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

There are ‘status quo’ elections and then there’s this week’s 2021 Canadian federal election – where every party’s seat total is no more than two seats different from what it was last time.

Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called this snap election in the hopes of bettering the minority government he won just two years ago. Instead, he is just a single seat better off and has provided Canadian electoral reformists with yet more evidence of the need to ditch First Past the Post (FPTP). So let’s take a look at some of the key electoral issues thrown up by this election.

Results of the 2021 Canadian Election

Disproportionality

It’s not at all surprising that a FPTP election would deliver a skewed and unrepresentative result, but, with a vote-seat deviation score of 18%, this election is the least proportional Canadian election in 21 years and the sixth least proportional since 1945.

The Liberals are again the main beneficiary, taking 15 percentage points more seats than they would be entitled to under a fully-proportional voting system. The Conservatives and regionalist Bloc Québécois will also have marginally more than their fair share of MPs, while the social democratic NDP is left noticeably underrepresented. The right-wing populist People’s Party will have no representation despite winning just over 5% of the vote, enough to win at least one seat in most of western Europe.

Although this election is above average in its disproportionality, Canadian voters have had to get used this level of distortion of their votes. The previous 24 post-war elections have an average vote-seat deviation score of 15.0%, slightly less than Britain’s average 15.5%, but still meaning that nearly 1 in 6 votes are usually misallocated. The instability of the Canadian party system has meant that every key party has at some point been severely underrepresented, though for the NDP it is the norm rather than the exception – with them losing out on over 150 seats across the last 20 years due to FPTP.

Canada does have some wildly different sized constituencies sizes which also play a role. The less populous provinces have a few more ridings than their population would suggest, and the more heavily populated have fewer. This is because a formula is applied when the number of ridings in each province is calculated.

Minority Government

With no party winning an overall majority, this election will likely lead to a minority government. This is not unusual for Canada – nearly half of their elections since 1945 have created hung parliaments and they have traditionally eschewed coalitions. While minority governments are not inherently unstable, the Canadian reaction to them is less than ideal. Not just are coalitions not formed, but formal Confidence and Supply arrangements are also a rarity. Instead, minority governments in Canada typically have to win support on an ad hoc basis – perpetually placing government stability at the whims of opposition parties, with them perfectly happy to give a vote of no confidence if their demands aren’t met. Unsurprisingly, Canada is the home of snap elections, with the average parliament fulfilling less than two-thirds of its permissible term.

Questionable Mandate

The issue of Canadian insistence on single-party government is compounded by the increasing lack of support that those single parties command. Trudeau may claim that the voters have given him a ‘clear mandate’, but this is now the second election in a row where the winning party received less than one-third of votes cast, and no party has managed more than 40% in the last 20 years. Whether or not a party wins a majority in the House of Commons, no recent Canadian government has been endorsed – explicitly or even implicitly – by anywhere close to a majority of voters. Instead, policy is decided solely by a party that twice as many people voted against than for.

Wrong Winner

Aside from the high level of overall disproportionality, this election has resulted in one of the gravest forms of misrepresentation that any electoral system can commit – it has produced a so-called ‘wrong winner’ result.

The Conservatives won nearly 2% points more votes than the Liberals, but the latter have been rewarded with 12% points more seats. This is the fourth post-war Canadian election and second in a row where this has occurred – with the Conservatives’ less effective vote distribution meaning they now have to win the popular vote by several points just to draw level with the Liberals in seat terms. The Canadian Conservatives pile up large majorities in seats they win, while the Liberals tend to win with slimmer margins.

Minority government on 32% of the vote is one thing, but it is another when it isn’t even the most popular minority that gets to be in charge.

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Brenda from Bristol famously cried “not another one!” at the news that we were to hold an election in 2017, just two years since the last one.

Let’s hope she doesn’t plan to move to America anytime soon: the House of Representatives has been elected every two years for the last 230 years.

Elections to the House of Representatives are in a cycle with the Senate and the Presidency. Every two years every member of the House of Representatives are elected for a fresh two-year term, and a third of Senators are elected for six-year terms. Oh, and there’s a Presidential election every four years.

