First-Past-The-Post Voting

10 Key excerpts on "First-Past-The-Post Voting"

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  Real-World Electronic Voting

  Design, Analysis and Deployment

  • Feng Hao, Peter Y. A. Ryan(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Auerbach Publications

    (Publisher)

  First-past-the-post is used, among other places, in USA presidential elections (48 states) [111], UK lower house elections [394], Canada [382], India [298] and Malaysia [276]. There are variants of the first-past-the-post system that require the winning can-didate to achieve a quota , i.e., a threshold of votes, which is higher than the natural quota. For instance, in a two-candidate election, the winning candidate might be re-quired to receive a quota which is greater than half of the votes: in the United States upper house, a so-called filibuster preventing legislation may be stopped only if the legislation receives three-fifth of the votes [239]. These systems are sometimes called quota systems, and in the case of a two-candidate election a super-majority system. Note that in the first-past-the-post system, each voter is restricted to vote for only one candidate. If this restriction is lifted, the resulting system is called approval voting. In an approval voting system, each voter may vote for (i.e., approve of) any number of candidates and the single candidate with the highest number of votes (i.e., approvals) wins. 80 Real-World Electronic Voting: Design, Analysis and Deployment Approval voting is used among other places by the Mathematical Association of America [21], the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sci-ences [17] and the American Statistical Association [2]. Although first-past-the-post provides a simple solution to elect a single winner, it does not guarantee an absolute majority if there are more than two candidates. One way to make sure that the winner receives an absolute majority is to choose the two candidates with the most votes for a second round of voting. In a two-round system (TRS) , each voter votes for one candidate. If a candidate receives more than half of the votes, they are declared the winner.

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  Beasts and Gods

  How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose

  • Roslyn Fuller(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Zed Books

    (Publisher)

  To voters, electoral outcomes are like lotteries; the people may or may not get the government that they voted for. Whether or not they do is beyond their control. But for politicians, election outcomes are foreseeable and manipulable. Elections, therefore, are not just a lottery, they are a rigged lottery. This is the absolutely inescapable consequence of handing power to a number of people so small that they are unable to accurately reflect the society as a whole. When this happens the chain of causality between the representative and the represented is broken. Representation is not real, but merely symbolic; a matter of belief instead of reality. The identity of the representatives does not depend on majority will, but rather on their ability to game the system, and therefore this is precisely what they focus their energies on.

  And this is exactly why the Athenians avoided elections whenever they could – elections tempted candidates to adopt corrupt practices in order to garner votes. The Athenians were right to have such a negative view of elections, and not only with regard to First-Past-The-Post Voting.

  Other electoral systems

  In recent years, the issues surrounding first-past-the-post systems and their potential for abuse have become more well known and support for swapping FPTP for other voting systems has increased. New Zealand, which had particularly suffered from manufactured majorities, replaced FPTP with the personalized proportional vote in 1993, while voters in the Canadian province of British Columbia voted to replace first-past-the-post with the single transferable vote in 2009.1 However, although some electoral systems are more accurate than FPTP, they are still not actually accurate. All electoral systems can produce manufactured majorities, not to mention other statistical irregularities, because the basic problem – the impossibility of electing a large enough percentage of the population to be statistically accurate – is still present.

  The single transferable vote: musical chairs

  The single transferable voting system (STV) is used in Ireland, Tasmania and Malta. STV, it must be confessed, vaguely sounds like the kind of disease that comes as a consequence of a particularly wild night out – an association that, as we will see, is not entirely inapt. Under STV, the voter does not cast a ballot in favour of one candidate, thus implicitly rejecting all others. Instead, he numbers each candidate (or as many as he likes) in order of preference, i.e. he gives the candidate he likes best a ‘1’, the candidate he likes second best a ‘2’ and so forth. In each riding not one but several candidates are elected. To be deemed elected a candidate must procure one vote more than the total number of votes cast, divided by the number of seats contested in the riding plus one. For example, if there are three seats in a riding and 30,000 votes are cast, a candidate has to receive at least 7,501 votes to get elected. Whether or not a candidate has reached that quota is often determined over several rounds of calculation.

