'It feels as if the outdated First Past the Post voting system is creaking and failing voters on a massive scale.'

Hundreds of thousands of people have signed a petition calling for a voting system where every vote counts. Launched by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), the petition advocates for a fairer voting system in Britain.

The ERS highlights how no party has won a majority of the vote in almost a century. Yet due to the voting system, Britain has a “near-constant single-party governments setting the rules for everyone.”

Under Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, the candidate with the most votes in a constituency wins, regardless of whether they have a majority. Consequently, a party can secure a large number of seats without a proportional number of votes. Votes cast for losing candidates are therefore considered “wasted” as they do not contribute to the overall result. This can lead to feelings of disillusionment among voters and lower turnout on polling day, as people feel their votes do not matter.

Under Proportional representation (PR), the distribution of seats corresponds closely with the proportion of total votes cast for each party. Moving to a PR system would give minority parties and independent candidates a better chance of winning seats in parliament. As more people’s preferences are taken into account, under PR fewer votes are ‘wasted.’ This in turn can reduce apathy and lead to greater voter turnout.

At around just 60 percent, the 2024 general election turnout was the lowest in over 20 years. The only lower turnout in recent times was in 2001, when Tony Blair secured a second term with roughly 59 percent of voter participation.

The relationship between the number of seats won by the parties and their vote share has been described as one of the most disproportionate ever. Reform’s four million votes translated into 14 percent of the share of the total votes, but only 1 percent of all the seats in the House of Commons. Labour won 34 percent of total votes, but about 64 percent of the 650 seats. The Greens also had a considerably larger vote share than seat share, with 7 percent of the total vote but, like Reform, about 1 percent of total seats, or four MPs.

The ERS analysed how the outcome of the election would have looked if we had used the same electoral system they use for the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments instead. It found that under the Additional Member System (AMS), a form of proportional representation, where voters choose a constituency candidate and have a second vote for their preferred party to represent them regionally, there would have been a much closer alignment between votes shared and parliamentary seats. Labour would have been the largest party but with fewer seats, while the Tories, Lib Dems, SNP, Green Party, and Reform UK would have gained more seats proportionate to their vote shares. This suggests a fairer representation across Parliament compared to the current FTPT system.

Following the election, Darren Hughes, chief executive of the ERS, has been making the case for PR in TV and radio interviews across the UK. According to Hughes, the public are voting as if we already have PR, as it was the first election ever where four parties received over 10 percent of the vote and five parties received over 5 percent, while the combined Labour and Conservative vote share slumped to its lowest level on 57.4 percent, the second lowest combined vote share for the two parties was in 2010 when they received 65.1 percent.

“It feels as if the outdated First Past the Post voting system is creaking and failing voters on a massive scale. This has only strengthened the argument the ERS has long made: that it’s time to scrap this broken Westminster system and move to a fairer proportional voting system that accurately reflect how the whole country voted,” says Hughes.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward

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