Jan 5, 2026
Having moved from a country with a moderately sane electoral system to one lacking in that department, I have thoughts on the subject. Let's start with what I mean by moderately sane, and outline some features we might like a voting system to have. I'm going to use the word parliament in its general sense to describe the elected body, even though many such elected bodies have different names.
We would like to elect candidates that have the support, or at least acquiescence, of as many voters as possible. This seems obvious, but is a much-neglected criterion.
We would like to give voters a wide choice, so they can vote for candidates who best match their preferences. We would like it to be feasible for a new party or candidate to gain a reasonable chance of success. Existing political parties generally do not want this, but voters do, because existing parties may not match their wishes.
We would like voters to have a single elected member who is in some sense accountable to them - a local member to whom they can direct requests, opprobium or other forms of feedback about their needs. Lacking a single such member, then a smaller number of such members is better than a larger number.
We would like the winner of the election to have the ability to implement their mandate. This one is controversial, not everyone agrees, and I'm ambivalent about it myself, but many people think it's important so let's put it down. In practice what it means is to amplify a majority, or near-majority, to ensure the winner has the votes in the parliament to pass legislative measures. The argument for it is that some party presented their program to the electorate, and then received the largest share of the vote, so they are entitled to take that as assent to implement their program. The counter-argument is that if the governing party has to negotiate with members outside their party to pass legislation then that is more often than not a good thing and leads to better outcomes that better match the wishes of the electorate and can temper excesses. One can just as well argue that the electorate has given them a mandate to implement whatever they can get the parliament to pass, since the composition of the parliament is what the electorate voted for.
Existing political parties would like to entrench themselves as the natural party of power, or failing that as one of the two such parties, so they can focus on attaining and retaining power, which is easier than focussing on attending to the needs of the voters. Voters of course do not want this - at least ones who have thought about it for more than a few seconds.
We would like ordinary people who are not psephologists, or perhaps don't even know what that word means, to be able to understand the system and know what the impact of their vote will be. This often leads those in public office to make condescending assumptions about the intelligence of the voters - people can generally understand quite well if someone bothers to explain it to them.
Now let's have a look at some common voting systems and how they measure up to these criteria.
This is when every voter selects a single candidate from a list for their electorate, and the one with the most such votes wins, even if they are far short of a majority of the votes cast. This scores well from the point of view of making entrenched existing parties happy, but fails grievously on reflecting the will of the voters and supporting choice. It forces voters to work out for themselves who are the two candidates who have a realistic chance of winning, and then voting for whichever of those best matches their wishes - even if such a least-bad candidate may actually be a long way from who that voter would like to see elected. Voters who don't perform this feat of mental gymnastics, or just get it wrong, tend to waste their vote and help entrench whichever of the major parties is furthest from the policies they want. So while it might look simple, it doesn't score well on letting ordinary people easily understand the impact of their vote. It doesn't permit a new party to gain support, as any such new candidate will tend to split support away from one of the existing major candidates, thus increasing the likelihood that the candidate furthest politically from the new party will be elected. This is why, for example, in the US Republicans are happy to see Green party candidates, because they help Republicans get elected. Because a candidate can be elected with a small percentage of the vote, it scores badly on ensuring the elected candidate is preferred by as many voters as possible. It does do well on concentrating the membership of the parliament in favour of the larger parties, hence making it easier for the party of government to implement their program - as discussed above I'm not personally persuaded this is an entirely good thing, but there are enthusiasts for the principle and this is an argument used in favour of this voting system. The tendency is to have only two parties that are competitive in the election, and neither party is under much pressure to deliver what their voters really want because they only have to be less unappealing to their voters than the other party. Generally, this is a bad electoral system in my opinion - however it prevails in most elections in the USA, UK and Canada. The voters of those countries deserve better.
