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Home > First Past the Post electoral system

The term "first past the post" 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").

1 Procedures

Each voter in a given electoral district selects one candidate. All votes are counted and the candidate with more votes than any of the other candidates is the winner. The winner represents the entire electoral district.

2 Examples

2.1 Simple example

The election of a Member of Parliament in the UK is a well known example of First-Past-The-Post. But the system is also used on a smaller scale.

This example is an election for the president of a school class. Each class has a president who sits on a school council.

There are three candidates, Amy, Brian and Chloe. Each class member gets a ballot paper, with these three names on it. The class member must put an "X" against one of the names.

After the election finishes, the papers are sorted into three piles. One pile contains all the papers where there is an "X" against Amy (that is, votes for Amy). The other two piles contain votes for Brian and for Chloe.

The largest pile decides the winner. For instance, if Amy's pile has 11 votes, Brian's pile has 16 votes, and Chloe's pile has 13 votes, then the winner is Brian. Hooray!

Notice that there were a total of 11 + 16 + 13 = 40 votes, and the winner had only 16 of them - only 40%. But that is only the result for this one class.

We have created an imaginary school where the girl and boy students disagree with each other on most issues, and that girls vote for girls, while boys vote for boys.

Now, let's suppose that across all the classes, 8 of the class presidents that were elected were girls, and 9 were boys. That makes the boys the overall winner. The only influence that the pupils in this class had was to vote for Amy, Brian or Chloe. Some might argue that a boy won for this class because there were two girls, who "split the vote". Perhaps if Amy had not been a candidate, then Chloe would have won this class, and the girls would be the winners of the whole council.

Arguments exactly like this, but on a larger scale, are common wherever there are first-past-the-post elections.

2.2 More complex example

Imagine an election for the capital of Tennessee, a state in the United States that is over 500 miles east-to-west, and only 110 miles north-to-south. In this vote, the candidates for the capital are Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Knoxville. The population breakdown by metro area is as follows:

• Memphis: 826,330
• Nashville: 510,784
• Chattanooga: 285,536
• Knoxville: 335,749

If the voters cast their ballot based strictly on geographic proximity, the voters' sincere preferences might be as follows:

3 Disadvantages

3.1 "Unfairness"

The most commonly expressed disadvantage – perhaps because it is easiest to express and explain – of first-past-the-post is that it is "unfair", i.e. that substantial bodies of opinion are not represented at all in the final result, and that a party may obtain a clear majority without popular support at that level.

3.2 Tactical voting

First-past-the-post encourages the tactical voting technique known as "compromising": voters are encouraged to vote for one of the two options most likely to win, even if it is not their most preferred option. In the above example, voters from Chattanooga and Knoxville may "compromise" by voting for Nashville, which they prefer to Memphis.

If enough voters vote using this tactic, the first-past-the-post system becomes a form of runoff voting where the first round is held in the court of public opinion. This can give substantial power to the media as voters will tend to believe their viewpoint on who the leading contenders are likely to be in the election and use that viewpoint to decide where a "tactical" vote would be (in the voter's opinion) best used. This can also become a system promoting votes against more so than votes for.

One consequence of the system is that many FPTP 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.

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