With so many elections held on May 6th, it was dubbed ‘Super Thursday’. But not all voters will be feeling so super about the results, especially where First Past the Post (FPTP) was in play.

How votes translated into representation has varied widely but where Proportional Representation (PR) has played its part, voters can be super confident of a vote that matters.

The Scottish Parliament, Welsh Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly and London Assembly all already use forms of PR - as do local councils in Scotland and Northern Ireland. From 2022 onwards, Welsh councils will have the option to choose the Single Transferable Vote for their elections too. It is only English local elections and Westminster that are well and truly stuck in the 19th century, stubbornly clinging on to FPTP to decide who gets elected.

Although the voting systems in place in the UK are not perfectly proportional, thanks to PR, Scotland is much more fairly represented. The Scottish Parliament uses the Additional Member System (AMS), so each voter casts two votes: one for a constituency member, and another for a regional ballot. So if it weren't for the proportional element of the voting system in Scotland, the SNP would have won a huge majority on a minority of the vote.

AMS is also used to elect the Welsh Parliament and the London Assembly.

But it’s a stark contrast in England, where local council elections use the undemocratic FPTP, also used in the Hartlepool by-election contest. This system skews the results wherever it is used because seats don’t end up matching votes. It leaves voters without a real voice in local matters and councils end up looking nothing like the way people voted.

Take Nuneaton and Bedworth for example, the Conservatives got 58 per cent of the vote but ended up with 88 per cent of the seats. Labour and the Greens gained a combined 40 per cent of the vote share but won just 12 per cent of the seats. This can’t be described as real democracy.

English local council results - Nuneaton and Bedworth

Votes for mayors and police and crime commissioners were counted using the Supplementary Vote, where people choose their first and second choice candidates. If no candidate gets 50 per cent of the first choice votes, the top two candidates go head-to-head in a second round and all other candidates are eliminated.

This threw up some interesting results on May 6th, where the second preference candidate scooped the win. So in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Labour took the metro mayor from the Conservatives when the second preference votes were totted up. The same happened in North Wales, with Labour winning the Police and Crime Commissioner election over the Conservatives. And Plaid Cymru also won the Dyfed-Powys Police and Crime Commissioner election over the Conservatives.

This preferential system has its flaws but it would be far worse for voters if FPTP was used. Yet Home Secretary Priti Patel announced proposals in March for precisely this, making it easier in future elections for unpopular and highly divisive candidates to get into city and town halls on low levels of voter support.

So as the new session of Parliament got underway, Make Votes Matter launched a petition against this blatant attack on our democracy. We need less First Past the Post in the UK, not more.

We’ve seen evidence in the devolved nations that proportional voting systems work, so why not extend it to British general elections and English council elections?

Make Votes Matter brokered the cross-party Good Systems Agreement which sets out the principles any new voting systems must deliver. And we believe the final decision would be best made by a deliberative democratic process such as a citizens’ assembly. It’s the only way forward.

The big takeaway from ‘Super Thursday’ is that when PR is applied, you get even representation. And when FPTP is applied, voters are left out in the cold, without a real say on the big issues affecting their local communities. It’s time to ditch the broken FPTP system and give voters a real choice at the ballot box.