The Prevail System

It is a common complaint about election systems that they fail to produce proportional representation in the legislature, that is the proportion of seats obtained by a party does not reflect its proportion of the popular vote.
Several voting systems aimed at achieving better proportionality are in current use around the world and can be reasonably effective. Often they operate in multi-seat constituencies and produce a degree of proportionality in each of these. Amongst the drawbacks of these systems is that they are complex and difficult for the voting public to understand. There is also never any certainty about how much proportionality will be achieved.There is no single best voting system to achieve a degree of proportionality. All systems involve trade-offs.

PREVAIL is an electoral voting system designed especially for single seat constituencies such as in the UK. It is a variation of First Past the Post. Its purpose is to create a more representative Parliament than that obtained for First Past the Post whilst retaining some of the features of the latter. PREVAIL does not guarantee that exact proportionality will be achieved but does guarantee that the degree of proportionality will be no worse than First Past the Post.

PREVAIL is a simple and transparent system. Voters vote for a single candidate exactly as they would with First Past the Post. With PREVAIL the major difference is that a seat can be allocated to a party with the second or third highest vote in the constituency.

Within its parameter settings PREVAIL can be tuned to provide a politically acceptable trade-off between parliamentary representation and constituency representation.

UK General Elections: First Past the Post

General Elections in the Uk are held using First Past the Post in single seat constituencies: the candidate who wins the seat is the one with the most valid votes.

The major criticism of First Past the Post is that it can produce a distribution of seats across parties that does not reflect the pattern of voting in the country. That is, it does not produce proportional representation. In true proportional representation, the proportion of seats obtained by a party would be identical to the proportion of votes it achieved in the election.

In the UK General Election in 2024 the Labour party won 411 seats out of a total of 649 (when the speaker's seat is excluded). This was 66.33% of the total number of seats, a majority that enabled them to form a government. Yet, across the country, they obtained 9,708,716 votes out of the total valid votes cast of 28,808,662 which is less than 34% of the total. The Reform Party obtained 4,117,620 votes (14.29%) yet won only 5 seats (0.77%). The Green Party obtained 1,943,813 votes (6.75%) yet won only 4 seats (0.62%). This is lack of proportionality on alarming scale!

First Past the Post has many defenders both in the UK and across the world. They argue that proportional representation leads to coalition government which is weak and beholden to the undue influence of small coalition partners. 

Voting in an election serves two competing purposes: to elect a fair and representative government and to elect a constituency representative in Parliament. First Past the Post completely ignores the first of these concentrating solely on the second. The challenge for a voting system is to reach an acceptable compromise between these two competing objectives,

In some countries, though, where First Past the Post is used, a high degree of proportionality is obtained. After the 2022 elections to Congress in the US, the House of Representatives, which has 435 seats had 222 Republican and 213 Democrat seats. The Republicans had 51.03% of the seats. They also had 50.6% of the popular vote. 

Why is there such a lack of proportionality in the UK? It is because there are several parties, not just two, competing and gaining a reasonable vote (unlike the US where there are really only two). As a consequence the winning candidate is often elected on a small share of the vote. This is then translated into a full vote in the House of Commons. 

PREVAIL can be used all across the World

Although discussed here with reference to the House of Commons, PREVAIL can be used for election to any legislature in the world.

PREVAIL : What you can do to help