“Future historians may determine that democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous but very realistic idea (or rather prediction),” writes Haim Harari in Democracy May Be On Its Way Out (From: What is Your Dangerous Idea?, ed. by John Brockmann, 2006. UK: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, pp.293-295). The theoretical physicist argues that democracy may be doomed due to rising anti-democratic forces in an increasingly globalised world where economic injustice is rife, education is in crisis in most advanced societies and a small well-educated technological elite is taking exclusive control of intellectual property.

His argument is, however, based on the assumption that democracy already truly exists. A far more dangerous idea (or rather fact) is that democracy already dies at the ballot box in many countries where undemocratic forces are inherent in the very system that claims to enable democracy: the plurality voting system known as First-Past-The-Post (FPTP).

FPTP is the second most widely used electoral system in the world and predominantly found in countries with a historical link to the UK, i.e. former British colonies such as the USA, India, Pakistan and several Caribbean and African nations. FPTP is the prevalent voting system in the UK itself, used also for general elections to elect members of the House of Commons as well as for local government elections.
FPTP is based on a One-Man-One-Vote principle and single-member constituencies, where each party nominates one single candidate and each voter is only allowed to vote for one. The term “First-Past-The-Post” stems from horse racing where the winner is the first to pass a designated point on the race course, after which all other runners lose. FPTP candidates may not actually need to pass a particular point in order to win, but they have to obtain the plurality of votes. The concept of FPTP is thus rather simple: voters put a cross in the box next to one candidate, the candidate with the most votes in a given constituency is the exclusive winner and all other votes count for nothing (hence FPTP is also known as “Winner-Takes-All”).
The simplicity of FPTP is often cited as its main advantage, allegedly allowing quicker, easier and more cost-effective elections: voters face a simple choice, the counting process is swift and results can be announced within hours after the polls have closed.

The foundations of democracy rest upon three criteria: “by-the-people”, “of-the-people” and “for-the-people”. If a political system is democratic in the sense of “by-the-people”, its institutions, government and governmental procedures express the actual will of the majority of the people; in other words, the people within that system must be able to vote their rulers out of office and replace them in line with their true political convictions.
FPTP already stumbles at this very first hurdle since candidates can win even if they fail to gain the overall majority of the votes cast. In the 2001 general election Labour gained the majority of seats (62.5%) despite winning only 40% of the national vote. In fact, under FPTP no UK government has won more than 50% of the votes since 1935. Equally, a party can be despised by 49% of the electorate and still win. The same goes for individual candidates; in the 2005 general election, George Galloway was one of three MPs who were re-elected into the House of Commons with less than 20 percent of the electorate in their respective constituencies.
Such disproportional results are possible because with FPTP all votes for the losing parties or candidates as well as those cast for the winners in excess of the number required for victory are wasted and count for nothing. In the 2005 election the wasted votes accounted for a total of 70% (52% of votes were cast for losing candidates, 18% were excess votes) – that is 19 million ballots! Unsurprisingly, such prospects lead to widespread voter apathy and low turnouts. With less than 60% of the electorate casting their vote, the 2001 election hit an all-time post-war low, while the 2005 election only lured 3 percent more voters to the polling stations.

Can a system that discounts over 50% of all the votes cast in an election be called democratic?

Plurality voting systems encourage broad centrist and rather homogenous parties. They also tend to produce dominant two-party systems (think of the eternal power struggle between the Tories and Labour in the UK!) and allow single-party governments which don’t rely on support from other parties to pass legislation. One-party rule, so some FPTP supporters claim, offers the advantage of speeding up the decision-making process. The downside is that single-party governments are likely to ignore a wide spectrum of concerns and perspectives in their politics. They are also more likely to push through radical policy changes, favoured by only a minority of voters, because they do not require as great a consensus as coalition governments.

Can a system that favours dominant two-party systems truly represent a diverse electorate?

Advocates of FPTP also claim that two-party systems are more stable and less prone to extremism. The invariably wheeled-out argument is that one particular non-FPTP system, namely Proportional Representation (PR), led to the demise of the Weimar Republic and enabled the rise of Hitler’s National Socialists. That was, however, “pure” PR without a so-called “hurdle” (a certain quota of votes a party or candidate needs to obtain in order to gain seats), which allowed any party with even the smallest public support to enter parliament and thus opened the door to extremists. The weakness of this arguments lies in the fact that that the revised form of this voting system, which now includes a quota and is being successfully used in most of Europe, has kept extremists at bay for well over 60 years.
What two-party systems are good at, however, is eroding the political landscape. Third parties have no real chance of winning and are marginalised, particularly since FPTP encourages tactical voting. Voters are frequently forced to betray their true political convictions and cast their vote for the most likely winner (since a vote for any other candidate would be wasted) or for the candidate with whom they disagree least (but still don’t fully agree).
Since tactical voting requires a prediction of the likely winner, the media are given undue weight and election polls become highly manipulative tools in increasingly costly election campaigns (that much for elections being more cost-effective with plurality voting!).

Can a system be called democratic if it denies voters a meaningful way of expressing dissenting opinion at the ballot box?

Tactical voting also has a knock-on effect on a party’s choice of candidates. In order to gain maximum votes, parties invariably choose the most broadly appealing or “safest” individual to stand for election, thus often overlooking party members from minority groups including women. Given that FPTP is based on single-member constituencies, voters wishing to vote for a particular party cannot express their disagreement with that party’s preferred candidate at the ballot box. As a consequence, voter choice is severely restricted.
Thus, FPTP falls at the second, the “of-the-people” hurdle since political parties and ultimately governments fail to fairly represent and employ people of all backgrounds.


FPTP can also lead to geographic injustice and imbalances such as electoral clusters or electoral deserts. Areas which have proved electoral deserts for a particular party tend to be neglected by that party when formulating its policy or campaigning. At the same time, ambitious party members living in such an electoral desert are often forced to move away in order to gain party influence and stand a chance to be nominated and ultimately elected.

There is, however, an alternative to FPTP which ensures that almost all votes effectively influence the results of an election: Proportional Representation (PR) in its variant forms. PR, which matches the percentage of votes obtained by a party or candidate with a proportionate percentage of seats, is the dominant electoral system in Europe and even in some countries within the UK, most notably Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland a form of PR called “Single Transferable Vote” (STV) is used for all elections bar Westminster. With STV, voters can rank candidates in order of preference (1,2,3 etc), whilst candidates don’t require the majority of votes to be elected but only a “quota”, which actually allows minority views to be represented. The ranking system means that few votes are wasted because if your favoured candidate has no chance of being elected or has already won enough votes, your vote is transferred to another candidate in line with your indicated preferences. This gives candidates of all parties as well as independent candidates a real chance of being elected. Such an electoral system effectively serves the interest of the people – unlike FPTP, which therefore fails to meet the third and last democracy criterion, “for-the-people”.
So far all attempts to initiate electoral reform and introduce a fairer and more representative voting system, especially for the way members of the House of Commons are elected, have been unsuccessful – for obvious reasons, because the only people who could actually change it (the MPs) are largely reluctant to do so, lest they lose out in a more just electoral system. Elections and electoral systems are fundamental to democracy. Through them we decide who should make decisions on our behalf and who should run the country, the economy and our foreign affairs. Through them we determine who should shape the future of our health service, education system and local services. Let’s raise democracy from its deathbed through a voting system that produces governments and politics by-the-people, of-the-people and for-the-people.

To find out more about more democratic electoral systems, including STV, and to support electoral reform visit:
www.makemyvotecount.org.uk
www.electoral-reform.org.uk