The idea behind first past the post seems simple, a number of people run in an election, people vote for who they want to be elected, and the person with the most votes wins, easy. It doesn't sound unfair, how could it possibly be unfair?
I'd go so far to say that if you understand the system, and even accounting for Arrow's impossibility theorem it's objectively bad. In other words, it's known that there is no perfect system possible, but that doesn't mean some systems are not worse than others.
Being the most liked by the most number of people sounds highly intuitive, but it isn't a good
metric for deciding who is genuinely the most popular because that result depends
very strongly on who else is running and how likely people are to vote for similar candidates, essentially making it arbitrary. To the point where it can result in the least popular candidate getting elected.
Just like many things that sound like a good idea, it's actually awful, in the words of H. L. Mencken "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong".
The more you look into plurality voting, the worse it gets. Even if you would prefer multiple single-winner elections over proportional representation, it's terrible.
The more you look into it the worst it gets, to the point it comes across as a rather inane method of deciding an election.
I think there are a lot of people out their who, while they supported AV, likely think that FPtP is still at least a legitimate and adequate way to decide a vote.
No, it's the worst way to hold an election for a single winner election. Organisations use it as a way to elect representatives, awards and some people's jobs are decided by this method and I'd go as far as to say that shouldn't even be legal!
Let's try and strong man it to see if there's anything good about it.
Proponents of FPtP will assert that it will elect the candidate who is most popular amongst the largest single group of people, sounds intuitive, but why is this fair and does that make sense?
First off the contention that FPtP elects the candidate who is the most popular amongst the largest group of people falls down at the idea that everybody votes for their genuine most preferred candidate, rarely is that the case.
Aside from just regular tactical voting a lot of people might not even entertain the idea of voting for someone else because they know their vote will be wasted.
This is because most people live in seats that are only 2-way marginal, if they're marginal at all.
Many voters will automatically vote for one of the two candidates most likely to win, because they quite rightly assume that voting for anyone else will see their vote get wasted, all votes not for the candidate in second place are as effective against the winner as abstaining.
Yes, sometimes it does happen that third parties leap frog to win, but normally that becomes very clear before the election that that is going to happen.
Just because some people are more emphatic about the person they vote for, so what you don't get your vote to count more based on how much the person you're voting for is your genuinely preferred candidate.
Then I could look at examples that go a bit beyond a single constituency, in Shropshire in 2001
That have been examples under FPtP of the winner having under 25% of the vote and it's proponents will still assert that this is the most popular candidate and therefore a fair result, but what if it was lower than that say 10%, is there no level to which the result can be fragmented to where it becomes more obvious that having the most votes to be the winner is a bit of an arbitrary metric.
First off it can lead the election of the most unpopular candidate winning
I suppose you could argue the case that if for example if a candidate (A) who had a clear majority of votes after a first round such as 45% and candidate B gets 25% and all the rest for 30%, and in the unlikely event the person who initially had 45% of the vote doesn't win but candidate B does, I'd say that's just indicative that most people who don't vote A first almost all would rather have B and if none of the other candidates had ran B would have just won anyway and no one would question it, but at least in that example with A so far ahead initially you would have at least some semblance of a point.
If you're still in favour of FPtP, my question, is there no level the winner could have a low vote share or a highly fragmented result that would make yo
Here are the list of counties where 100% of the MPs are from a single party.
