The elections held across the UK on 7 May 2026 produced a series of dramatic outcomes, and the political ramifications of those results are still playing out.

Different areas of Britain vote differently, and each year’s local elections happen in different parts of the country. If a party does well in the local elections, it might just be that elections were happening in areas where their supporters are more likely to live.

So, in my last article, I suggested keeping an eye on two sets of data produced by separate academics after the English local election results were in. Both datasets have been running for around 45 years, and both seek to do the same thing – estimate the vote share each party might have got if local elections had taken place across the whole of Britain, rather than just in certain parts of it.

The Projected National Share (PNS) is produced by Professor Sir John Curtice for the BBC and the National Equivalent Vote (NEV) is produced by Professors Rallings and Thrasher for Sky News.

We expected that both measures would indicate that UK public opinion is now unprecedentedly fragmented, with support spread more thinly across more parties than ever before. This is exactly what happened.

Professor Sir John Curtice’s Projected National Share

The results of the May 2026 PNS are as follows:

Reform UK: 26%
Greens: 18%
Conservatives: 17%
Labour: 17%
Liberal Democrats: 16%
Others: 6%

May 2025’s PNS was the first in which five parties scored over 10%. One year on and five parties have scored over 15%.

Other things to note are as follows:

• The 26% received by Reform UK is the lowest recorded by any largest party in the history of the PNS series. The previous lowest was the 28% recorded by both Labour and the Conservatives, in May 2019.
• It is the first time in the history of the PNS that neither Labour nor the Conservatives feature in the top two parties. The Greens are in second place, with 18%.
• There is only 10-points between the first placed party (Reform UK: 26%) and the fifth-placed party (Liberal Democrats: 16%).

Although not showing quite as fragmented a picture as the PNS, the NEV still breaks a number of records.

Rallings and Thrasher’s National Equivalent Vote

The results of May 2025’s NEV are as follows:

Reform UK: 27%
Conservatives: 20%
Labour: 15%
Greens: 14%
Liberal Democrats: 14%
Others: 10%

Things to note are as follows:

• The 27% received by Reform UK is the lowest recorded by any largest party in the history of the NEV series. The previous lowest was the 29% recorded by Labour, in May 2013.
• It is the first time in the history of the NEV that five parties received more than 10% of votes.
• There is only 13-points between the first placed party (Reform UK: 27%) and the fifth-placed parties (Greens: 14%; Liberal Democrats: 14%).

The different order of the parties in the NEV and PNS just shows the impact a few percentage points has when the parties are so close together. These data sets don’t mean that, for instance, Reform UK would win 26% or 27% of MPs in a UK general election. With First Past the Post it’s really complicated for voters to work out how their votes will translate into representation.

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Random results from England’s local elections

There are numerous examples of this multi-party politics playing out in individual council elections across England, with seat after seat seeing the largest party receiving the support of barely a third of local voters. With these sorts of voting patterns, First Past the Post throws out some pretty random and bizarre results, making it hard for voters to know how votes will tranlate to representation in their area. A flavour from last week’s local elections are below:

• Sefton = Lab majority (55% of seats), with 29% of votes*
• Calderdale = Reform UK majority (63% of seats), with 31% of votes
• East Surrey = Lib Dem majority (56% of seats), with 28% of votes
• Bexley = Conservative majority (64% of seats), with 33% of votes
• Lewisham = Green majority (74% of seats), with 42% of votes

Many councillors are elected in wards where each voter has as many votes as there are positions to be filled. When some voters have 2 votes and others 3, and some decide to not cast all their votes as well, you can’t simply add up all the votes to calculate the vote shares. For councils with wards that elect more than one councillor (multi-member wards), we have calculated vote shares by using the number of votes for each party’s best-placed candidate in each ward. This is the approach taken by local election experts Professors Rallings & Thrasher of The Elections Centre, a major resource for local election data in the UK.

Now that the elections are over, we will continue to keep a close eye on the opinion polls and see where our multi-party politics heads next.

