First Past The Post Voting System.

[Gromit]

Nigel F is on the warpath after UKIP is predicted to come second in 100 seats, but will probably get 4 or 5 seats.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage/11457471/Nigel-Farage-attacks-bankrupt-voting-system-after-predictions-Ukip-will-come-second-in-100-seats.html

Is first past the post that terrible, we've had it for decades?

[SirOracle]

It's probably as good as any system Gromit,and it does tend to give a definite result,rather than coalitions.
Perhaps not this year though.
As for Farage I don't give a toss for him or his complaints. Even one seat for UKIP is too many in my opinion.

[jno]

about the sort of result the LibDems got for years. Did Ukip come out in support of Clegg and his referendum on voting systems?

I've nothing against coalitiions; they reflect a divided electorate.

[SirOracle]

Jno....The problem is that often nothing gets done with coalitions,and another election has to take place in a short space of time.

[jno]

well, that will focus the electorates' minds if it happens. It may also focus MPs' minds as they realise they have to pipe down and compromise to keep the country running. The country is running - not that well, I don't think, with economic recovery well behind that in the USA, but I think that's down to the failures of individuals like Osborne rather than clashes within the coalition.

[Old_Geezer]

FPTP is fine. The goal is to be first choice in the constituency, not an also-ran.

[EDDIE51]

Exactly what the Lib Dems complained about for years.

[ubasses]

It is what we want though, the result in the 2011 referendum was 68% against proportional representation. I assume the 58% of people who did not vote do not care either way.

[jim360]

Thank you Nigel. I have been going on about this for ages and glad he's picked up on it at last.

[ToraToraTora]

No FPTP is the best system there is, it usually produces a majority governement. As much as the Lib dems and now UKIP go in bleating about percentages any version of PR hardly ever produces a governement and is a recipe for impotence.

[jim360]

And fptp is utter crap. There are so many better systems out there even before you get to PR.

[mikey4444]

The Liberals came second in many seats for years. Much more importantly, Labour comes second in many Tory seats, and the Tories comes second in many Labour seats.

Farage should stop complaining. Perhaps he should wonder why UKIP are second in so many seats ? He keeps telling us that they are "breaking the mould of British politics"..........maybe if his party wasn't seen to be the refuge of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, he might be doing better !

You can fool some of the people some of the time, etc, etc.

[mikey4444]

By the way, I have been saying this for nearly two years....that in a FPTP system, UKIP is unlikely to get more than a small handful of seats. But there are people on here that have said that Farage will sweep all before him.

I guess that now as it is in the Telegraph, it official !

[-Talbot-]

Are you sure you said 'a handful' mikey?

[jim360]

The difference mikey is that you are somehow OK with this, despite the point that this inevitably means that FPTP, in 2015, is going to say "up yours" to anyone who wants a different kind of politics. As it did in 1983. And, in between times, it has still managed to deliver the wrong result in every election since the modern system was introduced in 1948. The only possible exceptions are 1979 (when people were sick of Labour) and 1997 (when people were sick of the Tories), but even this elections have their anomalies.

FPTP is a broken, shoddy way to elect MPs. Thank goodness that Farage has realised this, and I hope that UKIP supporters don't sneer at him for raising this point.

[mikey4444]

The difficulty that I can see jim, is that on the only occasion when a change in voting systems was put to the people, it failed to grab the enthusiasm of the electorate. The main reason for this was that neither Labour or the Tories were really behind it.

As they are the only two Parties in Britain that can win any election, we can't blame them for being somewhat cool in changing our present system, Turkeys are not normally renowned for voting for for Xmas.

[jim360]

One of the ironies, of course, is that part of the reason they are the only two parties that can win is because the voting system locks them in. No wonder they were so lukewarm.

Another reason is evident in ubasses' post: "the result... was against proportional representation". Well, no it wasn't, because AV is not a proportional voting system. Evidently, it has been mis-sold by opponents of change, because pure PR carries the toxic "never leads to a decisive result" image -- while often true, this is only because no party actually commands enough support to deliver a decisive result! Any system that delivers an outright winner when that's not actually what the public vote was wanting is a bad system.

