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A Better Way to Vote: Why the UK Should Switch from First Past the Post to Preferential Voting Before the Next General Election
The 2024 General Election has made one thing painfully clear: our First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system is no longer fit for purpose in a modern, multi-party democracy.
Labour formed a large majority government with just around one-third of the national vote – the lowest vote share ever for a majority government in modern UK history.Wikipedia+1 Smaller parties collectively won record levels of support, yet millions of their votes translated into a handful of seats, while some MPs were elected on barely more than a quarter of the valid votes in their constituency – and scarcely more than one in seven registered voters, as your 2024 results analysis shows.
Independent researchers have described 2024 as “the most disproportionate general election in British history” and “a crisis of electoral legitimacy”.Wikipedia+2Nuffield Politics Research Centre+2 That should worry anyone who cares about democracy, whatever their party preference.
We do not have time to design and implement a completely new constitutional settlement before the next General Election. But we can take a major step to repair democratic legitimacy while keeping the familiar structure of one MP per constituency and one trip to the polling station:
Switch from FPTP to Preferential Voting (PV) – also known as Ranked Choice Voting / Alternative Vote – with optional ranking of candidates.