Brenda’s hypothetical American cousins have a similar attitude to her: turnout in elections half-way through a President’s term are shockingly low. The highest it has reached in the last 100 years was 48.7% in 1966, but in recent years it has sat around the 40% mark, dropping to 37% last time.

Thankfully, turnout is supposed to be up for this election. But no matter how many people vote, elections in America aren’t a straight race.

Something isn’t right

The one vital detail missing from news reports on the midterms is that the Democrats don’t just need more people to vote for them. According to FiveThirtyEight projections, they need to beat the Republicans by nearly six percentage points.

Or to put it another way, to get 50% of the House of Representatives, the Democrats need to get 56% of the popular vote.

This isn’t new. In 2012 more people voted for the Democrats than Republicans, but the latter won a majority of the House.

While the Electoral College (used for electing the President) was designed to artificially boost the power of voters in less populated states, the House of Representatives is supposed to represent the nation equally.

So where has this partisan bias come from?

[bctt tweet=”Just like in the UK, Americans use the winner-takes-all First Past the Post system to elect the House of Representatives. And just like in every country it is used, the system leads to worrying levels of ‘electoral bias’.” username=”electoralreform”]

Winning big and losing small

The ‘bias’ is the difference in seats between the two main parties if they both got the same number of votes. The perfect natural experiment was 1996, when both parties got the same share of the vote, to one decimal place… and Republicans won 19 more seats.

In the UK, the electoral bias changes over time as third parties grow and shrink. But in America, where third parties are almost non-existent, the bias has been consistently pro-Republican for many years.

This is because Republican voters live in locations that help their party’s electoral chances. With First Past the Post, you only need to come first by one vote to be elected. Republicans are spread around the country in such a way that their candidates can take advantage of this by winning narrowly, and losing badly.

Remember: if you beat your opponent by one vote or 100,000 votes, the result is the same: you still only get one seat.

The system means there’s no difference between a candidate who wins with 51% and one who wins with 80%. You could say it penalises popularity. Why bother winning big?

While some people may vote out of a sense of civic duty, so for them their vote was still important, in terms of who ends up sitting in the House of Representatives, all these votes are wasted.

It’s the geography, stupid

There’s another factor at play: people enjoy living near people like themselves. But in particular, Democrats tend to live in areas with a higher density of other Democrats. Since that increases the chances of Democrats ‘winning big’ in individual seats with no proportional increase in representation, in effect they self-sort in a way that helps the Republicans.

Politicians in America take advantage of this feature of the voting system, by designing constituencies to ensure they have an even more ‘efficient’ voter base. Unlike in the UK, where independent boundary commissions design the seats, in many States, politicians can choose their voters by carefully drawing constituency borders around them.

America is fairly unique in that while the Federal government tells each state how many Representatives the state gets, it is the State that draws the constituency boundaries, decides the franchise and picks the electoral system for Federal elections.

Another way

Voters aren’t going to move house to solve this problem, so the solution is to change the electoral system to one that isn’t based on constituencies that elect just one member. With a preferential system like the Single Transferable Vote, all the votes that would have been wasted under First Past the Post can be transferred to help other people get elected.

Maine is part of the way there, as this midterm they will elect their Representatives and Senators with ‘Instant Run-off Voting’ for the first time. This isn’t a form of proportional representation, but will at least ensure that the winner gets over 50% of the vote.

Interest is growing in electoral reform all the time, and as the old saying goes, ‘As Maine goes, so goes the nation’. Depending on what happens these midterms, the rest of the US may be very keen to follow suit.

The General Election on this day in 1951 couldn’t have been more decisive. Six years since Labour’s victory in 1945, and one year after their victory in 1950, the public was still behind Clement Attlee’s reforming agenda. The chances looked good for Labour in 1951 and, as the results started coming in, the numbers looked good as well.

They had won the most votes of any political party in any election, a record not surpassed until the Conservative Party’s victory in 1992 – when there were over seven million more people in the country.

In fact, even with a smaller population, Labour won the most votes they have ever won to date.

On top of their record-breaking haul of votes, Labour was well out in front, with almost a quarter of a million votes more than the Conservatives. A decisive victory for Labour then? Not quite.