But AV wasn't PR, just a slightly more involved version of FPTP that ensures that people have the option to express preferences, rather than feel obliged to throw all their support behind just one party/ candidate as FPTP does. Which is another reason the system is broken -- for many people, the choice is far more nuanced than just a single cross on the ballot paper can ever reflect.

At all three levels of election, FPTP fails.

[ToraToraTora]

describe a better system jim, please.

[mikey4444]

jim....I have sympathy with your views and your argument. But even in the safest seat, there is never 100% voting for the winning candidate.

Take Liverpool Walton, currently Labours safest seat ::::

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_Walton_%28UK_Parliament_constituency%29#Elections_in_the_2010s

The seat was won by Steve Rotheram with 72% of votes cast. If we leave out most of the fringe runners up, the LibDems and the Tories comprised the other 21% of votes. How would any new voting system offer the constituents of Liverpool Walton a better result than they have already got ? They quite clearly voted for Labour.

At what percentage below the winning 72% in this seat, would another system offer a better result ?

I realise that I have deliberately chosen the toughest test for any PR change, but there are lots of seats like this, for Labour and the Tories, all over the country.

FPTP is simple to understand, but none of the alternatives have that advantage.
The people know exactly who is representing them and why.

KISS....Keep it simple stupid would seem to win the day here.

[jim360]

I could describe maybe 20, but I suppose first I should ask what you mean by "better" in this case. Below are my suggestions.

A better system would not deliver the horror show that was the 1983 election, where the vote share for Labour was only marginally better than the SDP-Libs got, but they ended up with 9 times as many seats. A better system would not allow the result of 1951, when Labour won quite a few more votes than Labour did but got fewer seats than Churchill's Tory-National Lib Coalition.

A better system would not allow the Lib Dems support to decline over 14 years from 1983, but still see them gain more and more seats compared to 1983's high.

A better system would not allow MPs to be awarded the representation of their constituency based on less than 30% support from constituents.

All of these things are possible to deliver in a voting system before you even go near PR, if that is so undesirable. AV was half-way to achieving these things. A system with fewer safe seats wouldn't go amiss either.

The first step to a better system, though, is simply to allow voters to express some level of preference. If, as is the case for many voters, it's essentially a toss-up between two parties, that close decision could be reflected by being able to express a 1st/ 2nd preference, or some weighted preference, or some such. The possibilities for improving the system are almost endless, TTT.

[jim360]

Picking majority seats is a distraction, Mikey -- obviously, some number of results wouldn't really change under a new system. I think it's on the order of 220 seats at the last election, where the only difference that might have been made is if more people voted. But that leaves 400+ seats where a new system could well have made a difference. Again, in some of those all that made have happened is that the winning candidate would have been reaffirmed. But even that's an improvement, giving more legitimacy to the winner -- and it still leaves several other seats when the "winner" has received less than, say, 40% of the total vote but is handed the seat regardless. This is likely to become even worse in 2015, with the presence of even more choice pulling the winning margin down to as low as 30% (it's already below that in one seat, Norwich North). A seat in which an overwhelming majority of voters did not vote for the FPTP winner should well call the system into question. In other seats the winning margin is so slight as to call the result into question again. 42 votes was the winning margin in one seat in 2010 (Hampstead & Kilburn) -- that is a difference of 42 votes out of 16,000, which is such a small difference as to be basically noise over the "this constituency is split" result.

There is no legitimate defence of FPTP. Even the "simpler" argument is dubious, insulting the intelligence of the electorate as it does, who apparently can't possibly be expected to understand as a whole the very simple concept of "rank candidates by order of preference if you wish". In the AV referendum 2011 it looks to me like the lack of supprot was based on its being misrepresented by opponents (eg Cameron's utterly false claim that it violated the principle of "one person, one vote"), or in a shabby underhand tactic of tying it into a referendum on Nick Clegg's decision to join the coalition.