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Since the votes cast in the local elections were counted on Friday there has been extensive debate among experts and in the media about whether we are seeing the end of the two-party system. This has been prompted largely by Reform’s surging performance, with the party winning the Runcorn and Helsby byelection, two mayoralties and over 670 councillors, meaning they could take control of as many as 10 of the 23 councils that were up for election.

Professor John Curtice pointed out the unprecedented nature of these results when he released the Projected National Vote Share score, which estimates what parties’ overall vote shares would look like if the whole country had been voting. This placed Reform on 30% of the vote, Labour on 20%, the Lib Dems on 17%, the Conservatives on 15% and the Greens on 11%.

The elections guru explained that these results equalled Labour’s worst ever performance in 2009 and were the lowest estimate ever recorded for the Conservatives. This was also the first time that the combined Labour and Conservative vote share had slumped below 50%, which Prof. Sir John argued highlights the increasing fragmentation of British electoral politics.

In a piece in the Times, Prof. Sir John expanded on how the results showed that Reform was now benefiting from the distortions of the First Past the Post (FPTP) system, which has traditionally favoured the big two parties.

‘Cannot presume FPTP will ensure dominance of the two many parties in the Commons’

He said: “It [Reform] won 40 per cent of the 1,641 seats being contested, well above its share of the vote. Being ahead in votes rather than third enabled the party to breach the barrier hitherto presented by first-past-the-post. It was even able to win overall control of more than half a dozen councils, including, most remarkably, the former Labour fiefdom of Durham. 

“Conservative and Labour MPs can no longer presume that Britain’s electoral system will ensure their continued dominance of the Commons.”

Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, drew a similar conclusion in his piece in the Observer newspaper, saying “no third party has ever been so dominant in local elections”.

‘First Past the Post helps incumbents and hurts insurgents – until it doesn’t’

Prof Ford added: “Reform’s rise was amplified by the electoral system. First Past the Post helps incumbents and hurts insurgents – until it doesn’t.

“By forming the biggest party in a fragmented field, Farage was able to turn the tables, reaping the rewards of a system which hands a massive bonus to any party big and broad enough to win across the map.

“Efficient voting delivered a landside for Labour on a third of the vote last July, and a similar share helped Reform sweep to power in England’s shires.”

The polling firm More in Common’s analysis of the local election results also focused on the how Britain is moving towards multi-party voting. In a report, Luke Tryl, the company’s UK Executive Director, noted: “Further fragmentation means that the era of multi-party politics has well and truly arrived – but with a clear winner of that era this week in Reform UK – capitalising on both disillusionment and frustrations on cost of living and immigration.”

These local elections have been a continuation of theme we saw at last year’s general election: that of the public voting in an increasingly multiparty fashion and our two-party electoral system failing to cope. Last year we saw Labour win a landslide 63% of the seats in Parliament on just 34% of the vote, in what was the most disproportional election result in UK history. The general election was the first in British history where four parties won over 10% of the vote, and five parties won over 5%.

We need to move to a fairer proportional system

At the locals we saw FPTP handing powerful combined authority mayoralties to candidates on less than a quarter of the vote, such as in the West of England where Labour won on just 24.97%. We also saw it delivering distorted results in town halls across the country, such as in Staffordshire where Reform won 79% of the seats on just 41% of the vote, and Shropshire where the Lib Dems picked up 57% of the seats on 34% of the votes.

The consensus from the experts following this election is that the two-party system is coming under pressure in a way not seen for a generation. What is also clear is that our two-party voting system is failing to cope with the shift to multiparty politics and throwing up disproportional and distorted results at all levels of our democracy.

In effect, people are already voting as if we have a multi-party voting system, which is another reason why we need to move to a fairer proportional system that accurately reflects how they’ve voted, whether at Westminster or at town halls.

It’s to scrap first past the post and finally fairly represent us all in local government.

Add your name to our call for fair local elections in England

The local and mayoral elections saw the corrosive impact First Past the Post is having on our democracy writ large. Not only did we witness its continued distorting effect on local council elections, with a number of heavily disproportional results (one party took 90% of the seats up for election on less than half of the vote), but we also saw its impact on mayoral and police and crime commissioner (PCC) results for the first time.

