When I first came into contact with some of the deeper aspects of our voting system as a teenager there was always something that bothered me. Under our system of democracy, the “First Past the Post” system the government only ever had approx 40% of the votes, it never seemed enough as more than half didn’t vote for the government. But, it was a majority so I was willing to move on, but then I saw the translation of total votes into seats in parliament and that looked a little bit out of synch with expectations. The winning party typically had over 55-65% of the seats, well that was OK to some degree, but now I was starting to feel uneasy. It was only when I started looking at the minority party votes that I realised that votes don’t convert well into seats. This did not seem to fairly represent the votes cast by the public.

Pretty much any definition of democracy describes a system of representation. So what do we mean by that? In its simplest form it would make sense that we are represented fairly in terms of our views and voting patterns. This does not have to be exact but let me give you an example. Have a look at the last election’s statistics in comparison to the one before;

There are 650 seats in parliament and the majority party need 326 to automatically form a government. In 2005 this was possible under Labour but not so in 2010 when the Conservatives gained the majority of seats. A voter turnout of 61% in 2005 and 65% in 2010 gave us the following voting patterns across the major parties.

2005 Election	Conservative	Labour	Lib Dem
% of Vote	32.4	35.2	22
Seats	198	355	62
Total Vote	8,784,915	9,552,436	5,984,454
2010 Election	Conservative	Labour	Lib Dem
% Vote	36.1	29	23
Swing	3.7	-6.2	1
Seats	306	258	57
Seat Change	108	-97	-5
Total Vote	10,703,604	8,606,517	6,836,248
Total Vote change	1,918,689	-945,919	851,794

The data used covers only the main 3 parties and was publicly available (that means you could go and do some comparisons yourself and actually find something out, I dare you to do it, you could even go back a few elections……)

The first thing you notice is that the party with the most votes wins. Simple and this also seems fair. But take a look at the split of votes versus seats, especially for the Lib Dem party. With 2.2 million fewer votes that the Labour party in 2010 they have 201 less seats! They have 23% of the vote and Labour only have 29% of the vote, only 6% difference. Wow that is a massive discrepancy!!!

On the other end of the scale the Conservatives gained 3.7% extra share of the vote and got a whopping 108 vote bounty. The Lib Dem vote went up by 1%, so you would expect an increase in seats even if modest, but they actually end up with less seats. Based on the figures for the Conservatives you would expect approx 25 extra seats, right?

There are loads more insights we could discover, but you get the point. The voting system does not truly represent the voting patterns we are delivering at the ballot box. Why is this? Well, it’s the “First Past the Post System” which means a few important things are working against the pure vote being portrayed.

1. All of the votes are expressed across 650 seats, so not evenly spread out

2. The party with the most votes in any seat wins, even if that is by a single vote (first past the post…geddit?)

3. No other votes matter in that seat, therefore all of the votes above that 1 mean nothing and also all of the votes for other parties also count for nothing, they are effectively discarded

4. Winning the right seats is more important than winning all of the seats

The majority in a seat only really matters to create a larger challenge to overturn it at the following election, which means winning a particular seat is more important than another. A vote in a constituency that is neck and neck means more than a safe seat, as it could swing the balance of an election in your favour. Often, during election night, you hear the reporters talking about swing seats. These are the seats that could go either way, where the democratic rubber meets the road.

The origins of this system are important, in that people vote for their local representative and that person represents them in parliament making sure there is balance between local and national issues. The voting public can then review what the member of parliament voted for and then re-elect if they feel they were fairly represented. Pretty straightforward stuff…..

But do you actually know who your local MP is? Simple test…..what is his or her name? And if you know that, how many terms have they served? I’m guessing the answer is if you know one of these you won’t know anything about how your local MP voted or what they have done. (all of this is publicly available – you can even read anything said in the House of Commons in a publication called Hansard) Essentially most people vote ideologically or for the leader, even though only one constituency actually has that leader in it. This is what all of these leaders debates are about, they draw us into the Leaders and not the local MP or representative and what they can do for us. This begs the question is this system even valid anymore??

This system has been available for a very long time, we had the chance to vote against it with a form of Propositional Representation in 2011, only 42% of people voted and 62% voted to keep things the same. A pretty straightforward win in a 2 horse race, by anyone’s standards. But I guess my point is why? Surely only the Conservative and Labour party are served by the existing system, unsurprisingly it was the Lib Dems who wanted to change it. I can understand the main parties wanted to keep things the same, but us voters, surely we want to have a better balance and more representation? Don’t we???

Now I am not particularly advocating a propositional representation system, I just think we should be aware of how we are engaging in democracy. We assume that its fair but at the last election 10 million votes were cast for the winning party, that’s 36% of those who turned out (65%), that’s under 23% of the voting public (not even 23% of the entire adult population) got to decide on some pretty serious things, such as significant changes to the benefit system, massive changes to the health service, the austerity cuts etc. Does this seem right?

The massive discrepancy could easily explain why given the opportunity to be involved in government, the Lib Dems jumped at the chance to do so. Another way to look at it is that over 17 million voters / 59% of views were represented. To my mind the Lib Dems worked hard to balance out the most extravagant aspects of the conservative party, and paid a price in giving up some of their own policies. It looks like in this election they will be decimated. I am not suggesting they are the saviours of our democracy or that everything is about to meltdown but at least that is what I would consider representative government. This election will probably not produce a majority government, as we have seen the rise of the SNP and UKIP, splitting Labour and Conservative vote respectively.

We are likely to see more collaborations between parties to form a government, possibly even another coalition, which is a healthy thing, democracy is forced on the government, as they will need to compromise to get their bills through parliament by working with others. I would prefer this to be on a vote by vote basis rather than a formal coalition, this would seem more honest and more democratic. This is in contrast to a majority government that can force legislation as they have enough votes to get pretty much anything they want through the House of Commons. This election is Intriguing and the subject for another post……but could we have stumbled on a more representative government?