Voting shouldn’t be a lottery
YouGov (who are the gold standard on this type of research) has published new projections on how voters would cast their support if a General Election was held tomorrow and it shows a dramatic shift.
In a General Election tomorrow, Reform UK would be the largest party with 271 seats, nearly a hundred more than Labour. It shows the Conservatives falling back even further after their worst General Election result in a century. It shows the SNP fighting back in Scotland. It shows that the two-party system we’ve had for more than 100 years is dying right in front of us.
Above all else, it shows that our electoral system, built for two parties, can't cope with the reality that is British politics today.
Last year, the First Past the Post electoral system gave us the most disproportional election result in our country’s history.
Labour won two-thirds of the seats with only one-third of the vote. Reform UK and the Green Party received nearly 21% of the vote, but only won 9 MPs between them (1.4% of the total). The DUP and Reform UK ended up with the same number of MPs despite Reform UK getting 24 times more votes!
But current polling now shows a similarly disproportional result, with Reform UK now being the big beneficiaries of our Victorian voting system - winning nearly 42% of the seats on just 26% of the vote. Some polling experts suggest Reform UK could win a majority with less than 30% of the vote. If Labour recovers in the polls and Reform UK falls back slightly, then Labour could also win a majority with a similar vote.
This cannot be right in a democracy! The current government ‘won’ a stonking majority with the support of just 1 in 5 registered voters. The next government could be elected with even less support.
What kind of mandate can a Government claim to have when they are elected by so few of the citizens?
The role of a voting system should be to convert people’s votes into representation. The current system can only do this reliably when there’s only two main parties competing. With five parties polling over 10% of the vote in the UK, plus the SNP and Plaid Cymru polling competitively in Scotland and Wales, the system simply cannot cope.
When there’s only two main parties competing (as in most elections prior to 2024), the winning bar in most elections usually starts at around 40% of the vote and up. The multi-party politics we have now means that the winning bar for a candidate is often well under 30% of the vote - so with 7 in 10 voters opposing them.
At the recent local elections, we saw dozens of results like this. Voters in the West of England are now represented by a Mayor who 3/4s of voters opposed - in fact that seat was won with just 8% of registered voters backing the candidate. Can that Mayor really claim a mandate with this level of support?
The figures from YouGov’s MRP show that one MP would be elected with just 23.5% of the vote. 140 MPs would be elected with less than 30% of the vote, 298 MPs would have ‘won’ with less than a third of the vote. Right now, the margin of victory in 396 seats is less than 10%, meaning even small shifts in votes can lead to huge numbers of seats changing hands.
Our voting system is breaking down before our eyes. Voting is becoming more like buying a lottery ticket than choosing who you want as an MP or a Government.
No wonder trust in politics is at an all time low. Another poll last week showed that support for changing the UK’s voting system is now at a record high 60%. The public can see that the current system doesn’t work any more.
Political parties including Reform UK, Liberal Democrats, Green Party, Plaid Cymru, SNP and others all back electoral reform. The Labour Party Conference of 2023 backed electoral reform too. The biggest All Party Political Group in Parliament right now is the APPG for Fair Elections.
The only people who are still to be convinced are the leaders of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. The YouGov MRP shows the Conservatives winning just 46 seats on 18% of the vote - it’s clear the electoral system isn’t helping them any more. Labour leaders clearly think that the current system still helps them and are still holding out.
But they are missing the point. The voting system shouldn’t be there to ‘help’ any party - it’s there to serve the people. It’s there to turn people’s votes into seats in Parliament. And it’s failing miserably at doing that.
The current electoral system might have worked terribly for Reform UK 12 months ago, but right now it’s working brilliantly for them. It worked brilliantly for Labour 12 months ago, but in the recent local elections, it gave them the worst results in recent history.
It’s a lottery, and unless somehow there’s a dramatic return to traditional two-party politics, things will only get worse.
The choice for Keir Starmer and his Government is clear -
Keep his fingers crossed, do nothing, allow more and more chaotic elections where people don’t get what they vote for and hope/pray that the current voting system will somehow end up helping Labour as much as it’s helping Reform UK right now.
Do something popular - change our voting system to proportional representation. Use the cross-party support and public support that’s there to fix our democracy. Put power back in the hands of the voters and make political parties EARN seats based on the votes they win from the public. It couldn’t be any more in the national interest.
Over to you Prime Minister!