This was the first set of mayoral and PCC elections to use First Past the Post after the government decided to abandon the fairer preferential Supplementary Vote (SV) system, which has been used since the posts were created. The result was a host of mayors and PCCs elected being on as low as a third of the vote, meaning many places now have influential politicians in place the majority of those who voted didn’t support.

First Past the Post hits mandate of London Mayor

The most eye-catching result of this switch to First Past the Post was Sadiq Khan being re-elected for a historic third term as the Mayor of London. Analysis from our research team found the changes to the rules mean he won with the smallest mandate since the office was created 24 years ago.

The Labour politician won 43.8% of the vote on Thursday, which was enough to secure him a third term under the new First Past the Post system.

All prior London mayoral elections used the traditional Supplementary Vote (SV) system, which allows voters to indicate a first and second preference. Under SV, if no candidate gets over 50% of first preference votes, the top two candidates continue to a runoff where second preference votes from eliminated candidates are allocated. This ensures winners have a broad base of support, and helps reduce ‘vote-splitting’.

We found that, after the first and second preference votes of previous winning candidates are taken into account, Sadiq Khan’s current mandate is lower than any previous winner elected under SV. The mayor with lowest vote share under SV was Ken Livingstone, who received 44.4% of votes from voters giving him either their first preference vote or a transferred second preference vote in 2004.

Vote share of London Mayoral winners after first and second preferences are counted

Vote share	Winner	Year	Electoral System
43.80%	Sadiq Khan	2024	FPTP
44.40%	Ken Livingstone	2004	SV
45.30%	Ken Livingstone	2000	SV
47.60%	Sadiq Khan	2021	SV
47.80%	Boris Johnson	2012	SV
48.40%	Boris Johnson	2008	SV
50.40%	Sadiq Khan	2016	SV

Under First Past the Post a third of the vote is enough to win

Elsewhere, the switch to First Past the Post saw Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) and an elected mayor win on as low as, or just over, a third of the vote.

We found that in the 2021 elections, where the Supplementary Vote was used, no winning PCC or mayor received less than 40% of the vote.

Reduced mandates – PPC and mayoral results

Vote Share	Winner	Party	Contest
31%	Philip Wilkinson	Conservative	Wiltshire PPC
32.3%	Clare Moody	Labour	Avon and Somerset PPC
33.1%	Chris Nelson	Conservative	Gloucestershire PCC
34.3%	John Campion	Conservative	West Mercia PCC
35.2%	Sarah Taylor	Conservative	Norfolk PCC
35.1%	David Skaith	Labour	York and North Yorkshire Mayor

Lowing the bar for politicians – and raising it for voters

The move to First Past the Post has lowered the bar for politicians to get elected by taking choice away from voters. This is bad for voters, who now have mayors and PCCs the majority didn’t vote for; it is bad for elected politicians who must do their jobs with less backing for their policies; and it is bad for trust in democracy.

At the same time, we are seeing the bar to voting being raised, as this was the first time millions had to show ID to cast their ballot. We know that voter ID prevented at least 14,000 people from voting at last year’s local elections and this year we have again heard of voters – including a decorated ex-serviceman – being barred from exercising their fundamental democratic right due to not having an accepted form of ID from the government’s list.

Our politics is headed in the wrong direction when we are making it harder for people to vote but easier for politicians to get elected. We need to set our democracy on a better course by scraping voter ID and improving access to voting, but also by moving to proportional and preferential voting systems that better represent how people voted.

First Past the Post shouldn’t have a place in town halls

Add your name to our call

Local people are best placed to decide the priorities of their local government. But as we say today, voters in England and Wales have very little impact on who sits in their local council chambers.

With many of the 2023 local election results now declared, the First Past the Post system used across England has once again failed to reflect the views of voters in who runs their local community.

Rather than simply representing the strength of support for the different parties in their area, as councils in Scotland and Northern Ireland do, England’s councils are often wildly different from their local communities and the votes of those who live there.

Thursday’s local elections also saw some parties picking up as much as 90% of the available seats on less than half of the vote share. 

It’s not just that the bigger parties do slightly better than their support deserves, once the votes go through the tumbler of First Past the Post, who can tell how they will come out because of how disproportional a system it is.