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  Women and Legislative Representation

  Electoral Systems, Political Parties, and Sex Quotas

  • M. Tremblay(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Such systems give rise to a smaller and less diverse range of parties than do PR systems. This is, of course, a general description; a closer look at the evidence reveals several nuances: some PR systems behave like majoritarian systems (in Hungary, for instance), while some majoritarian systems do allow for minority represen- tation (for example, in India, where representation is supported by a system of reserved seats for members of depressed classes). Nevertheless, the general pattern illustrates a persistent conflict between principles of universality and particularity in political representation. Mixed systems, to borrow from the title of a book by Shugart and Wattenberg (2001a), are an attempt at bring- ing together the best of both worlds, although some writers, such as Sartori (1994), feel that they actually combine the weaknesses of the two contribut- ing formulas (for a contrary opinion, see Shugart 2001). In any case, the choice of voting system is not neutral: in one sense, it corresponds with a conception of political representation while, in another, it determines how the people’s will is represented in parliament. The plurality single-seat constituency system (also called the FPTP system) is in some ways the basic electoral model: one individual is elected per constituency and this is the person who receives the greatest number of valid votes cast in her or his favour. The elector is granted only one vote and goes to the polls only once (a one-round system). This system is used in many countries, including Bangladesh, Canada, Great Britain, India, Malawi, Malaysia, Sudan, Uganda, and the United States. Plurality voting may also occur in multimember electoral districts (this is called the block vote [BV]). In this case, the elector is granted as many votes as there are seats to be filled, 3 and the winners are the candidates who receive the greatest numbers of votes in their favour in each electoral district.

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  Government Failure

  A Primer in Public Choice

  • Gordon Tullock, Gordon L. Brady, Arthur Seldon(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Cato Institute

    (Publisher)

  3 Under this system, the population is divided geographically into single constituencies. Usually the constituencies have about the same number of voters in each of them. Sometimes, however, this is not true: the U.S. Senate is an obvious example. The people who hold the seats in these constituencies are mostly elected by one of two systems. The first, used in Britain and most of its former colonies, is “first-past-the-post.” Under this system, a large number of candidates may be nominated for a given office and the one with the largest number of votes is declared elected regardless of how few those votes may be. In present-day Britain, for example, the party in power normally receives less than the majority of the votes because three major parties run candidates. Salvador Allende in Chile became president with only 36 percent of the vote because his two opponents split the remainder of the vote almost evenly between them. It is sometimes said that first-past-the-post leads to a government with strong parties because splinter parties have almost no chance of putting anyone in the legislature. Although there is a strong drive in first-past-the-post systems to form large coalitions in order to win, this drive is not overwhelming and sometimes may fail.

  With proportional representation, Britain would normally have a coalition government, usually composed of the Liberals and one other party, because coalition of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party would be unlikely. The prime minister would likely be Liberal. Exactly how large the Liberal vote would be is hard to say because the current polls are based on the opinions of people who are accustomed to the present method and have not thought about how they would operate under the other system. That proportional representation would greatly change the outcome is fairly obvious.

  The Variety of Voting Rules

  Many different voting rules are used in the world and each leads to a somewhat different outcome. Saari has produced a rigorous mathematical proof that for a given set of voters with unchanged preferences, any outcome can be obtained by at least one voting method.4

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  Debating Democratization in Myanmar

  • Nick Cheesman, Nicholas Farrelly(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • ISEAS Publishing

    (Publisher)

  1 As the 2012 elections revealed, the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is a real political asset for the NLD. If the party can maintain its level of popularity with the public, the FPTP system stands to deliver the NLD a single-party parliamentary majority in 2015, even if the number of seats set aside for the military is taken into account. However, the political aftermath of Myanmar’s general election in 1990 is a reminder that the FPTP system’s amplification of wins and losses can also be a political liability, potentially undermining the fragile political calculus that since 2011 has given the reformers licence to positively shape Myanmar’s politics. 2 Assuming the NLD fails to negotiate an arrangement with ethnic minority parties to avoid vote-splitting, the FPTP system may be a liability in another important sense: it runs at cross-purposes with several ethnic minority parties’ expectations to have significant representation in national-level legislative institutions as part of an historic process of national reconciliation. In her initial address to parliament as an elected member of parliament (MP) in May 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi stressed the centrality of issues of ethnic inclusion, stating: “to become a truly democratic union with a spirit of the union, equal rights and mutual respect, I urge all members of parliament to discuss the enactment of the laws needed to protect equal rights of ethnicities” (Hla Hla Htay 2012). Similarly, in her Electoral System Choice in Myanmar’s Democratization Debate 235 June acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Aung San Suu Kyi said that she and her party “stand ready and willing to play any role in the process of national reconciliation” (ibid.). 3 Shortly after the by-elections on 1 April 2012, a group of non-NLD democratic parties and ethnic minority parties, collectively known as the Democratic and Ethnic Alliance (DEA), 4 began advocating for a shift to a more proportional electoral system.

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  The Many Faces of Strategic Voting : Tactical Behavior in Electoral Systems Around the World

  • John Aldrich, Laura B. Stevenson, André Blais(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of Michigan Press

    (Publisher)

  cohabitation or midterm divided government in a presidential system, there is no certainty about how one’s vote would contribute to the outcome. But outside of Canada and the United Kingdom, most parliaments are decided by either proportional representation or a mixture of FPTP and proportional representation voting. We now turn to strategic voting under proportional representation and under mixed systems.

