either the first or the second choice of most voters in that region of the country.
Not a single member of the Bloc Québecois was elected outside Québec.
All the way through the results tally in Britain, strange things turned up. For example, Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party, obtained 0.6 per cent of the vote, and yet elected four MPs – because of its regional strength in a few ridings near to Ireland. The Green Party, on the other hand, earned 3.8 per cent of the vote – over six times as many as Sinn Fein – but had only one solitary member elected.
This kind of distortion and misrepresentation will also happen in the Canadian federal election this fall, if we allow our politicians to be elected by this antiquated and ineffective voting system. Here's an example from a recent Canadian provincial election — in PEI; gone are the subtleties, and all the small parties. And wasted votes are everywhere.
In fact, the current federal Conservative government is in power because a mere 24 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots in its favour.
Here are four big problems with our current first-past-the-post voting system:
1) if there are more than two political parties, it forces voters to pick a party that is likely to get in, rather than the party they would choose to vote for.
2) it favours regional strengths, giving disproportionate influence to parties dominant in a single part of the country, e.g. the Conservative Party in Alberta (although Rachel Notley may have influenced that province’s federal voting patterns!) or the Bloc Québecois in Québec.
3) it marginalizes people who don’t have the time or energy to vote, and breeds cynicism among their ranks e.g. the economically disadvantaged, First Nations, and youth.
4) it essentially eliminates political representation for minority concerns, or concerns that are widespread, but not well understood or immediate (e.g. global warming).
Time to go proportional, now
A proportional voting system will result in fairer representation across the political spectrum, more balance between regional influences, less marginalization of minorities, and better voter turnout (in New Zealand, turnout jumped almost 20 per cent once that country went from first-past-the-post to proportional voting).
So far, the NDP and the Green Party have all committed to bringing in proportional voting if they are elected. The Liberal Party has committed to starting a process leading towards a fairer voting system, including proportional representation.
Only the Conservative Party has said it will not support any change in the current voting system.
The non-partisan group Fair Vote Canada has called for a move towards proportional representation, so that the next election will be “the last unfair election” in the country.
Many Canadians think that makes eminent good sense.
Certainly the anomalous and unbalanced results of the election in the UK – coupled with the steady erosion of democracy in our country – make a very strong case for change.
Image from FairVote.ca