The distortion of election results under First Past the Post produces some pretty funky results when you look at the numbers. Our research team have identified a series of results where voter’s actual choices have been almost disregarded under England’s winner-takes-all system.

When coming second means you come first  

Unbelievably, First Past the Post can’t even guarantee that the party with the most votes wins the most seats. In Gosport, the Lib Dems managed to turn a second place in votes to a majority of the seats up for election.

In Sunderland, the Conservatives are the second most popular party – but only won the third largest group of councillors up for election. The Liberal Democrats on the other hand, just beat Reform UK into third place by 0.9 percentage points, and First Past the Post propelled them into winning the second largest group of councillors while Reform UK failed to win a single seat.

In Broxbourne, First Past the Post transformed the narrowest Conservative majority into a stonking 90% of the seats up for election.

When the results don’t look anything like how we vote, how are voters supposed to hold their councils to account? With council tax rising across the country and local services under extreme pressure, we need to know that the Councillors we have trusted with our vote are actually in the Council Chamber to properly scrutinise and improve our local areas.

Nobody can look at these examples and think our system is working. It’s failing voters and it’s failing communities. From Gosport to Broxbourne, election after election we see thousands of voters ignored by First Past the Post.

(For councils with wards that elect more than one councillor, we have calculated vote shares by using the number of votes for each party’s best-placed candidate in each ward. This is the approach taken by local election experts Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, directors of the Elections Centre, a major resource for local election data in the UK) 

 Votes wasted, voters ignored 

Under First Past the Post, all votes not cast for the one (or multiple) winners in each ward go to waste. Spread across a whole council area, parties can often secure a substantial number of votes and still be left with zero representation. 

No party should be able to sweep the board on a minority of the vote. But again and again, we see parties handed huge numbers of seats entirely out of step with their number of votes, leaving many voters feeling their voice has been ignored.

We are calling for a shift to proportional representation for English councils and to end the use of First Past the Post in local government. 

A tried and tested alternative

There is a clear alternative to the unfair results we have seen in England. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland use the fairer proportional voting Single Transferable Vote system, avoiding the distorted and random results produced by First Past the Post. STV is a form of proportional representation, that can breathe new life and energy into our local democracy.

Since STV was introduced in Scotland in 2007, one-party fiefdoms have become a thing of the past. In 2020, Wales passed legislation allowing councils to introduce the fair and proportional Single Transferable Vote system.

Three councils are preparing to run consultations on moving over to this system.

With STV, voters would live in wards with one or more councillors, just like now. Except, rather than the norm being that one party can dominate all the councillors, you get a group of councillors that reflect the diversity of local opinion. Ensuring everyone is represented, your council budget is properly scrutinised, and you have multiple people and parties to ask for help from on local issues.

Proportional representation would mean fairer results at local elections and would create council chambers that better reflect the way people voted.

It’s to scrap first past the post and finally fairly represent us all in local government. 

Add your name to our call for fair local elections in England

News that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was turned away from voting as he went to a polling station without an accepted form of ID caused widespread amusement on social media yesterday. According to media reports, Johnson later returned with an accepted ID and cast his vote.

His colleague on the government benches, Tom Hunt MP, also had to seek out an emergency proxy as he couldn’t find his passport.

While the spectacle of the former PM being caught out by a law he passed understandably caused hilarity, it also drew attention to others who were caught out by this unnecessary and poorly thought-through legislation.

Voters turned away with government-issued photo ID

Last year we reported on Police Officers being turned away from polling stations as Police Warrant cards don’t count as voter ID. This year, a decorated former army office and Afghanistan veteran, was turned away because his veteran’s ID is not an accepted form of ID. Adam Driver said he was ‘gutted’ to be ‘turned away from the door’ when he went to try and cast his vote in the local elections. His tweet prompted an apology from veterans minister, Johnny Mercer, who said he would ‘do all I can’ to get veteran’s cards added to the list of acceptable ID.

As it stands, ID cards for active servicemen and women are valid for voting, but not those issued to veterans. The government promised to rectify the baffling discrepancy between active and former services personnel as far back as 2021, but three years later veterans are being turned away from polling stations.

