Elections

First past the post: Canada's voting system

The First past the post electoral system is a voting system for single-member districts. The name first past the post (abbreviated FPTP or FPP) is an analogy to horse racing; the system is also variously called winner-take-all, plurality voting, or relative majority. In political science, it is known as Single-Member? District Plurality or SMDP. When this system is in use at all levels of politics it may result in a two-party system, based on single seat district voting systems. However, the system of forming a government is also crucial. It is used in 43 of the 192 countries in the United Nations. Some believe the system results in stable government but it can elect a candidate who is opposed by a majority of voters.

The term "first past the post", as stated above, refers to a now seldom-used analogy with horse racing, where the winner is the first to pass a particular point (in this case a plurality of votes), upon which all other runners automatically and completely lose ("winner take all"). There is, however, no "post" that the winning candidate must pass in order to win, they are simply required to receive the largest number of votes in their favour. This sometimes results in the alternate name "furthest past the post."

Although "first past the post" is the standard term in Canada, the term may have originally had a pejorative meaning, again based on the horse racing analogy: once a particular party achieves plurality ("passing the post") there is no point in counting any further votes. For example, if a constituency has 100 people and the first 51 votes counted are all for the same party, the remaining 49 ballot papers can be effectively thrown in the waste bin uncounted because they cannot possibly affect the final result - thus technically leaving around half of the constituency without any representation.

Advantages

Fewer parties

FPTP tends to reduce the number of political parties to a greater extent than most other methods, thus making it more likely that a single party will hold a majority of legislative seats. Some argue that this is an advantage, in that single party rule enables quicker decision-making with less need for back and forth negotiation.

Multi-party coalitions, on the other hand, require consent among all coalition partners to pass legislation, which some argue gives small parties a disproportionate amount of power. Arguments for FPTP often look to Italy where the frequent government changeovers are presented as undesirable.

Single-member districts also mean that parties need to appeal to a wide cross-section of the populace rather than a political niche. Some argue that this discourages "extremist" parties.

Simplicity

FPTP may well be the simplest of all voting systems. This implies specific advantages. It is likely to be quicker, and easier to administer; this may also imply that an election costs less to run. It may also have an effect on voters, because it is easy to explain and understand. Alternative voting systems may alienate some voters who find the systems difficult to understand, and who therefore feel detached from the direct effect of their own vote.

In addition, not all voters see party politics or policies as a major issue. Some voters see an election primarily as a form of recruitment for an individual representative, a point of contact between the state and themselves. FPTP gives such voters a direct choice of single candidates, with no extra votes to be shared or balanced between parties. This may be especially important to voters who want to vote for individuals based on particular ethical frameworks that are not party aligned, and who do not want their vote to have a "side effect" of electing others they may not approve of.

Each representative must be a winner

Sometimes, the voters are in favour of a political party, but do not like specific candidates. An example was the premier of Alberta, Donald Getty. His government was re-elected in 1989, but because of voter dissatisfaction with the way the government was led, Getty, the leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, was not re-elected by voters from his electoral district.

However this can also have the opposite effect. A candidate who is very popular among the electorate in general may lose if the candidate or the candidate's party is unpopular or has caused dissatisfaction in his or her seat. For example, in the 1999 Ontario provincial election, Mike Harris and his Progressive Conservative party were re-elected to a majority government, but symbolic of the growing discontent among voters over cuts to education, his education minister and strong ally was resoundingly defeated by the opposition candidate.

It is often claimed that because each electoral district votes for its own representative, the elected candidate is held accountable to her own voters, thereby helping to prevent incompetent, fraudulent or corrupt behaviour by elected candidates. The voters in the electoral district can easily replace her since they have full power over who they want to represent them. In the absence of effective recall legislation, however, the electors must wait until the end of the representative's term. Also, it is generally possible for candidates to be elected if the party regards them as important even if they are fairly unpopular, by moving the candidate to a safe seat which the party is unlikely to lose or by getting a candidate in a safe seat to step down.

Stable governments

The use of FPTP usually results in majority governments, meaning one party wins a majority of seats in the legislature, even if it doesn't win a majority of the popular vote, as will be discussed in more detail below. Minority governments are fairly rare occurrences and thus in theory, FPTP results in more stable governments.

Extremist parties are excluded

Extremist or fringe parties rarely have enough concentrated support to win any seats under the FPTP electoral system.

Disadvantages

Fewer parties

First-past-the-post's tendency toward fewer parties and more frequent majority governments can also produce disadvantages.

One such disadvantage is that the government may not consider as wide a range of perspectives and concerns. It is entirely possible that a voter will find that all major parties agree on a particular issue. In this case, the voter will not have any meaningful way of expressing a dissenting opinion through his or her vote.

Another disadvantage is that fewer choices are offered to the voters, often pressuring voters to vote for a candidate whom they largely disagree with, in order to oppose a candidate whom they disagree with even more. The likely result of this is that candidates will less closely reflect the viewpoints of those who vote for them.

It may also be argued that one-party rule is more likely to lead to radical changes in government policy that are only favored by a plurality or bare majority of the voters, whereas multi-party systems usually require greater consensus in order to make dramatic changes.

