Plurality electoral formula in which the candidate with the most votes in a single-member district wins the seat outright, with no requirement to win a majority and no second round. It is named by analogy to a horse race, in which the winner is simply whoever crosses the line first among the runners, regardless of the margin. It is the method used to elect the UK House of Commons, the Canadian House of Commons, the Indian Lok Sabha, and the United States House of Representatives and most state legislatures, and it reached these systems largely through the shared inheritance of British parliamentary practice and its export through colonial and Commonwealth institutions. Its chief documented effect, formalized as Duverger's law, is a tendency toward two dominant parties, since a vote for a third-place candidate in a single-member district usually elects nobody and voters converge on the two candidates seen as able to win. The same single-member-district structure that produces this effect is also the one that makes gerrymandering possible: because a seat is won district by district rather than in proportion to a party's overall vote share, redrawing district boundaries can shift outcomes without a single voter changing their vote.
Facts
Origin Year1885 marks the UK's Redistribution of Seats Act, which converted most House of Commons constituencies from the two-member seats that had been the norm since the thirteenth century into single-member seats decided by a simple plurality. Plurality voting itself is far older than 1885, but first past the post as this atlas defines it, a single-member district decided by whichever candidate gets the most votes with no run-off, only became the House of Commons' standard method once the 1885 Act made single-member seats the norm; the 1884 Reform Act that extended the franchise is a distinct and earlier reform, not itself the origin of the single-member system. Founding ContextFirst past the post grew out of the older practice of electing Members of Parliament from multi member constituencies by simple plurality, and became Britain's standard method once the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885 converted most constituencies to single seats. Its main appeal is simplicity: whichever candidate wins the most votes in a constituency takes the seat, with no requirement for an outright majority. 2 Connections
Associated With
India, Countries India runs the world's largest FPTP elections, with over 800 million voters.
Source Electoral Reform Society: First Past the Post
FPTP elects Members of Parliament to Westminster.
Source Electoral Reform Society: First Past the Post
This source names United States directly: "Commons, the Indian Lok Sabha, and the United States House of Representatives and most state legislatures, and it reached these systems largely through the shared inheritance of British..."
Source Election: Plurality and Majority Systems (Britannica)
Influenced
The observed tendency of first-past-the-post systems toward two dominant parties is the empirical pattern Maurice Duverger generalized into the law.
Source Duverger's Law (Britannica)
Gerrymandering is possible only where representatives are elected from single-member geographic districts, the defining structural feature of first past the post; a proportional formula largely removes the incentive and the opportunity, since a district boundary does not change a party's seat share.
Source Gerrymandering (Britannica)
Practiced By
Source First-past-the-post voting (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Election: Plurality and Majority Systems (Britannica)
Encyclopaedia BritannicaLegislative elections > Plurality and majority systems section, opening paragraphQuote, Legislative elections > Plurality and majority systems section, opening paragraph
The plurality system is the simplest means of determining the outcome of an election. To win, a candidate need only poll more votes than any other single opponent; he need not, as required by the majority formula, poll more votes than the combined opposition.
2. Electoral Reform Society: First Past the Post
Electoral Reform Societyopening paragraphQuote, opening paragraph
First Past the Post (FPTP) is the name for the electoral system used to elect Members of Parliament (MPs) to Westminster.
First-past-the-post voting (Wikipedia)
Practiced By: Canada, Article text
Canada uses FPP and only two of the last seven federal Canadian elections (2011 and 2015) produced single-party majority governments.
In Group: Plurality, Majority and Indirect Voting Methods, Lead paragraph
First-past-the-post (FPTP), also called choose-one, first-preference plurality (FPP), or simply plurality, is a single-winner voting rule.
View the SourceDissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
Reform advocates, most visibly the UK's Electoral Reform Society, document that First Past the Post routinely produces disproportional results, seat shares that do not track vote shares, and has produced UK governments holding a parliamentary majority on as little as 33.7 to 37 percent of the national vote, which they term minority rule. They also document a safe-seat versus swing-seat disparity in campaign attention and accountability problems where a party can lose seats despite gaining vote share. This is an advocacy-organisation critique rather than a balanced academic consensus; defenders of FPTP value it for producing decisive single-party government and a direct constituency link, a trade-off the reform literature itself acknowledges.
A dissenting reading, from Electoral reform advocacy critique of First Past the PostElectoral Reform Society: First Past the Post, Electoral Reform Society
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