First-past-the-post voting
Based on Wikipedia: First-past-the-post voting
The Voting System That Can Make a Loser Win
Here's a puzzle that sounds impossible: a political party wins more votes than any other party in the entire country, yet ends up with fewer seats in parliament. It's not a riddle. It's not a hypothetical. It has happened repeatedly in democracies around the world, including in New Zealand, Ghana, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
The culprit? A voting system so simple it fits in a single sentence, yet so consequential it has shaped the political destiny of nations for centuries.
It's called first-past-the-post voting, and if you live in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, or India, it's probably how your representatives get elected. Understanding how it works—and how it can produce such counterintuitive results—reveals something profound about the hidden machinery of democracy itself.
The Simplest Possible Rule
First-past-the-post voting, sometimes called plurality voting, operates on a beautifully straightforward principle: whoever gets the most votes wins. That's it. No runoffs, no ranked preferences, no complicated formulas. You mark one name on your ballot, all the votes get counted, and the candidate with the highest number takes the seat.
The name itself comes from horse racing. In a race, the first horse past the post wins—it doesn't matter if it wins by a nose or by ten lengths. Similarly, in this voting system, it doesn't matter if a candidate wins by one vote or one million. Victory goes to whoever crosses the finish line first, regardless of margin.
This simplicity is both its greatest virtue and its fatal flaw.
A Tale of Four Cities
To understand why first-past-the-post can produce such strange outcomes, consider a thought experiment that political scientists love to use.
Imagine Tennessee needs to choose a new capital city. The state has four major population centers: Memphis in the far southwest, Nashville in the center, Knoxville in the east, and Chattanooga in the southeast. Each city's residents naturally want the capital as close to them as possible.
Memphis, as the largest city, commands forty-two percent of the state's population. Nashville has twenty-six percent, Knoxville seventeen percent, and Chattanooga fifteen percent.
Under first-past-the-post, Memphis wins easily. It has more votes than any other single option.
But here's the catch: Memphis sits at the extreme western edge of the state. Fifty-eight percent of Tennessee's population—a clear majority—lives closer to Nashville than to Memphis. If you asked every voter to compare Nashville against Memphis directly, Nashville would win in a landslide. Nashville is the geographical and political center of the state, the compromise choice that most people could live with.
Yet Nashville loses.
This is the heart of the problem. First-past-the-post doesn't find consensus. It doesn't identify the option that the most people find acceptable. It simply rewards whoever can assemble the largest single bloc of supporters, even if that bloc represents a minority of the population and even if most voters actively oppose the winner.
Manufacturing Majorities
The Tennessee example illustrates a local quirk, but the real consequences play out at the national level. When first-past-the-post is used to elect an entire legislature—hundreds of seats, each decided by its own local race—the distortions compound in unpredictable ways.
The fundamental issue is geography. A party's seats in parliament don't reflect how many people voted for it. They reflect where those voters happen to live.
Consider two hypothetical parties competing for one hundred seats. Party A wins sixty percent of the vote in fifty districts and zero percent in the other fifty. Party B wins forty percent of the vote in those same fifty districts and one hundred percent in the others. Overall, Party A has received more total votes. But Party B wins fifty seats to Party A's fifty. A perfectly tied parliament despite a significant gap in popular support.
Tweak the numbers slightly, and you get an even more absurd result: the less popular party winning more seats.
This isn't theoretical. In Canada's 2019 and 2021 federal elections, the Conservative Party won more votes nationwide than the Liberal Party, yet the Liberals took more seats and formed the government. In the United Kingdom's 1951 general election, Labour won more votes than the Conservatives, but the Conservatives won more seats and returned to power.
Political scientists call this a "wrong-winner" election or a "majority reversal." The system has literally inverted the will of the voters.
The False Majority Problem
Even when the right party wins, first-past-the-post often hands them more power than they earned.
In Canada, since 1900, only six federal elections have produced a majority government where the winning party actually received a majority of votes cast. In every other case—the vast majority of Canadian political history—a party that failed to convince more than half the country still received enough seats to govern without coalition partners.
The United Kingdom tells a similar story. Since 1922, nineteen of twenty-four general elections produced single-party majority governments. In only two of those elections did the winning party actually secure a majority of the national vote.
What this means is that most of the time, the party controlling parliament represents a minority of voters. They govern with a "false majority"—complete legislative control granted by the electoral system, not by the electorate.
Defenders of first-past-the-post sometimes argue this is actually a feature, not a bug. Majority governments can act decisively. They can implement their campaign promises without endless negotiation. They provide stability and clear accountability. When the next election comes, voters know exactly who to blame or reward.
Critics counter that this misses the point entirely. Democracy is supposed to translate public opinion into public policy. A system that routinely gives complete power to parties supported by forty percent of voters—while leaving sixty percent unrepresented—isn't translating anything. It's distorting.
The Spoiler Effect
Perhaps nothing frustrates voters more than the spoiler effect, and perhaps no election illustrates it better than the 2000 United States presidential race.
That November, Democratic candidate Al Gore faced Republican George W. Bush. But a third candidate complicated matters: Ralph Nader, running on the Green Party ticket. Nader positioned himself to the left of Gore, appealing to environmentalists and progressives who found the Democratic Party insufficiently bold.
In Florida, Bush defeated Gore by just 537 votes out of nearly six million cast. Nader received over 97,000 votes in the state. Most analysts agree that the vast majority of Nader voters, if forced to choose between only Bush and Gore, would have chosen Gore. Nader's presence on the ballot almost certainly changed the outcome.
This is the spoiler effect in action. A third candidate, with no realistic chance of winning, draws enough votes from a similar candidate to hand victory to someone most of those voters liked least.
The perverse incentive this creates is profound. Under first-past-the-post, voting for your true favorite can actually help your least favorite win. The rational response is to abandon candidates you genuinely prefer and vote "strategically" for whichever major-party candidate you find least objectionable. Democracy becomes an exercise not in expressing your values, but in calculating how to prevent the worst outcome.
This isn't hypothetical game theory. Voters do it constantly. "Don't waste your vote" is the refrain of every major party trying to squeeze out minor competitors. And it works, which is why first-past-the-post systems tend to produce two dominant parties while alternative voting systems produce more diverse political landscapes.
Duverger's Law
In the mid-twentieth century, French political scientist Maurice Duverger noticed a pattern so consistent that his observation became known as Duverger's Law: electoral systems using first-past-the-post tend, over time, to produce two-party competition.
The mechanism is straightforward. Voters don't want to waste their ballots on candidates who can't win. Donors don't want to fund hopeless campaigns. Media outlets don't want to cover irrelevant candidates. Over successive elections, smaller parties either wither away, merge with larger ones, or find themselves permanently relegated to spoiler status—winning nothing themselves while occasionally tipping races to candidates their supporters like least.
The United States exemplifies Duverger's Law in its purest form. Despite periodic attempts by third parties—Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, Ross Perot's Reform Party, various Libertarian and Green campaigns—American politics has been dominated by two parties for over a century and a half. The electoral system makes it almost mathematically impossible for a third party to break through at scale.
But Duverger's Law isn't quite universal. India uses first-past-the-post yet sustains a vibrant multiparty democracy. Canada has multiple significant parties despite the same electoral system. Regional parties can thrive under first-past-the-post when their support is geographically concentrated enough to win local races, even if they have no hope of national victory.
Still, the pressure toward consolidation is real. The gravitational pull of first-past-the-post bends political systems toward fewer, larger parties competing for the center.
Safe Seats and Wasted Votes
In any election using first-past-the-post, some votes matter enormously and some matter not at all.
If you live in a district where one party wins by thirty percentage points every election, your vote is essentially decorative. Support the dominant party, and you're piling onto a guaranteed victory. Support the opposition, and you're adding to a guaranteed defeat. Either way, the outcome was determined before you walked into the polling booth.
Political scientists call these "safe seats," and they're remarkably common. In the United States, the vast majority of congressional districts are considered safe for one party or the other. Only a handful of "swing districts" or "marginal seats" are genuinely competitive.
This geographic distribution of electoral relevance has profound consequences. Political campaigns concentrate their resources—advertising, canvassing, candidate visits—in competitive areas. Voters in safe seats rarely see a presidential candidate in person. Their concerns receive less attention because their votes are already spoken for.
Parties "write off" regions where they're weak. Why invest in building support among populations you'll never win? Better to double down where races are close. The result is a politics of targeted appeals to narrow slices of the electorate, rather than broad national vision.
Meanwhile, the "wasted vote" problem means that in many races, more than half the ballots cast have no effect on the outcome. Vote for the loser, and your preference vanishes into the void. Vote for a winner who would have won anyway, and you've made no marginal difference. Only those votes that pushed a winner from losing to winning actually mattered.
Estimates suggest that in first-past-the-post systems, as many as three-quarters of votes can be effectively wasted in a given district. Those voters participated in democracy but had no influence on the result.
The Question of Extremism
Does first-past-the-post keep extremists out of power, or does it let them in?
Both arguments have evidence behind them, which is why this debate generates so much heat.
The case for moderation goes like this: because only one candidate can win each district, parties must appeal to a broad coalition. Extreme positions alienate swing voters. Candidates who stake out radical ground lose to more centrist opponents. Strategic voting further punishes fringe parties, as voters abandon them to prevent worse outcomes. The result is two large, moderate, big-tent parties competing for the middle.
The case against is more subtle but equally compelling. First-past-the-post creates safe seats, and safe seats create complacency. A party that dominates a region faces little pressure to moderate because it faces no real competition. The only meaningful contest happens in party primaries, where a smaller, more ideologically committed electorate selects candidates. Extremists can capture a major party from within, and once they do, first-past-the-post protects their position.
The Constitution Society, a British think tank, published a report in 2019 arguing exactly this point. In certain circumstances, they concluded, first-past-the-post can actually abet extreme politics. If a radical faction captures one of the major parties, the electoral system protects that party's dominance. Voters who dislike the party's new direction can't easily defect to a moderate alternative without risking handing victory to their least-preferred major party. They're trapped.
Hungary offers a cautionary tale. The country uses a mixed electoral system heavily weighted toward first-past-the-post districts. Since 2010, the right-wing populist party Fidesz has used this system to maintain power while implementing what critics call anti-democratic reforms—to the point that the European Parliament no longer considers Hungary a full democracy.
The Center Squeeze
There's a phenomenon that political scientists call "center squeeze," and it reveals one of first-past-the-post's most counterintuitive failures.
Imagine an election with three candidates: one on the left, one on the right, and one in the center. The centrist candidate is actually everyone's second choice. Voters on the left prefer the leftist candidate first but find the centrist acceptable. Voters on the right prefer the rightist candidate first but also find the centrist acceptable. The centrist would beat either opponent in a head-to-head matchup.
But in first-past-the-post, second choices don't count. Only first-preference votes matter. The centrist, despite being acceptable to everyone, might receive the fewest first-choice votes and finish last. The election then becomes a contest between the left and right candidates—two polarizing options that each alienate half the electorate.
This is center squeeze: the moderate, consensus candidate getting crushed between two extremes because the voting system doesn't capture the full picture of voter preferences.
It happened in that hypothetical Tennessee capital election. Nashville, the geographic center, finished second despite being the option most voters could accept. The voting system rewarded Memphis for having the most passionate local support, not for being the best compromise.
The Colonial Legacy
How did first-past-the-post become so widespread? The answer lies in history, specifically in the history of the British Empire.
First-past-the-post has been used to elect members of the British House of Commons since medieval times. As Britain colonized large portions of the world, it exported its governmental institutions—including its electoral system. India, Canada, Nigeria, Jamaica, Kenya, and dozens of other nations inherited first-past-the-post as part of their colonial legacy.
The ACE Electoral Knowledge Network explicitly describes India's use of first-past-the-post as "a legacy of British colonialism." The system wasn't chosen through deliberation about what would best serve Indian democracy. It was simply what the departing colonial power left behind.
Interestingly, many former British colonies have since abandoned first-past-the-post. Australia switched to preferential voting (also known as ranked-choice or instant-runoff voting) in 1918. New Zealand replaced first-past-the-post with a mixed-member proportional system in 1996 after two referendums. Ireland uses the single transferable vote. These countries looked at the system they'd inherited and decided they could do better.
The United States, though never a British colony in the same sense, adopted first-past-the-post during its founding era when British parliamentary traditions still heavily influenced political thinking. It has remained largely unchanged since, though recent years have seen growing interest in alternatives, with several states and cities experimenting with ranked-choice voting.
The Stability Argument
Defenders of first-past-the-post often emphasize stability. The system tends to produce clear winners and single-party governments. No messy coalitions. No horse-trading between parties after the election. Voters know what they're getting.
Proportional representation systems, by contrast, often produce legislatures where no single party has a majority. Governments must be formed through coalitions, and small parties can wield outsized influence as "kingmakers"—demanding policy concessions in exchange for their support.
Tony Blair, defending first-past-the-post, argued that alternative systems "give small parties the balance of power, and influence disproportionate to their votes." An Israeli journalist made a similar point about the Knesset, Israel's highly proportional parliament, which "affords great power to relatively small parties, forcing the government to give in to political blackmail and to reach compromises."
Winston Churchill once criticized ranked-choice voting as producing outcomes "determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates"—meaning that votes for minor candidates could end up deciding the election between major ones.
There's something to this argument. Coalition governments can be unstable. Small parties can extract concessions that larger numbers of voters would reject. The need to constantly negotiate can slow governance to a crawl.
But critics of first-past-the-post see the same facts and draw opposite conclusions. If small parties gain influence through coalitions, isn't that because voters chose to support them? Why should a party with five percent of the vote have zero percent of the influence? And if coalition-building forces compromise, isn't that just democracy working as intended—requiring broad agreement before major changes?
The Geography Problem
Perhaps the deepest criticism of first-past-the-post is that it makes geography destiny.
Your vote's power depends entirely on where you live. In a competitive district, your ballot could decide who represents thousands of people. In a safe seat, you're essentially a spectator. If your preferred party's supporters happen to be spread evenly across many districts, you might elect nobody. If they're concentrated in a few areas, you might elect representatives even with fewer total votes than a rival party.
This creates artificial regionalism. Parties become associated with specific geographic areas, not because their ideas appeal more to certain regions, but because the electoral math rewards concentration. A party with twenty percent support spread evenly across a country might win zero seats. A party with twenty percent support concentrated in one region might win twenty percent of seats, or more.
The distortion can be extreme. Theoretically, under first-past-the-post with equally sized districts, a party could win a majority of legislative seats with just over twenty-five percent of the national vote—if that support were distributed with perfect efficiency, winning each victory by slim margins while the opposition piled up huge margins in losses.
No real election is this perfectly efficient, but the principle holds. Electoral geography matters at least as much as total support. A party trying to maximize its seats would do better to carefully target winnable districts than to maximize its overall vote share.
Reform and Resistance
For over a century, reformers have proposed alternatives to first-past-the-post. Ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, multi-member districts, approval voting—the menu of options is long and well-studied.
Yet first-past-the-post persists, especially in the countries that have used it longest. Why?
Part of the answer is inertia. Electoral systems are constitutional infrastructure. Changing them requires political will, often supermajorities, and always the support of politicians who won under the current system. Asking winners to change the rules that made them winners is a hard sell.
Part of the answer is genuine disagreement. Some people truly believe that first-past-the-post's simplicity outweighs its distortions. They value decisive governments over representative ones. They worry that proportional systems would empower fringe parties or create perpetual coalition chaos.
And part of the answer is strategic self-interest. Major parties benefit from first-past-the-post. It suppresses competition, inflates their seat counts, and locks out challengers. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
Still, the tide may be turning. Ranked-choice voting has gained traction in the United States, with Alaska and Maine adopting it for some elections. New Zealand's successful switch to proportional representation demonstrated that change is possible even in deeply established democracies. Growing awareness of the spoiler effect and wasted votes has fueled reform movements in multiple countries.
Whether first-past-the-post's centuries-long run is approaching its end remains to be seen. But the conversation about how democracies translate votes into power has never been more active—or more urgent.
The Stakes
Voting systems are not neutral technical choices. They shape political cultures, determine which voices get heard, and ultimately decide who holds power and who doesn't.
First-past-the-post has given the world stable governments and clear mandates. It has also given the world wrong-winner elections, spoiler effects, wasted votes, and legislatures that look nothing like the electorates that chose them.
Understanding these tradeoffs is essential for any citizen who wants to engage meaningfully with democracy. The rules of the game determine who wins, and in politics, the rules themselves are always up for debate.
Next time you vote—or next time you see election results that seem to defy common sense—remember the Tennessee capital. Sometimes the city at the center loses precisely because it's at the center. And sometimes the voting system, not the voters, decides who wins.