What’s wrong with First Past the Post?

First Past the Post (FPTP) is the name for the voting system used to elect Members of Parliament (MPs) to Westminster.

It’s also used in a variety of other elections across the UK, including local elections in England and Wales.

We’ve been calling for the government to scrap First Past the Post, and to introduce a voting system that uses Proportional Representation (PR) – namely, the Single Transferable Vote (STV).

But what, exactly, is the problem with FPTP?

First Past the Post results in ignored voters

We live in a representative democracy. That means that when we elect MPs, we’re electing people who’ll represent our interests in parliament. We can get on with our lives while they stand up for the national policies that matter for us, be they on education, healthcare or taxation.

The problem is, under First Past the Post, huge portions of us end up without a representative that we actually voted for. In the 2024 General Election, 73.7% of votes cast made no difference to the result – either going to losing candidates or candidates who already had enough votes to win.

The reality is that First Past the Post delivers election results that are disproportional. In other words: seats in Parliament simply not matching votes.

But how does this happen? Take the constituency of Somerset North. In the 2024 General Election, 53,766 residents cast a vote in this area. 19,138 voted for the winning Labour candidate. That’s just 35.6% of all voters. Meanwhile, 34,628 – 64% of voters – voted for somebody else. Their votes? Ignored. Even though they outnumber the people who voted for the winner.

The story is repeated again and again across the country, and across our elections. Head north to Dumfries & Galloway, and just 29.6% of voters voted for the winning Conservative candidate.

So a picture emerges of a Parliament that doesn’t actually represent voters. That’s why we have a Labour Government with 63.2% of MPs, on just 33.7% of the votes.

In a representative democracy, we ought to have a Parliament that matches the way people actually vote. Under First Past the Post, that just doesn’t happen. It needs to be scrapped – and replaced with the Single Transferable Vote, which will deliver fairer, more proportional election results.

First Past the Post creates safe seats – which create complacency

In a democracy, every person’s vote should count as much as any other, right? Not under First Past the Post. 

First Past the Post has created a network of ‘safe seats’ – where there’s such a low chance of the seat changing hands, that parties don’t bother campaigning in those constituencies.  

Swing seats, where the results are much closer, are much more likely to change hands. Because parties care about getting as many MPs as possible, they’ll invest their energy into the swing seats where they have a higher chance of convincing voters to change their minds.  

Manifestos are designed with swing seats in mind – and parties spend most of their money campaigning in them.  

That means that if you happen to live in a safe seat, your political views are, in essence, irrelevant to the political parties. And that means that many of us are ignored by the politicians who are supposed to represent us. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could have an electoral system where parties don’t just pander to the interests of voters in a select few seats, while ignoring the rest of us. A proportional voting system, such as the Single Transferable Vote would mean that votes would actually be reflected in who wins the election – with multiple MPs representing larger constituencies – so parties would have reason to care about every single vote. 

First Past the Post makes us vote against our true preferences

Many of us who have voted before are already familiar with the winner-takes-all workings of First Past the Post.

This means that many of us opt to vote tactically in elections: voting not for our favourite candidate, but for the candidate we think is more likely to stop another candidate from getting the most votes.

This is because we know that under First Past the Post a vote for a losing candidate will go to waste – so it can be more impactful to try to prevent our least favourite candidate from winning.

In a democracy, we should feel empowered to vote according to our beliefs and preferences, rather than having to resort to tactical calculations and holding our nose while voting. First Past the Post means many of us end up thinking strategically at the polling station instead of voting for what we really believe in. It’s a system that’s simply not fit for purpose.

By contrast, with the Single Transferable Vote, we’d be empowered to vote for the candidates we really want to see represent us, confident in the knowledge that our vote won’t just go to waste.

First Past the Post isn’t fit for multi-party politics

First Past the Post results in wasted votes and disproportional results regardless of how many parties are in the running.

But in elections with multiple contending parties, vote shares end up being spread thin across an array of parties – resulting in MPs securing seats on very low portions of the vote.

This happened in Northern Ireland in 2015, when the SDLP candidate for Belfast South won their seat with just 24.5% of the vote. Nine parties were in the running.

A system that allows a single MP to preside over a constituency with less than a quarter of all votes is clearly broken.

The fact is, First Past the Post just isn’t equipped for the reality of our ever-changing democracy, which has seen increasingly fractured vote shares in elections: in 2024, more voters than ever voted for parties other than Labour and the Conservatives.

We need a system that can cope in this kind of scenario. FPTP truly is a square peg in a round hole, with multi-party voting being clumsily crammed into a two-party voting system. STV is far better equipped to ensure that voters are represented, even in cases where votes are split across a number of parties.

And FPTP’s failure to cope with changing electoral landscapes has been showcased again in the 2025 local elections, where mayors have been elected on tiny shares of the vote, thanks largely to multi-party voting.

Here again, in the West of England combined authority, the impact of forcing multi-party voting into the two-party system of First Past the Post is clear: a mayor elected on just a quarter of the vote. That’s not good enough.

There’s no hiding from it: First Past the Post is broken

From giving us unrepresentative parliaments, to causing chaos across local and national elections, it’s undeniable: our voting system is broken. First Past the Post needs to be scrapped – and replaced with the fair, proportional system of STV.