First-past-the-post (FPTP) is used as the primary form of allocating seats for legislative elections in about a third of the world’s countries. Supporters of FPTP argue that its concept is easy to understand and ballots can more easily be counted and processed than those in preferential voting systems. Critics argue that a fundamental requirement of an election system is to accurately represent the views of voters, but FPTP often fails in this respect.
About First-past-the-post voting in brief
First-past-the-post (FPTP) is a plurality voting method. It is used as the primary form of allocating seats for legislative elections in about a third of the world’s countries, mostly in the English-speaking world. Supporters of FPTP argue that its concept is easy to understand and ballots can more easily be counted and processed than those in preferential voting systems. Critics argue that a fundamental requirement of an election system is to accurately represent the views of voters, but FPTP often fails in this respect. The effect of a system based on plurality voting spread over a number of separate districts is that the larger parties, and parties with more geographically concentrated support, gain a disproportionately large share of seats. It’s more likely that a single party will hold a majority of legislative seats in Canada and the UK, where FPTP has been used for 19 of the 24 general elections since 1922. In some countries that elect their legislatures by proportional representation, FPTP is used to elect their head of state. The U.S. uses FPTP and only two of the last six federal Canadian elections produced single-party majority governments. In Canada, the FPTP voting method is used in each of the two rounds of the election. The first round, held according to block voting rules, determines which candidates may progress to the second and final round. In a multiple-member election, each voter casts the same number of votes as there are positions to be filled, and those elected are the highest-placed candidates corresponding to that number of positions.
The multiple-round election voting method uses the FP TP voting method in eachof two rounds, and the second round is held in a single-member electoral division, where the candidate with the highest number of votes is elected. The second-placed candidate had an inferior margin of only 0.35% and a majority did not vote for Tony Tan. In this real-life illustration from 2011, Tony Tan obtained a greater amount of votes than any of the other candidates. Therefore, he was declared the winner, although the second- placed candidate had a greater margin of just 0.5%. In this example, Labour took amajority of the seats with only 36% of the vote. In contrast, the Liberal Democrats took more than 20% of the vote but only about 10% of seats. All people who did not finish first in their district were described as a full of second-choices who no one really didn’t really object to. Winston Churchill criticized the alternative system as ‘determined by the votes for the most worthless candidates’ by calling it ‘wasted votes’. It often creates false majorities by over-representing larger parties while under FPTP it often creates larger ones by overrepresenting smaller ones while under proportional representation it often fails to reflect the popular vote in the number of parliamentarylegislative seats awarded to competing parties to win elections. It can be problematic where said government’s policies favour only that fraction of the electorate that supported it.
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This page is based on the article First-past-the-post voting published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
