The change we need
Fair, equal votes for the UK Parliament: renewing trust in our politics
To start rebuilding public trust in our politics, we need to replace the divisive, volatile, alienating and discriminatory voting system currently in place with a proportional one for General Elections. A system where everyone’s vote counts equally and where the elected Parliament represents and reflects the way the British people voted overall.
Of course it’s more than voting reform for General Elections alone – see here for the political changes we need to make – but Parliamentary elections must be the starting point; the door opener to full scale democratic change. As Ed Davey replied when asked whether we should prioritise Lords reform: “[That’s important, but doing Lords reform alone] is like changing the tyres when the car’s on fire.” (IPPR seminar, November 2022).
The existing voting system for UK General Elections is called First-Past-the-Post (FPTP): there are have 650 separate constituency elections and voters cast their vote for one candidate, who is chosen by their party. People can only vote for one option within each political party and the party candidate with the highest number of votes wins, even if that is well below half the total votes cast. Voters are incentivised to cast their vote for a party they do not prefer (the least worst who can plausibly win) to avoid wasting their vote. They are often told “It’s a two-horse race!” or “Only Party X can beat Party Y here!”.
A system that offered true voter choice would give a high proportion of voters a representative for whom they had voted; waste as few votes as possible; and allow voters to express their true preferences. As Liberal Democrats, we need to make the case for urgent change but we also need to be able to say what we want to change to. “Which system?” has at some point to be answered.
The UK already uses three proportional systems: Single Transferable Vote (STV); List PR (LPR); and Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) or Additional Member System (AMS).
We have assessed each of these systems against major democratic criteria: proportionality; local links; and accountability.
In addition, we have considered the implementability of each of these systems: how can we switch general election voting from FPTP to a proportional system?
Liberal Democrats have long advocated STV as the system which most empowers the individual voter. People can choose not just the party they prefer, but individual candidates as well. Dispersing and localising power is fundamental to a healthy, robust liberal democracy and STV sits at the heart of our party’s values. STV today is used for all Northern Ireland elections except for UK General Elections; for Scottish local government elections and for numerous organisations and associations. We have found this system scores best against the stated criteria and would be best - and easily - implemented using stable constituencies based on existing local links: local authority boundaries are the obvious choice.
You can read summaries of the three systems in our brochure.
In our PR Systems for the UK briefing, we assess each system in the context of UK implementation, with constituency maps. You can download both documents below.
We have also produced outline draft legislation to help pilot reform through parliament, which you can find here.