The Conservatives may regret campaigning to keep first past the post in 2011

As the UK prepares for the election in July, the polls do not make pleasant reading for the Conservative party . While some are predicting catastrophic losses , others think the Tories could be overtaken by Reform UK . With a quarter of their 2019 voters predicted to vote for Reform in July , the Conservatives will be thinking about how this could have been avoided.

One option would have been to choose a different side of history in a divisive referendum – the 2011 vote on electoral reform. In that campaign, the Conservatives were opposed to introducing an alternative vote system (AV) to replace the current first past the post system of voting. Their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, had been the ones who pushed for the referendum to be held, and led the campaigning on the other side.



First past the post hands constituencies to whichever candidate wins the most votes, regardless of whether they took the overall majority of votes (the combined votes for other candidates could add up to more than the winner). This system means that candidates can, and often do , win constituencies after securing fewer than 50% of the vote. AV is a form of preferential voting widely used in Australia, including national elections for the House of Representatives (the Australian equivalent of the House of Commons).

In the version of AV proposed for the UK, voters would have to rank candidates in order of preference on their ballot paper. For example, if there were five candidates, vote.