You shouldn’t choose an electoral system because you like the results
We campaign for proportional representation at every election, as we think it’s just as unfair for Labour to get an unfair advantage as it is for the Conservatives. The thing with Westminster’s First Past the Post system is that it doesn’t care about the political background of the parties that it gives an advantage too, and the ones it punishes.
Choosing an electoral system because it would help your party at one point in time, is no guarantee that it will in the future. But an electoral system that gives a proportional outcome at this election, will give a proportional outcome at the next.
One of the reasons the voting system produced such a disproportional result last week is that the public are already voting as if we have a proportional voting system and this old system, which is designed for two parties, is buckling under the pressure.
The public are voting as if we already have PR
This was the first election ever, for example, where four parties received over 10% of the vote and five parties received over 5%. Meanwhile, this election saw the combined Labour and Conservative vote share slump to its lowest level on 57.4%. The second lowest combined vote share for the two parties was in 2010 when they received 65.1%.
We have known that the voting system has been failing for a long time. The last three general elections have seen a winning majority gained on just 36.9% of the vote in 2015, a minority government on 42.4% of the vote in 2017 and then an 80-seat majority achieved on a vote share increase of just 1.3% in 2019.
But now it feels as if the outdated First Past the Post voting system is creaking and failing voters on a massive scale.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.
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