CALLS for city council chiefs to lobby the Government to introduce a new voting system for General Elections have been made by Worcester’s Green Party.
City councillors will be asked to back plans to change from the current ‘first past the post’ arrangement to proportional representation at a meeting tomorrow (Tuesday).
December’s General Election, like all before it will see the candidate with the most votes win the seat and become the MP for the constituency.
A move to proportional representation would explore the idea the seats in parliament should be allocated so that they are in proportion to the votes cast.
There are numerous forms of proportional representation with one seeing voters asked to rank the candidates in order of preference. Once a candidate achieves 50 per cent support then he or she is elected.
While the Green Party locally hasn’t specified a preferred method, Coun Marjory Bisset will propose a motion to highlight PR would ‘boost turn-out, make the council more representative of the political make-up of its residents, and improve the quality of its decision-making’.
According to Make Votes Matter, the current voting system denies millions of people a voice in Parliament, forces millions more to vote tactically and distorts the will of the British people.
The campaign group points out the Conservatives and DUP won a majority of seats in the House of Commons, despite receiving just 43 per cent of the vote in 2017.
Klina Jordan, co-founder of Make Votes Matter, said: “Proportional Representation simply means that Parliament reflects how the people vote – if a party gets 20 per cent of the votes, they win 20 per cent of the seats.
“Most developed countries already take this for granted, but in the UK we’re still blighted by an antiquated system which completely distorts the will of the people.
“It’s time we caught up with the rest of the developed world by switching to a form of Proportional Representation.”