  Proportional Representation (PR)

  The wide array of PR systems all share two features. First, they contain multimember districts. In some cases, districts are a whole country (for example, Israel, the Netherlands); in others, the country is divided into regions (for example, Spain, Norway). Second, seats are distributed based on the proportion of support shown for a party. As was the case under FPTP and two rounds, strategic voting may occur in PR because of expectations about the outcome in the district, in the legislature, and in the government.

  While some observers claim that strategic voting is associated with FPTP but not with PR voting procedures, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem tells us that logically there are opportunities for strategic voting in every system, including PR. What makes FPTP special in this sense is that the logic of wasted voting is very easy to see and implement. Indeed, parties and candidates often pursue campaign strategies that remind voters about this logic and instruct them on what to do. The situation is more complex with PR voting. Empirically, the evidence seeming to support “wasted” voting may well be as clear and compelling under PR as under FPTP (see Abramson et al. 2010; Riera 2016, table 1.1). Table 1.2 offers a simple example, the 1999 Israeli election. In that election, Israelis cast two votes, one for prime minister under pure FPTP rules and one for representation in the Knesset under what are among the purest cases of PR rules in use. Nearly everyone who preferred Barak or Netanyahu most intended to vote for him. Many Mordechai supporters also intended to vote for him, but one in four reported an intention to cast a strategic vote for their second-choice candidate. That is the kind of evidence we would expect given the circumstances of the campaign at the time of the survey and assuming that voters are purely investment-oriented. But Israelis also cast a vote for the Knesset under highly proportional rules. Table 1.2B shows that, if anything, the results are even stronger in support of the “wasted voting” account in the Knesset election.

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  Minority Governments in India

  The Puzzle of Elusive Majorities

  • Csaba Nikolenyi(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction

  National parliamentary elections conducted under the first-past-the-post electoral system typically result in the election of majority parliaments and the formation of a single-party majority government. India, however, has become a very important and puzzling exception to this pattern during the past 17 years. Although India has used the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, none of her general elections has produced a majority winner since 1989 and only one of them was followed by the formation of a majority-size government. In short, electoral and parliamentary majorities have become elusive properties of the world’s most populous democracy.

  Parliamentary elections that fail to provide a decisive mandate to govern are particularly problematic in a majoritarian democracy like India, where the main political institutions, inherited from British colonial rule, are expressly designed to facilitate the formation of an effective political majority as opposed to the creation of a broadly based consensus and power sharing (Lijphart 1999). Moreover, governing a complex and divided society like India’s without the support of either a clear electoral mandate or a legislative majority also runs the risk of seriously weakening the bond between state and society and undermining the legitimate foundations of the country’s democratic establishment. Therefore, it is very important that we have an accurate understanding of the reasons why electoral and political majorities are increasingly more difficult to forge.

  This book tries to offer an explanation for the puzzling absence of electoral and parliamentary majorities in India in the period 1989–2004. The Indian case is an important addition to the literature on the politics of multiparty government that has had a traditional bias toward the study of Western Europe (see, for example Laver and Schofield 1990; Laver and Shepsle 1996; Muller and Strom 1999, 2000). Moreover, the study will also offer a valuable comparable case for scholars examining the development of post-dominant party systems, such as Japan or Mexico, as well as to those who study the relationship between the FPTP electoral rule and the party system in other countries, such as Britain, Canada or the United States (Chhibber and Kollmann 2004, 1998). A number of recent works have addressed the transformation of the Indian party system with specific focus on the increase in the number of parties (Chhibber 1999; Chhibber and Kollman 1998, 2004; Sridharan and Varshnoy 2001; Yadav 1996), the strategies of electoral mobilization (Chandra 2004) and the specific contextual features of the elections in the new Indian party system (Roy and Wallace 1999; Wallace and Roy 2003). However, the study of coalition politics, including the formation and the durability of both electoral and executive coalitions as well the consequences that they have for other aspects of the political system, has not been systematically addressed. It is this gap in the literature that the present book seeks to fill.

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  Central Debates in British Politics

  • John Benyon, David Denver, Justin Fisher(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Other democratic arguments in favour of electoral reform are based on the specific advantages of particular systems and are more difficult to measure. Any system with a list element, for example, is likely to benefit the representation of women and ethnic minorities, as parties can use strategies to ensure that such candidates can be represented on the list. But this advantage is difficult to quantify and in any case, Phillips (1998) has shown that it is extremely difficult to argue for the democratic benefits of social representation in the legislature on normative grounds. Preferential systems, such as the Alternative Vote and the Single Transferable Vote, allow voters to give expression to multiple preferences which may reveal important underlying trends in popular opinion (Dunleavy and Margetts, 1994). They clearly deliver more choice than FPTP, as voters effectively have more than one vote to cast. Mixed-member systems, such as the Additional Member System, allow voters to retain a constituency link while still increasing proportionality. AMS also delivers greater choice than FPTP, because voters choose at both the constituency level and the top-up level. List PR systems, alternatively, where voters vote for party lists and are unable to choose between candidates (‘closed-list’ systems) clearly deliver least choice of all, although there are variants where voters can nominate their preferred candidates (‘open-list’ systems).