Disproportionality

The most commonly expressed disadvantage - perhaps because it is easiest to express and explain - of first-past-the-post is that it frequently produces disproportional results, i.e. results in which a party's share of the seats does not match up with its share of the votes. Thus, substantial bodies of opinion can be left out of the final outcome, and a party can obtain a majority of seats without a majority of the vote. Examples include the United Kingdom general election of 2005 where the new government won a majority of the seats with less than 38% of the national vote. The disproportionate nature of this system also means that whole regions may have M.P.s from only one party. The British Conservatives won large majorities of seats in the 1980's on a minority of votes while almost all the Scottish seats were Labour, Liberal or Scottish National Party, thus creating tremendous disatisfaction in Scotland.

In Canada, in the 2000 federal election, the Liberal party under Jean Chrétien won a majority with only 40% of the popular vote. Similarly, many provincial elections have resulted in one party sweeping all the seats, even though they did not receive 100% of the popular vote. This occurred most recently in New Brunswick in 1987, when Frank McKenna's Liberals won every single seat in the legislature. In the 1998 Quebec provincial election, the Parti Québécois won a comfortable majority, capturing 60% of the seats in the provincial legislature, even though the second place Liberals actually received a higher percentage of the popular vote, 43.5% to 42.8% for the PQ. In the Prince Edward Island provincial election of 2000, the Liberal party won only 1 of the 27 seats in the legislature, yet received 33.7% of the popular vote. The Progressive Conservatives won the other 26 seats, with 42.9% of the vote.

The usual cause for these disproportionate results is that a party has a large number of votes across the entire territory, but they are spread out across the territory rather than being concentrated in particular constituencies. Parties with less overall support, but where that support is concentrated in particular constituencies, will win plurality in those constituencies over a party with widely distributed support.

This presents a problem because it encourages parties to focus narrowly on the needs and well-being of specific electoral districts where they can be sure to win seats, rather than be sensitive to the sentiments of voters everywhere. A further problem is that usually the party in power has the ability to determine where the boundaries of constituencies lie: thus, in order to secure election results, they may use gerrymandering - that is, redistricting to distort election results by enclosing party voters together in one electoral district.

It often seems fundamentally unfair that a party should have a substantially greater or lesser share of seats than their share of the vote. A further consequence of the system is that many such elections can be considered won before all votes are tallied, once there are no longer enough uncounted votes to override an established plurality count. Though not necessarily a disadvantage, this can produce a feeling of disenfranchisement among voters when running tallies are reported through the media.

Regionalism

FPTP also encourages regional parties which can be very popular in one geographical region but have little or no support in other parts of the electorate. Case in point in Canada would be the Bloc Québécois, which runs candidates only in the province of Quebec. Also, the Reform party arose in Western Canada, a result with the perceived domination of Central Canada. The party attempted to broaden its appeal and ran candidates in every province, but failed to make inroads east of Manitoba.

Tactical voting

To a much greater extent than most other methods, first-past-the-post encourages the tactical voting technique known as "compromising". Voters are pressured to vote for one of the two candidates they predict are most likely to win, even if they ideally do not want to elect either of them, because a vote for any other candidate will be likely to be wasted and have no impact on the final result.

The difficulty is sometimes summed up, in extreme terms, as "All votes for anyone other than the second place, are actually votes for the winner" - because by voting for other candidates, they have denied those votes to the second place candidate who could have won had they received them.

Because voters have to predict in advance who the top two candidates will be, this can cause significant perturbation to the system:

1. Substantial power is given to the media. Some voters will tend to believe their viewpoint on who the leading contenders are likely to be in the election. Even voters who distrust the media will know that those candidates who receive the most media attention will be the most popular with other voters, and thus most likely to be in one of the top two.
2. A newly appointed candidate, who is in fact supported by the majority of voters, may be considered (due to their lack of a track record) to not be likely to become one of the top two candidates; thus, they will receive a reduced number of votes, which will then give them a reputation as a low poller in future elections, compounding the problem.
3. The system may promote votes against more so than votes for. In Canada, for example, in the too-close-to-call 2004 election, support for the NDP dropped as voters were pressured to vote for the Liberal party in order to prevent the Conservative party from possibly forming the government.
4. If enough voters use this tactic, the first-past-the-post system becomes, effectively, runoff voting - a completely different system - where the first round is held in the court of public opinion.

One often-overlooked flaw in the FPTP system is that invariably, voters can select only one candidate in a single-member district, while in multi-member districts they can never select more candidates than the number of seats in the district. Some argue that FPTP would work better if electors could cast a vote for as many candidates as they wish. This would allow voters to "vote against" a certain despised candidate if they choose without having to guess at who they should vote for to defeat that candidate, thus eliminating the need for tactical voting. Such a system would also serve to reduce the spoiler effect.

Safe seats

A safe seat is one in which a plurality of voters support a particular candidate so strongly that their votes for that candidate are guaranteed in advance of the election. This causes the difficulty that all other voters in the constituency can then make no difference to the result, since the winner of the seat is already known in advance. This results in serious feelings of disenfranchisement, and leads to abstentation. It also results in parties using these safe seats to get "star candidates" elected, people the party's leadership want to have in government, and thus want to ensure that they will be elected. These candidates are often parachuted into safe ridings, at the expense of popular local candidates.

Wipe out and clean sweep results

Since FPTP combined with single member constituencies generate a winner's bonus, if not winner takes all, the opposition can be left with few if any seats, as has been previously mentioned.

An opposition that is weak or absent, because of an electoral wipeout, is not good for good governance, it is argued. Provincial elections in several Canadian provinces provide suitable examples.

This is the missing corollary of strong-government argument for FPTP.