The Conservatives move back into Downing Street

Clement Atlee had to resign as Prime Minister and an ageing Winston Churchill quickly moved back into Downing Street, while his Conservatives formed a government with a majority of 17.

The 1951 General Election was certainly quick and decisive – and one party with a majority was kicked out of office to be replaced by another. It’s just that the wrong party got kicked out.

First Past the Post’s wrong winner problem

This wasn’t the last time a ‘wrong winner’ vote – where a party gets more votes but fewer seats than its opponent – would happen. In February 1974, Labour secured 301 seats to 297 for the Conservatives – despite the Conservatives beating Labour by over 200,000 votes.

Internationally, there are other precedents. New Zealand saw two wrong winner elections in a row in 1978 and 1981, setting them on the path to electoral reform. The mechanics of the electoral college in the United States are also similar and have delivered Presidents who did not win the popular vote in 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. And provinces across Canada are now debating adopting a fair, proportional voting system after a series of undemocratic wrong winner elections.

Why? The results of elections under Westminster’s First Past the Post system aren’t in proportion to the votes that are cast.

Due to the complex way votes are turned into seats, some parties will get significantly more seats than you’d expect, while others get significantly less. When two parties get a similar number of votes, these differences can turn a loser into a winner and vice-versa.

Put simply, if a party wins huge majorities in constituencies – such as the 77% majority for Labour in Liverpool Walton in 2017 – then those additional votes above and beyond the nearest challengers do not help a party win any more seats.

So, the most ‘efficient’ thing to do under Westminster’s voting system is to try and win constituencies by a small margin – not to ‘waste’ effort in seats you are likely to lose in or get a bigger majority than you need.

The result is a huge amount of votes not counting towards getting anyone elected to Parliament. And of course, a skewed campaign map, with swathes of the country written off by parties as ‘unwinnable’ or ‘safe’.

In 1951, Labour was piling on votes in seats they had already won, while the Conservatives won narrow victories. The opposite happened in 1974 when the system meant the Conservatives lost out to Labour. Since 2015, the problem of electoral ‘bias’ means Westminster’s voting system has advantaged the Conservatives.

Any system that has constituencies will have some bias in it, but the more proportional a system the less bias – thereby making sure that the parliament the public vote for is the one they get.

A simple electoral system would make each vote equal

In a simple electoral system, you wouldn’t have to calculate complicated uniform swings to find out how many MPs a party with half the vote would get. They would get half the MPs.

When voters know what impact their vote will have, they are powerful. When only party analysts can work out the impact of electoral results on parliament, they are the ones who are in control.

We need to fix this broken system before it happens again.

Sign our petition for a fair electoral system

Last week’s local elections were a textbook lesson in why we need to change the way we elect our local councils. From the wrong party winning, to councils with zero scrutiny, using Westminster’s voting system to decide who controls council’s multi-million-pound budgets is a disaster waiting to happen.

But it doesn’t have to be like this in England. Just across the border in Scotland, local councils reflect how local residents vote. In Northern Ireland, local government has functioned perfectly well for decades with a democratic voting system.

Most of the councils up for election last week are elected in one of two ways, usually electing more than one councillor from each ward.

In the first, as is typical in the London boroughs, you have three councillors in a ward, three votes you can cast and the top three will be elected. Typically, voters will cast all three votes for one party’s candidates and hence three councillors of the same party will be returned.

This means that councils often do an even worse job reflecting how people vote than even Westminster. With three separate wards there is a chance that different parties’ candidates might win each one. With a single ward that elects three, typically, one parties’ candidates will get all.

Another way is elections by thirds, typically used in the urban North. These wards are once again multi-member except that one councillor is generally elected a year, with a fourth year with no election. Once again the same party tends to win all three, plus voters get tired of voting every single year which reduces turnout and engagement.

Both these statements were born out last Thursday.

For instance, three London boroughs, Barking and Dagenham, Lewisham and Newham are now 100% Labour councils with no opposition councillors whatsoever.

Three London boroughs, Barking and Dagenham, Lewisham and Newham are now 100% Labour councils with no opposition councillors whatsoever. Click to tweet

Even with a voting system that is famous for not respecting how people vote, you might expect that the vast majority of residents voted Labour. Perhaps 80%?