Elections for the lower house of the Australian parliament have used what Australians call Preferential Voting since 1918 and it has generally worked well. Voters rank the candidates in their electorate in order of their preference. If any candidate receives a majority of the first preferences votes they win, otherwise the candidate with the least such votes is eliminated and their ballots are inspected to see who received the second preference, and those votes are then allocated to the second preferred candidate. If this puts anyone into majority position they win, otherwise the process repeats with the new least-preferred candidate, allocating second preferences and possibly lower preferences to skip any already-eliminated candidate, iterating until someone receives the majority. If it ultimately becomes a contest between two candidates then one of them must have a majority. The elected candidate can thus claim to have won at the very least the acquiescence of the majority of the electorate. As a voter, you can still vote for the candidate you prefer even if you don't think they are likely to win, and then your preferences will naturally flow to a least-bad option, without you having to do your own calculations and predictions. If you want to start a new political party people can still vote for you without risk of making the candidate most opposed to you more likely to win, and the major parties may find it useful to pay attention to your proposed policies and move some distance in your direction in order to get the preference votes of your voters. As a voter you get the benefit of more parties being available to vote for, so you can more directly choose your actual preferred outcome, not just the least bad - with the assurance that your vote will at least end up going to a least-bad candidate if your most preferred candidate isn't elected.
In the US this system is called Ranked Choice, and has started to be used in some city elections, as well as in some states. There was a referendum in the UK a decade or so ago proposing to introduce it, which failed due to the campaigning of the major parties who would not have benefitted from it. It is in my view a huge improvement over first past the post, and I hope that with familiarity from the elections where it is used it will become more widely accepted. It is sometimes argued that this is too complex for ordinary voters - but given over a century of experience in Australia it's hard to make that argument unless you are claiming that voters in other countries are that much more stupid than Australians (and I would not make that claim, despite being tempted).
This is when the voters choose a party, not an individual candidate, and then the seats in the parliament are allocated in proportion to what fraction of the total vote each party received. This does score well on ensuring the composition of the parliament reflects the wishes of the voters, and gives new parties a reasonable chance of establishing themselves. It does badly on giving each voter a local member that they can attempt to hold accountable. It also entrenches the role of political parties. The previous two systems don't actually need parties - each voter chooses candidates, not parties, so independent candidates are possible and the elected members are less beholden to a political party (less beholden, but still beholden). In proportional voting the parties hold all the power as they can choose all of their elected members, and the voters don't get to choose them at all. The d'Hondt system used in some European parliaments is essentially this, but with some extra mathematical complexity to manage the rounding error in favour of larger parties.
There are a few variants on this, but generally it's some linear combination of proportional voting with ranked choice, where each electorate sends some small number of members to the parliament, and voters rank the candidates in their order of preference. The Hare-Clark system used in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory is an example of this, and you could argue the system used to elect the Australian Senate is also if you squint at it the right way. Scotland's Single Transferable Vote system used for council elections is another example. The objective is to capture the benefit proportionality offers in terms of the elected members reflecting the wishes of the electorate, while still providing each voter a small number of candidates they can attempt to hold personally accountable. It's a balance of the competing objectives.
The above isn't an entirely unbiased appraisal, to be honest. But I didn't intend it to be - first past the post voting is a betrayal of democracy and should just not happen. Changing to Ranked Choice voting is the smallest incremental change in the right direction and makes things so much better that it should be a no-brainer. Proportional and Multiple Member systems have less clear benefits relative to ranked choice, and opinions can reasonably vary as to the pros and cons, so I wouldn't personally advocate for them but if you do then I wish you joy of it.
In the US there is an organisation called FairVote that advocates for both ranked choice voting and proportional representation, which you may wish to learn about and support. I think they might be better to just focus on one of those, preferably the former, but they should of course do what they think best. In the UK the Electoral Reform Society advocates for Single Transferable Vote (a multiple member electorates system), and also discuss Ranked Choice Voting (which they call Alternative Vote). FairVote Canada advocates to change Canada's electoral system to either proportional or multiple member - they aren't impressed by ranked choice per se. I am not persuaded by their arguments against ranked choice, but what they do advocate for is vastly better than what Canada has now so am not inclined to quibble. I wish all these organisations well!