  The extent to which electoral systems deliver stable government, and therefore satisfies the Democratic Audit’s criteria in ensuring that ‘the composition of Parliament and the programme of government reflect the choices actually made by the electorate’, is perhaps the most difficult of all to quantify. FPTP does tend to deliver single-party government due to its ‘leaders’ bias’ effect that favours large parties. Governments elected under FPTP have a party mandate which offers a mechanism for linking electoral preferences to government action through the central party role in both; such mandates are less clear for coalition governments. However, opponents of proportional representation have argued that both coalition governments have been inherently unstable (citing Italy) and too stable (citing Germany): ‘the fact is that there are many different kinds of coalition in Western Europe alone’ (Dunleavy et al., 1998: 20). Furthermore, research has shown that coalitions can still allow parties to keep their commitments owing to agreements among the partners which let each pursue their own differing priorities (see budge, 1998).

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  European Democracies

  • Markus M.L. Crepaz(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For the U.S. Senate, whoever receives the most votes in his or her state is elected. The same rule applies to the U.S. House of Representatives: Whoever wins the most votes in his or her congressional district is elected. For both the Senate and the House, a single ballot is needed. In Europe, the simple winner-take-all system with a single ballot is used only in Great Britain, where it is called “first-past-the-post.” This system may also be called single-member district (SMD) plurality, meaning that only one Member of Parliament is elected per district and that it is sufficient to reach a plurality of the votes (not a majority in the sense of 50 percent + 1) in order to win the seat. Other European countries use a wide variety of rules to elect their parliaments, but most use a form of proportional representation (PR) which allocates parliamentary seats in proportion to popular votes. Election rules are not interesting for their own sake, but because they influence the way the political game is played. The connection between the rules of the game and the game itself is well known from sports. Changes in the rules of a sport often influence the kinds of players who are able to make the team. As we see in this chapter, the same holds true for politics. A politician or a political party who is successful under one set of rules may not be successful under another. French political scientist Maurice Duverger has formulated this argument in a classical way. 2 Generally speaking, European politicians depend for their electoral success in Parliament much more on their political parties than do their American colleagues. For US congressional elections each candidate has largely to fight for himself or herself to be elected. This means in particular to organize a very personalized election campaign and to collect the necessary money. As a consequence, money is much more important for electoral success in the USA than in Europe

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  Elections and Voters

  • Cees Van der Eijk, Mark N. Franklin(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  But, for part i cu-lar voters, who i s the i r representat i ve ? There i s no such person, as all those elected ( i. e . the ent i re Parl i a m ent) are everyone ’ s representat i ves . In other words, there i s no close, let alone un i que, l i nk between a voter and a part i c-ular representat i ve i n a l i st proport i onal syste m. That i s v i ewed as not very sat i sfactory by proponents of m a j or i tar i an elect i ons . A feature of FPTP countr i es i s that voters have a s i ngle representat i ve who m they can cons i der to be ‘ the i r own ’ (though shared, of course, w i th other voters i n the sa m e electoral d i str i ct or const i tuency) . A part i cular voter m ay not have voted for that representat i ve but the representat i ve i s duty bound to represent every voter i n her or h i s d i str i ct . So i f we want good const i tuency serv i ce we prob-ably want an FPTP or MMP syste m. On the other hand, i f we want repre-sentat i on i n ter m s of pol i cy platfor m s rather than const i tuency serv i ce, then we def i n i tely want a proport i onal syste m (a mi xed syste m prov i des good proport i onal i ty as we have already expla i ned) . A second trade-off ar i ses fro m the types of govern m ents that tend to result fro m d i fferent electoral syste m s i n parl i a m entary reg im es . FPTP elect i ons Electoral Institutions 69 tend to exaggerate the nat i onal w i nner ’ s m arg i n (see Box 2 . 1) and generate a s i ngle party govern m ent, wh i ch also d i scourages the prol i ferat i on of part i es because voters hes i tate to cast the i r vote for a party that ‘ cannot w i n ’. PR tends to lead to m ore part i es and hence to the need for coal i t i on govern-m ents, thought by m any to blur the electoral connect i on between voters and govern m ents by i ntroduc i ng uncerta i nty i nto the translat i on of votes i nto govern m ents .

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