For those of you who don’t know, our current system, that being the one used for these 2015 Elections are “First Past The Post”, meaning there are a certain number of seats, in each one candidate can win and the winner is selected by the most votes.
Now at first glance you could argue this is perfectly fair. In reality it isn’t. The Conservative party received 36.9% of the total votes. Now it doesn’t take a genius to realise that 36.9% is not a majority. This however is only the beginning of why people are unhappy.
Non-Voters
You see when people make arguments against PR, it’s based largely on a premise that the electorate is some hive-mind that knows exactly what everyone else is going to do. But it’s based on individuals, their perceptions.
So let’s dive into some informal game theory. In the 2015 Election, I voted for the Green party. Now I live in a safe conservative seat that is never going to change hands. Many liberal people I know here who don’t like conservative, don’t want to vote, because they feel it won’t affect the outcome. Now the good old rhetoric of “you can’t complain if you don’t vote” sounds fair, but put it this way. We live with a system which pushes many people into a situation where their vote is pointless, and has no chance of affecting the outcome. Sure, if EVERY non-voter went to vote it would change things, but no one has that kind of coordination. On an individual basis (and we must always look at individual perspectives in game theory), my voting was pointless, an expenditure of energy and resources that never had any chance of affecting the outcome.
This is often the case with elections, as a single vote in any system is small. But FPTP compounds these issues and results in safe, locked down seats. It’s easy to blame the people for not voting, but an alternate system provides a fairer game where the best option for an individual is to actually vote.
Tactical Voting
In the vast majority of seats held in this country, there are only two “reasonable” votes, meaning two candidates who have a chance of winning. Any vote not for one of those candidates is not only wasted, but acts as a ‘vote’ for the winning candidate. This leads predictably, for people voting mostly for the two big parties (duh), and voting based on previous election results.
This means that many people who support smaller parties (Liberal Democrats, Greens etc, Not so much UKIP due to reasons I can comment on if anyone is interested), are very unlikely to vote for them due to the fact that it is harmful to their political interests to waste their vote. This leads to a situation where, because the electorate is not a hive-mind, a party could have the most supporters but very few votes. Because everyone’s vote is based off speculation of who other people will vote for. Again, this is rudimentary Game Theory (A very interesting mathematical topic to learn about in my view).
Is it a coincidence the only seat Greens won was their hold in Brighton? I don’t think so. Certainly it’s known to be a very left-wing area. But I don’t buy that everywhere else there was simply no support for them. People voted for a minority party because they knew they had a chance for their vote to count. Parties become trenched in with only two parties being a viable choice in the majority of cases. Not because of support, just because of a flawed electoral system.
What does this all mean? It means that if you investigate FPTP with Game Theory, you not only see it inevitably leads to two-party politics. But for any number of votes for a large party, a great deal can be considered insincere.
Of the 39% of people who voted Tory, even less ACTUALLY wanted them, and simply didn’t want Labour.
On top of all this, votes can be Manipulated through altering the Electorate perception of outcomes
This is a REALLY serious issue, it means the media holds incredible amounts of power over what people vote for. And the media is mostly supportive of … you guessed it, the Tories.
Valory's Volition 