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When is a vote not a vote? When it doesn't count for jack, that's when! : articles

When is a vote not a vote? When it doesn't count for jack, that's when!

Posted Tuesday 3rd May 2005

As the UK elections draw nearer, there's been a lot of talk about Iraq, education, the NHS, pensions, Rover, you name it! However, one thing that none of the parties seem to be making a big thing of is the fact that a very large percentage of votes don't count for anything at all. What I'm talking about is our electoral system, and the fact that unless you happen to vote for the candidate that wins in your constituency, your vote has absolutely zero effect on the shape of government. That's right - nada, nothing, zilch, zip. You might as well have not bothered voting, because your voice is completely ignored.

Our antiquated electoral system may seem fair on first impressions, but the vast majority of people are blissfully unaware of how completely broken it is, and how little it actually represents the true wishes of the people in our country. It's all down to the many problems of the "first past the post" (FPTP) system, in which a number of candidates stand for election in each area, and the one who gets more votes than anyone else in the area wins a seat in parliament, regardless of whether they have a majority of the votes or not. The winner takes all, and it's just tough luck to everyone else - can't say fairer than that, surely?

Think about this scenario: Imagine a country divided up into ten zones. In each zone, there are three candidates, A, B and C, each representing the A party, the B party and the C party respectively. The A party gets 40% of the votes in each of the ten zones, the B party 35%, and the C party 25%, meaning that in each zone, 60% of the people voted against the A party. The new government is formed, consisting of the ten winning A party candidates. Now, despite the fact that 60% of the people in the country didn't vote for the A party, not a single B or C party candidate is in the government, because none of them were the winner in any of the areas.

Instead of there being a government proportional to the number of votes for each party, the entire government is formed of A party candidates. Ultimately, this means that 60% of the voters are not represented by their government. But this is not an imaginary scenario, this is the way it really works in UK elections, and it has gone on far too long.

As part of their last election campaign, Labour promised a review of the electoral system used in Britain, and conveniently concluded that it didn't really need proper reviewing until a later date. You've got to hand it to Labour - they ain't stupid. Why on earth would any sane political party change the system that does a very good job of keeping it in power? If you go making things fairer, you'll get all those other pesky parties having a say in how the country is run, or even worse, you risk losing power completely.

That's the trouble with the FPTP system - it encourages tactical voting, since if you vote against the party most likely to win, you run the risk of your vote counting for nothing at all. This tends to give people the impression that voting for smaller parties who "won't get in" is a wasted vote, since if you don't vote for one of the bigger parties likely to win, your vote really does get almost completely ignored under the current system.

There are plenty of fairer systems in use - some that let you specify votes in order of preference (single transferable voting), some that let you have a maximum of one vote for each candidate and you simply vote for everyone you could tolerate (approval voting) and some that use a mixture of systems to produce a representative result. I'm not going to go into too much detail here about various forms of election or government, because other people have done a much better job of explaining this elsewhere (see the links below) but when it comes to producing a government that truly represents the people, FPTP is among the worst systems possible.

We're supposed to live in a democracy, where the government represents the people, yet in 1997 Labour took 65.2% of the seats on 43.3% of the total vote, and in 2001 they took 62.6% of the seats on 40.7% of the vote. Hardly very representative, is it!

When you cast your vote on May the 5th, just bear in mind that you're voting in a fundamentally flawed election process (before you even get as far as postal vote corruption or dead people turning up to vote), and let's make sure the 2005 UK elections are the last elections using this unfair, broken system that cheats us out of a properly representative government time after time.

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