An unfair landslide?

The fairness or unfairness of the first-past-the-post voting system goes beyond mere vote shares

The past fortnight has shown us that our electoral system can appear fundamentally unfair. Constituency-based first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting, the electoral process used for legislatures in India, England, and the United States (US), seems to be only marginally reflective of real preferences in countries with only two real parties, like the US. But the moment that you have a more fragmented polity, this begins to fall apart.

In the United Kingdom’s general election, for example, the Labour Party won a historic majority of 412 seats out of 650. That’s over 60 per cent, closing in on two-thirds. Yet they won only 33.8 per cent of the vote. In other words, their share of seats was 1.9 times their share of votes — far more than is normal. Meanwhile, the new anti-immigrant Reform Party had an excellent night: Its leader Nigel Farage finally won entry to Parliament on his eighth try. But the party won only five seats in spite of getting over 14 per cent of the vote. Its predecessor in 2015, the United Kingdom Independence Party, had won over 12 per cent of the vote but won a single seat.

The most ironic successes were achieved by the centrist Liberal Democrats. The Liberals have long argued for proportional representation: They have been England’s third-largest party for much of their existence, but have remained a marginal force in politics. In the last election, in 2019, their leader Jo Swinson attempted to stand on an equal footing with the larger parties. She presented herself as a potential Prime Minister and focused on competing in every possible constituency. The Liberals increased their vote share by four percentage points — but actually reduced their number of seats from 12 to 11. In 2024, by contrast, the party ruthlessly focused on fewer than 100 winnable seats. They transferred resources there, and named their candidates well in advance of their rivals. The party’s leader avoided presenting himself as a potential Prime Minister and instead focused on a few, but emotive, policy issues.

Incredibly, the Liberal Democrats’ share of the vote went up by only 0.6 percentage points, but their seats in Parliament went up six-fold, to 72. They won the most seats that they have in a century. And yet FPTP is so fundamentally stacked against smaller parties that even after this focused and historic performance, they only have a share of seats in the House of Commons that is broadly equivalent to their share of the vote.

Keir Starmer of Labour now has an unarguable mandate to rule — on only a third of the vote. The comparison to England’s neighbours across the channel is stark. There, in another unexpected and early election, the centrist coalition associated with President Emmanuel Macron lost a large number of seats. In the final outcome, neither the left-wing coalition, nor the centrists, nor the right-wing populists — who unexpectedly came third — have a majority.

France also has constituencies with FPTP, but has two rounds of voting. In the second round, only a subset of candidates who did well are eligible to run. This allows for votes to shift from less to more competitive candidates. The French left and centre, who have spent years at each other’s throats, essentially agreed to block the far-right in the second round. Almost all of the left’s voters voted for the centrists, while a smaller set, but still a majority, of the centre’s voters voted for the left. This was enough to relegate the right, which had topped the first round, to third place. The question of “who won” this election is therefore very confused, and is still being debated.

In some sense, the French system turns the generally opaque question of tactical voting into something transparent and easy to understand and discuss. The reason that both the Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom appear to have done so well on such a limited vote share is because their voters behaved very tactically. Liberals in Labour-dominated seats voted for the left, while Labour supporters in Liberal heartlands did the opposite. They did this without needing to have a second round that made preferences clear — because it was usually clear to constituents which of the Conservative Party’s opponents had the best shot of unseating them in a particular area. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats’ campaign slogan in such areas was simply: “Liberal Democrats are winning here”, a signal that it was safe to vote for them.

The fairness or unfairness of FPTP cannot be judged, in fact, merely by looking at vote shares. The question of whether voters have enough information to vote tactically also matters. In India, it is usually far from clear who is competitive in a particular area. This means that tactical voters can struggle, especially in four-way contests like Uttar Pradesh. Pre-poll coalitions tend to be a greater feature of Indian elections than elsewhere in the world precisely for this reason.