Chaos and confusion at the polling station

These two differing tales threw into sharp relief the daft and inexplicable inconsistencies that voter ID rules are riddled with, often creating a two-tier democracy for who gets to cast their vote and who don’t.

From the start, the ERS and other democracy organisations argued that bringing in voter ID was an unnecessary and damaging measure. It has always been a solution in search of a problem. Levels of personation – where someone pretends to be another person at a polling station to cast their vote – have been extremely low. For instance, there have only been only 10 convictions between 2019 and 2023 out of tens of millions of votes cast.

Voter ID is causing problems were there were no real ones before

At last year’s local elections, at least 14,000 voters were turned away polling stations due to a lack of acceptable ID and never returned, according to the Electoral Commission. That figure likely underplays the true number of people affected by voter ID as it doesn’t count people who stayed at home as they don’t have an accepted ID. While voters without acceptable ID can apply for a Voter Authority Certificate, more than 2 million people are estimated not to possess any of the accepted forms of ID.

Voting is a fundamental democratic right, and no one should be barred from casting a vote they are entitled to. The fact is our inconsistent and arbitrary voter ID law has already prevented thousands of people from voting and even wrongfooted the prime minister who brought into law.

Participation is the lifeblood of our democracy and anything that stops people voting weakens it, as well as trust in politics.

At the very least, the types of acceptable ID needs to be vastly expanding so people are not caught out and turned away from polling stations due to illogical requirements.

But, ultimately, even that will only be a sticking plaster. We scrap this damaging and disproportionate policy before stops any more people exercising their basic democratic right to vote.

It’s clear that this scheme is a disaster – it’s time for a rethink

Add your name to our call to scrap this policy

Today, the 2^nd May, millions of voters will head to the polls to elect more than 2,500 councillors, 37 police and crime commissioners, 10 metro mayors, 1 MP (by-election in Blackpool South) and London Assembly Members.

Every eligible voter in England and Wales will have an opportunity to vote on May 2^nd, but not in the same way we have traditionally. Following the Elections Act 2022, the government have made two big structural changes to the way we vote, treating voters as guinea pigs in their electoral experiments.

Millions of voters are using first past the post for the first time

For the first time voters in Wales, and in parts of England, will be required to bring Voter ID to vote in elections. The ERS has opposed the use of Voter ID since it was first proposed in the Pickles Report 2016, likening the report to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Elections are safe and secure in the UK, with only 10 convictions between 2019 and 2023 for people pretending to be other people at the polling station.

We do have an idea about what will happen with this experiment though. In the 2023 local election at least 14,000 electors were turned away because they lacked ID and did not return. The disenfranchisement of 14,000 voters in an effort to curtail a handful of voter fraud cases is very much a poisoned cure.

It’s now easier to be a Mayor or Police and Crime Commissioner

Another change which has not made as many headlines as the introduction of Voter ID is the change in the voting system for Police and Crime Commissioners and Metro Mayors from the traditional Supplementary Vote to First Past the Post.

With the traditional system, everyone marked who their first and second favourite candidate was, and if no candidate won a majority, they checked these choices to see which of the top two candidates were the most popular more broadly. It means these powerful positions can’t be controlled by just a small minority of the population.

In the smaller mayoral elections in 2023 we saw how this change could transform the outcome of the elected candidate. In Bedford the Conservatives took the mayoralty from the Liberal Democrat on 33%, only 145 votes more than the Lib Dem candidate. In 2019, the Lib Dem candidate won the race after 2^nd preference votes were counted, giving them a 54% mandate.

We shouldn’t have mayors, with the power to sign off big budgets, without broad support.

Under First Past the Post, mayors do not have to try and win support outside their core voters and will be governing with a reduced mandate as a result.

Lowering the bar for politicians and raising it for voters

In essence, the changes to voting have raised the bar for voters by requiring Voter ID, and lowered the bar for politicians as FPTP allows them to govern without winning broad support.

They should be making it easier for voters to hold politicians to account, rather than trying out schemes in advance of the general election and ignoring the obvious impact.

Tell us how these changes have impacted you

Have you been turned away? Tell us what happened