Electoral Reform Society report will highlight deficiencies of ‘an archaic and broken voting system’
- Definitive report on 7 May result highlights least proportional result in UK electoral history
- Exclusive YouGov study for the ERS will show result under fairer voting systems
- First Past the Post is ‘breaking up Britain’ by creating artificial divisions, analysis shows
The failure of Britain’s voting system will be laid bare on Monday, when the Electoral Reform Society will release their definitive report on the General Election.
The report, ‘The 2015 General Election: A Voting System in Crisis’, will reveal how this election was the most disproportionate in British electoral history, according to new analysis.
It will also, for the first time, conclusively reveal how the election would have looked different under other voting systems – based on polling of over 40,000 people’s party preferences for the ERS by YouGov.
As well as this exclusive new polling, A Voting System in Crisis argues that the voting system is even contributing to the break-up of the UK, artificially inflating divisions and leading to a ‘postcode electoral lottery’ where parties are excluded in one area and over-represented in another. Millions of people’s voices are being excluded simply because of where they live, the report argues.
It draws on the fact that the SNP won 95% of Scottish seats on half the vote – leaving unionist sentiment in Scotland almost completely unrepresented, while at the same time the Labour party was locked out of the South of England – winning just 8 seats in the South East and South West despite getting nearly a fifth of the vote. Equally, cross-community parties were kept out in Northern Ireland under Britain’s divisive voting system, and Labour were greatly over-represented in Wales.
The number of votes cast for parties other than the three main UK wide parties rose to its highest ever level on May 7 – the dawn of ‘truly multi-party politics’, but a politics operating under what the ERS describe as an ‘archaic and broken voting system’.
The report will show the shocking number and percentage of votes which went to losing candidates and were effectively wasted. It will also reveal the number / percentage of MPs who were elected without a majority of votes, as well as the stunningly low number of MPs who actually secured a majority from the overall electorate.
The full report will be produced on Monday 1 June.
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