In Lewisham, for instance, only 52% voted Labour, with three other parties gaining more than 10% of the vote. The Greens (18.4%) the Conservatives (13.0%) and the Liberal Democrats (11.8%). While just over half of Lewisham residents wanted a Labour council, a substantial minority voted for other parties. Had a few percentage points been different, labour could have gained 100% of the seats on less than 50% of the vote.

Lewisham Council Elections 2018

But it was not just Labour who gained an advantage from disproportionate results. In the City of Westminster Council, the Conservatives won by a narrow margin in votes, 42.8% to 41.1%, but won 41 seats to 19 for Labour.

We’ve been crunching the numbers on how people voted in #LocalElections2018

Westminster could very easily have had Labour in the lead on votes, but losing on seats. pic.twitter.com/QZWOW0CFwj

— Electoral Reform Society (@electoralreform) May 4, 2018

The politicians who benefit from Westminster’s voting system often argue that one of the advantages is that it produces clear winners for whoever wins the most votes. But in Wandsworth Labour won the most votes, 38.7%, and got 26 seats, while the Conservatives got 38.3%, but won 33. In Plymouth (elected by thirds) the Conservatives won the vote 44.9% to 44.2% but Labour won the most seats up for election, 11 to 8, seeing it take control of the council.

It’s very narrow, but looks like more people voted Labour in Wandsworth than Conservative.

Sign the petition for a fair voting system: https://t.co/l0oFRHUrTZ pic.twitter.com/r6p3GItlci

— Electoral Reform Society (@electoralreform) May 4, 2018

The Conservatives actually beat Labour in terms of votes in Plymouth. Yet Labour won the most seats.

Westminster style voting can’t even do the one thing its supporters say it does. Sign the petition: https://t.co/l0oFRHCQvp pic.twitter.com/ByEWMLxqBs

— Electoral Reform Society (@electoralreform) May 4, 2018

The results of Westminster style all-or-nothing elections can often be changed completely by a small number of voters. This is why parties fight hard in some wards and barely show up in others. A change of 141 votes in Wandsworth in the right wards would have seen a Labour administration elected for the first time since 1971.

In Wandsworth Labour won the most votes, 38.7%, and got 26 seats, while the Conservatives got 38.3%, but won 33. Click to tweet

Local councils are important – they have multi-million pound budgets, control major developments, trading standards, bin collections, social care, transport and so much more. According to research ‘one-party councils’ could be missing out on savings of around £2.6bn when compared to their more competitive counterparts – most likely due to a lack of scrutiny. £2.6bn is a lot of potential extra cash for our struggling authorities.

People should have the opportunity for their votes to truly count and to have vibrant councils as diverse as the communities they represent, with the power to hold their leaders to account.

Sign our petition for local voting reform

We hear time and again of the way First Past the Post lets voters ‘kick the bastards out’ – a colourful reference to the perceived ease with which voters can turf out one government and neatly replace it with another.

It’s a view that goes almost unquestioned, including by many reformers, so we thought we’d have a closer look.

It’s obvious that the 2010 election was unusual – not because of the coalition – but that it actually produced a transfer of power. The previous occasion was, of course, Labour’s win in 1997, but other than in the turbulent 1970s that produced three switches of power there have only been two other occasions since the end of the war – 1951 and 1964.

Even then, 2010 came tantalisingly close to an outcome where a reconfiguration of the government as a Labour-led coalition, rather than a full transfer of power, might have been possible: Labour fell a few seats short of this possibility.

While causing a power shift, the 2010 election confirmed another surprising fact about British government – that the classical picture of a majority government of one party cleanly replacing a majority of the other main party (the basis of the argument that First Past the Post enables voters to kick out a government) is a very rare event.

Since the mass franchise in 1885, there has only been one such occasion – Edward Heath’s singular victory in 1970. All others without exception have involved coalitions, minority government or parliaments with too narrow a majority to allow government for a full term.

Transfers of power in British government

* Transfer of power took place without an election. Elections followed shortly afterwards in 1905-06, 1922 and 1931 which ratified the new governments. The first transfer in 1924 followed a little after an election; arguably 1974 and 2010, when incumbent governments stayed on for a few days, are comparable.