Latest news with #FPTP
Daily Mirror
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Farage's Reform UK reached a 'tipping point' - and it's worrying news for Labour
Analysis of the local election results by the Electoral Reform Society shows Reform getting an almost 10-percentage point 'winner's bonus' in their haul of council seats last Thursday compared to their vote share Reform UK have reached a 'tipping point' where Britain's electoral system works for them rather than holding them back. Nigel Farage's party has long opposed the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system which holds back challenger parties. But analysis of the local election results by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) shows Reform getting an almost 10-percentage point 'winner's bonus' in their haul of council seats last Thursday compared to their vote share. Across 22 of the 23 councils contested last Thursday, Reform won just under 31% of the vote but garnered just over 40% of the seats, leading to a 'winner's bonus' of 9.8 points. In the 2013 local elections - when Ukip got its strongest vote - the party got just 5% of the council seats available, despite winning 20% of the vote. The ERS analysis shows that just a 12.2-point increase in Reform's vote share in 2025 compared to UKIP's in 2013 has resulted in a huge 35.5-point increase in council seat share. Darren Hughes, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society, said: "It is clear from these results that UK elections are turning into a random lottery to see which party will get the 'winner's bonus' under First Past the Post. " But in worrying news for Labour, Keir Starmer's party suffered the greatest electoral penalty from the FPTP system at the local elections, seeing a difference of -8.2 points, with its 14% vote share yielding just 5% of council seats. Labour benefited from the system hugely in last year's general election, turning a slim lead in votes to a huge commons majority. The FPTP system saw Labour win a landslide 63% of the seats in Westminster on just 34% of the vote [2], leading to the most disproportional parliament in British history. Mr Hughes added: "At these local elections we again saw that people are voting in an increasingly multi-party way and our two-party voting system is simply unable to cope. "That is why it is throwing out distorted results that don't represent the way people voted with parties winning majorities on councils on just over a quarter of the vote. "This just underlines the need to move to a fairer, proportional electoral system for town halls, as well as Westminster, that accurately reflects the way people vote in the seats parties receive. "Rather than gifting different parties massive electoral bonuses that don't represent the votes they won, the only bias the electoral system should have is to the voters."
Express Tribune
25-02-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
Ballot box representation
Listen to article Barely a quarter of all directly elected members of the National Assembly won more than 50% of the total votes cast in their constituencies, raising new questions about the mandates of our parliamentarians. Without delving into any rigging allegations, the data not only reflects the deep political divisions in society, but the unrepresentative nature of our current first-past-the-post (FPTP) election system, where a politician can, in theory, win with even less than 10% of the vote. Should such a victory constitute a legitimate mandate? Data from Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen) underscores the need to take a long hard look at major election reforms to ensure that the winning candidate is at least generally popular in their own constituency. One change suggested in several FPTP systems is a runoff system, where low vote-getters are eliminated and fresh polls held until somebody reaches a certain threshold, usually 50% of the vote. However, runoffs can be prohibitively expensive as they can require several stages of polling. This makes ranked choice voting - which lets people vote for several candidates while attaching a weightage to each name - more doable. This leads to an instant runoff, ensuring that the winner has at least some support from an outright majority of voters. It can also ensure that a generally unlikeable candidate with a strong base cannot win a split-vote election, and makes 'seat adjustment' between parties unnecessary. Some countries also have proportional representation, where votes are cast for parties, not candidates, and seats are allocated based on parties' own priority lists. But while this leads to strong governments, it opens the door for undemocratic parties to take regressive measures, making it a hard pass for Pakistan, where most major political parties lack internal democracy, and some have authoritarian leadership. Whatever the solution to better elections, it certainly is not FPTP in its current form.
