The Nuts and Bolts of the UK's flawed Voting System
Once you know how the voting system works, you will understand why it's misfiring.
To begin with, we may call it a general election but in truth there are 650 separate "stand-alone" elections held on the same day, one in every local constituency, each electing one Member of Parliament who invariably belongs to a political party. The voters in each constituency put an X alongside the name of their favoured candidate on their ballot paper and the constituency's Member of Parliament is the candidate with the most votes. The party with the most Members of Parliament wins the election and forms the government. Simple!
But there's a problem with our Victorian "First-past-the-post" voting system. It still works of a fashion, but it has never been very efficient, wasting huge numbers of votes shovelled into it and producing a rather rough end result. Moreover, this wheezing contraption has never been modified to accommodate the greater political sophistication of today's voters who are more educated, less deferential & trusting, better informed and more eclectic in their politics than they were a century ago.
What is most noticeable, however, is that seats won by a party do not necessarily reflect the level of support for that party, nor are outcomes consistent or certain, as can be seen from the table in the previous web page.
So, let's take a look under the bonnet to see what's wrong and what can be done to put things right.
Blues v Reds- and then Yellows, Greens and Purples!
Up until some time after the last war, consumer choice for the man in the street was very limited in everything from holidays to hoovers - and politics. In the Sheffield Hallam constituency of 1955, for example, voters there had a choice of just two candidates in that year's general election. The result was as follows:-
Roland Jennings Conservative & NatLib 30,069 votes 66.2%
James Marsden Labour 15,330 votes 33.8%
In individual constituencies up and down the land in 1955, most voters were offered similar meagre choice but at least Mr Jennings’s victory was clear-cut with the support of two thirds of those who voted in his constituency. However, let us fast-forward sixty four years to the 2019 General Election result in Sheffield Hallam which showed a very different picture:-
Olivia Blake Labour 19,709 votes 34.6%
Laura Gordon Liberal Democrat 18,997 votes 33.4%
Ian Walker Conservative 14,696 votes 25.8%
Natalie Thomas Green 1,630 votes 2.9%
Terence McHale Brexit 1,562 votes 2.7%
Michael Virgo UKIP 168 votes 0.3%
Elizabeth Aspden Independent 123 votes 0.2%
The number of candidates there mushroomed to seven, reflecting the profusion of parties that have sprung up over the decades; there are now about 370 registered with the Electoral Commission. Even so, while the UK has changed beyond recognition in so many ways since 1955, we are still using the same old Victorian voting system to elect our national government and clearly it can no longer cope with the increased number of parties in the Premier League of British politics, as the available vote splinters into smaller and smaller shards within the confines of a single member constituency. As a result, Sheffield Hallam’s Labour candidate squeaked in with the support of only 34.6% of those who had voted.
Our voting system is only 29% efficient!
When you go to the polls for a general election, you have just one vote which is counted only for your constituency's contest. It does not otherwise influence the national result; it is not added to any national total for the party of your choice. So, if you were a Green voter in Sheffield Hallam in 2019, yours was one of the 65.4% of the votes cast there that had no effect on the result, nationally or locally.
Is this typical? Yes, it is; in the 2019 General Election, one third of the MPs were elected on a minority of their constituency vote. Moreover, we mustn't forget that there are many other places, known as "safe seats", where the result is a forgone conclusion, like in Liverpool Walton, where Labour's Dan Carden won with a massive 84.68% of the vote in 2019. As impressive as his majority of 30,520 votes had been, they were surplus to his requirements, they didn't count in any national tally, and so represented wasted votes of a different kind.
It has been calculated that 45% of all the votes cast in the 2019 General Election were for losing candidates and a further 26% cast were surplus to the winners' requirements, which means that only 29% of the votes cast were effective. In the 2015 election, this efficiency rating was even worse, at 26%.
650 lotteries to elect a government!
Considering the results in Sheffield Hallam, Liverpool Walton and all the others in between, it seems more by good luck than good management that past governments have in any way reflected the national vote for parties in a general election, which any man in the street would suppose should determine the outcome. Two models illustrate what can happen when individual constituency results are lumped together to obtain a national result.
Albion City Model Election Red Party Votes Blue Party Votes
Albion North Constituency 15,000 18,000 Blue win
Albion Central Constituency 29,000 4,000 Red win
Albion South Constituency 16,000 17,000 Blue win
Total Votes won in Albion 60,000 39,000
Reds win more votes..... ...but Blues win more seats!
The "Albion City" model above shows how our voting system can misbehave even in a straightforward 2-party contest in 3 seats. In this model, the Reds' 2 to 1 superiority across Albion in terms of votes is not matched in terms of seats because much of the support for the Reds is represented by surplus votes uselessly piled up for the Reds in Albion Central, so the Blues win more seats.
A similar mismatch actually happened in the 1951 General Election. Back then, the Liberals were a music hall joke, the nationalists were nowhere, and the Greens, UKIP, Brexit Party and the issues that spawned them had not been invented yet. It was a straightforward fight between Labour and the Conservatives but the voting system yielded the following national result:-
1951 General Election UK Votes UK Seats
Labour 13,948,883 Labour won more votes.... 295
Conservative 13,718,199 321 ....but the Conservatives won more seats
Liberals and others 928,512 9
A slim majority of voters had elected to continue with the post-war Socialist project but the voting system gifted the election to the Conservatives instead.
It gets worse....
The system's creaky enough with just two parties in contention but, once other parties join the fray, it degenerates into a game of chance, as shown in the second model, where 3 parties are contesting 3 seats.
Britannia City Model Election Red Party Votes Green Party Votes Blue Party Votes
Britannia North Constituency 12,000 11,000 10,000 Red win
Britannia Central Constituency 7,000 12,000 14,000 Blue win
Britannia South Constituency 13,000 11,000 9,000 Red win
Total Britannia Vote 32,000 Least votes... 34,000 Most votes... 33,000
Total Britannia seats 2 ...but most seats! 0 ......but no seats! 1
Clearly there is something very wrong with a mechanism that has the potential to give the party with the least votes the most seats and the party with the most votes no seats at all, even with exactly the same number of voters in each constituency.
