Vote No to 'First' Past The Post (FPTP)
An ineffective electoral system whenever there is more than two candidates, with a highly misleading name.
With the voting system known as First Past The Post (FPTP), there is in fact no finishing post that a candidate has to get past, they just need to get more votes than each of the others. So, if there were 99 candidates, one of them could win by getting just 1% of the votes - does that seem like a good idea?! A better explanation/name would simply be farthest past the post, referring to the starting post of the 'race' (that in fact an election is nothing like - a race is about speed [distance over time], whereas an election has no element of passing time involved).
Essentially, with First Past The Post, the winner does not have to be first past the (finishing) post. This is simply not acceptable for a democratic voting system.
To further explain how bad the system is, I strongly suggest you watch this:
So to summarise, Farthest Past The (Starting) Post (its correct name):
- allows minority rule - with six or more candidates (often the case in our constituencies), the winner could win with just a 17% share of votes (or far less if there were more candidates than six). Most people would agree that is not fair to have people running the country with that large of a lack of support/confidence. With AV winners must have over 50% support.
- pushes towards a two party system, so makes it very hard for newcomers - voters won't bother voting for a new/small party because they feel their vote will be wasted/have no effect and instead vote for one of the two majors. With AV they can still vote for a minority/new party as their first preference, then have lower preferences for major parties if they are concerned about wasted votes.
- forces people to vote tactically to show their disapproval in candidates, so voting for one major to 'keep out' another major - doesn't happen with AV because they can vote for exactly who they want, in order of preference, and simply not give any support to those that they do not support at all (so far example, vote for their minority choice first then just the others that they don't disapprove of)
- suffers from the spoiler effect (votes being split between multiple similar candidates, allowing a dissimilar candidate to win - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect) - doesn't matter with AV as the votes will eventually be grouped together if the dissimilar candidate does not get 50% support
- significantly (i.e. much more than AV) suffers from the wasted vote effect (voters disaffected by the process because they feel their votes are wasted and don't bother voting at all - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote_effect) - with AV if you give preferences to all candidates, your vote is never wasted, so have a much bigger incentive to vote at all. An AV voter would only ever feel their vote is wasted if they have no preference at all to the candidate that wins, which is more a problem of the constituency system (only getting to vote for a single seat).
And now some facts about the voting systems used by national democracies - here's a list of all the countries that have moved to democratisation since the USA in 1789, and which electoral system they use for national legislature:
So we can see that overall, modern democracies most commonly choose List PR over FPTP and the other systems.
So just to set the record straight on which democracies currently use what, here are the grand totals, as best I can gather:
|Electoral system||Countries that moved to democracies currently using system for national legislature||Total democracies currently using system for national legislature||Democracies previously used system for national legislature|
|Farthest Past The Post (FPTP)||17||53||?|
|Party-list proportional representation (List PR)||31||46||3|
|Two-round system (TRS) (a form of AV)||10||35||?|
|Parallel voting or mixed member majoritarian (MMM)||11||17||5|
|Plurality at large voting/block voting (BV)||2||15||3|
|Mixed member proportional (MMP)||7||8||?|
|Single non-transferable vote (SNTV)||1||3||4|
|Alternative vote (AV)||1||3||0|
To me it seems obvious from these numbers that FPTP is on its way out around the world, albeit slowly, and us Brits would be wise (if we want to maintain our position on the world stage) to follow this progression too.
So come May 5th this year, if you're a registered UK voter, make sure to vote Yes to AV on the ballot, because more importantly in effect, you'll be voting No to FPTP, and No to FPTP ice cream: