The elections on Thursday for more than 5,000 seats on English municipalities, known as councils, took place under a voting system that was created when two big parties, Labour and the Conservatives, dominated the field.
But with the British electorate fragmenting, and several new or reinvigorated parties now jostling for influence, that system is under unprecedented strain.
Known as “first past the post,” the British system awards a seat to the candidate with the most votes in each electoral area. Losers get nothing. Even if one candidate only receives a small percentage of the overall vote, he or she can still win by securing just a few votes more than the closest rival.
While that seemed logical when the vast majority of voters chose between just two parties, it is being tested by the rise of the right-wing populist Reform U.K. party, which has been leading national polls at around 25 percent of the vote, and by the insurgent left-wing Green Party, which has risen to around 17 percent in recent months.
Support for the centrist Liberal Democrats, a party that has been a presence in British politics for decades, and for independent candidates is further fragmenting the vote.
With at least five parties now contesting elections in a serious way, seats can be won on a low share of the vote.
“Our system is set up for binary fights: Two fighters in the ring, the one that wins gets the seat,” said Robert Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester. “But if you’ve got five or six people in the ring, the one that ‘wins’ does not in any sense have the support of the majority of the people in that area.”
Complicating matters, elections also took place on Thursday for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, and those use two different but more proportionate systems.
Last year’s English council elections — using first past the post — threw up some jarring results. Seventy-five candidates were elected with each winning less than 30 percent of the vote, according to Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, two academics who specialize in elections.
In one area of Cornwall, the Liberal Democrat winner won with 19 percent of the vote, narrowly ahead of the Reform candidate, who had 17 percent. The first five candidates were separated by a total of just 110 votes.
“It’s a signal of stress on the first-past-the-post electoral system,” said Professor Ford. “It’s a sign of a system that is not really able to accommodate the diversity of preferences that are being expressed.”
He predicted that this pattern might be repeated in many municipal subdivisions, known as wards, where enough candidates from one party could win with around 25 percent of the vote to gain control of the municipality.
“That might mean you have a London council with a Reform majority, where three-quarters of people voted anti-Reform,” said Professor Ford. “That’s obviously problematic, but it’s a plausible outcome in the current scenario.”
It’s worse still when you factor in that local elections generally attract a lower participation rate than general elections, and that only 30 to 40 percent of those who could vote actually do so.
