Scale of Votes with ‘No Impact’ in General Election Revealed as Campaigners Demand Electoral Reform

The general election has produced the “most distorted result in the UK’s democratic history” according to electoral reform campaigners.

Analysis by researchers at cross-party pressure group, Make Votes Matter, has found that nearly 6 in 10 voters (58%) will be without an MP of their choosing following this election, a “record high” campaigners say. 

Nearly three quarters (74%) of votes were “non-decisive” – in other words, they did not impact the local result. That’s either because they went to losing candidates or were surplus votes for the winner. This is a joint record high, matching the 74% score in 2015, MVM says. 

And the Electoral Reform Society said the general election was the most disproportional on record, in terms of votes cast not matching the seats gained in Parliament. 

The so-called “deviation from proportionality” score was at record levels: in other words, seats did come close to representing the votes cast.

Dismay as Starmer Backs Westminster’s ‘Winner Takes All’ Voting System as Labour Eyes Big Majority

During his Labour leadership election, Starmer hinted at backing proportional representation. But he now appears to support continuing with Westminster’s First Past The Post voting system

Josiah Mortimer

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is one of several senior Labour figures calling for PR, which now-PM Keir Starmer appeared to reject during the election campaign.

Burnham said: “Opinion is changing. Labour at the grassroots has changed on this issue. I think Proportional Representation could become quite a big deal in this parliament..It’s growing more than the political class realise.”

Molly Scott Cato of the Green Party said “To save our democracy we need a fair voting system”, while Compass think tank tweeted that there are “potentially be more MPs than ever who support PR”. 

“This mandate enables bold action to get broken Britain working again, but also to make our country fit for the future, tackle the climate crisis head on and restore trust in our democracy.”

John Burn Murdoch of the FT wrote: “I just can’t get past Labour winning 65% of seats off 34% of the vote. [It’s an] absolutely wild mismatch between the headline result and, well, everything else. Britain is now a multi-party system, and first-past-the-post can’t cope.”

Alberto Smith, Interim Chief Strategy Officer at Make Votes Matter, said: “When it comes to Parliament accurately reflecting how the country voted, these results are as bad as we feared.1 Voters up and down the country woke up this morning to an election result that, to an unprecedented extent, does not reflect how they voted.”

General Election 2024: ‘Forget Tactical Voting we’re Calling for People to Push Back Against our Rotten System and Fight FPTP’

This election Compass is only backing candidates who recognise the “farce” of FPTP and will push to remove it in the next parliament

Frances Foley

Other key figures:

• Only 3 in 10 Conservative voters will have succeeded in electing a Conservative MP, compared to 8 in 10 Labour voters for a Labour MP
• Overall 87,200 votes were cast per elected Conservative or Reform MP, compared to 31,000 each to elect a Green, Labour or Lib Dem MP
• Reform UK and the Green Party won just 8 seats (just over 1%) between them with over 20% of the vote share combined
• Research by the Electoral Reform Society shows that Labour won an MP for every 24,000 votes they received, compared to one for every 49,000 for the Lib Dems, one MP for every 56,000 votes for the Conservatives, one for every 485,000 votes for the Greens and one for every 1,000,000 for Reform
• This was the first election where four parties received over 10% of the vote and the first where five parties received over 5%

The National Centre for Social Research recently found that trust in politics has recently sunk to record lows, a problem the ERS has long argued is exacerbated by people not feeling their votes count under the First Past the Post voting system

Tom Brake, Director of Unlock Democracy, said: “As a country, we are less committed than ever to the two main parties, but because of our voting system Parliament will not reflect that. Labour will have obtained a landslide in seats with the support of only 1 in 3 voters.

“Labour’s vote has been described as efficient, but let’s be clear what this means: winning seats with as few votes as possible. The bottom line is, under First Past the Post, some people’s votes matter more than others’.”

How Rishi Sunak ‘Changed the Rules’ to Keep the Conservative Party in Power

The Prime Minister accused Keir Starmer of wanting to “change the rules so they’re in power for a very long time”, despite the Conservatives making a long list of changes to elections designed to keep them in office

Adam Bienkov

Make Votes Matter is challenging the incoming Labour Government to “end the chaos” and deliver stability through voting reform. In research produced earlier this year, the group argued that the UK’s political instability is in part down to First Past the Post voting leading to hugely volatile results over the last decade. 

The last five UK Governments have been the shortest-lived of any Government among comparable parliamentary democracies, MVM says. Across the last fifty years, the average UK Government only managed to remain in office for 64% of its possible term, compared to Germany at 81%, or Luxembourg at 92%.

Across the last fifty years, the average tenure of a UK cabinet minister (of 2.1 years) was the fourth-worst of the 17 countries studied.

Reform UK could have got around 90 seats under a purely proportional voting system, with their 14% share of the vote, compared to their four under Westminster’s system. The Green Party could have won around 45 seats, again compared to their four under First Past the Post.

Thanks to Homar Paez for additional reporting.

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Josiah Mortimer also writes the On the Ground column, exclusive to the print edition of Byline Times.

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