South Africa’s history shows how an electoral system can change everything. Sometimes, democracy’s biggest dangers aren’t coups or revolutions, but the quiet impact of the rules that decide who wins power. The First Past the Post voting system is one of those rules — and it helped lay the foundation for apartheid.
When we look back, it’s clear that the system didn’t just record the will of the people. It distorted it. And that distortion changed millions of lives.
When a Minority Wins, Everyone Loses
In 1948, South Africa’s white electorate went to the polls. The National Party campaigned on a platform of strict racial separation — what became apartheid. They only won 37.7% of the vote, and didn’t even win the most votes – their opponents, the United Party, won close to half the vote, on 49.2%.
But due to First Past the Post, they won the most MPs.
FPTP rewards narrow victories in constituencies. You can lose the national vote but still win the country. Aided by intentional gerrymandering, that’s exactly what happened. A minority of white voters delivered a government determined to build a system of racial domination.
Once in power, the National Party moved fast. It used its majority in Parliament — won through a minority of votes — to reshape every part of society. Land, citizenship, marriage, work, education — all were re-engineered to entrench white control. What began as a technical electoral outcome became one of the most brutal political systems in modern history that lasted over 40 years.
The Mechanics of Exclusion
If we strip away the moral horror for a moment, what happened was a mechanical failure of democracy. First Past the Post magnifies small leads into huge majorities. It lets parties that come second win elections. And it silences millions of voters who’s preferred candidates don’t come first in a constituency.
And it doesn’t care about the opinions of the parties that it gives a boost to.
That instability – that bizarre mismatch between votes and power – is built into the system itself. It can turn fragmented opposition into permanent minority rule, and the more parties are in competition, the lower the barrier to power. The current UK government has two thirds of MPs on one third of the vote.
Once an extreme party crosses that low threshold, it gains the tools to cement its dominance, changing the rules to keep itself in power.
It should never become normal for a party to control a country without winning the confidence of most voters. Yet that’s exactly what First Past the Post allows.
Building a Fairer Foundation
When apartheid finally fell, Nelson Mandela and his colleagues understood this danger. They wanted a democracy that couldn’t be captured by one faction with a head start. So they built something different. South Africa’s new constitution introduced proportional representation – a system that ties political power more closely to how people actually vote.
Under proportional representation, a party must earn real majority support or temper it’s extreme ideas to form alliances. It can’t simply dominate through geography or luck.
That change wasn’t just technical; it was moral. It was about fairness. Mandela’s South Africa rejected the mechanics of exclusion and replaced them with a structure that values every voice. Calls for electoral reform in South Africa come from those who want to improve their proportional system, not return to the ways of the past.
Lessons for the Rest of Us
While South Africa’s story is extreme, the lesson travels. Any voting system that lets a minority, no matter how extreme, impose its will carries risk. We’ve seen it before. We may see it again.
We should never forget that the path to apartheid began not just with prejudice, but with a voting system that allowed it to rule.
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