Our voting system may be simple, but it is not fair. Currently, we vote using the First Past the Post system which elects candidates for each of the 650 seats in the UK general election. Whoever wins the given constituency is then awarded a seat in the House of Commons. This ensures that the whole counting process is simple, but it has major flaws. For example, if a party gains a large amount of votes in one constituency but fails to win, then all of those votes are irrelevant. Sure, they count towards the final percentage of that party. However, because our governments are elected by whoever wins the most seats, then the votes cast for the losing parties are 'wasted votes'. This is huge, because in a democratic society you would expect everyone's vote to count; not only those who vote for the winning party in their constituency. It also means that many smaller parties are underrepresented in the House of Commons because their vote share in seats where they have lost is irrelevant.

Furthermore, our current voting system means that 'safe seats' are created and MPs become complacent and work less because they know they face little challenge. First Past the Post exacerbates this because the candidate from the biggest party knows that the votes cast for the other parties mean nothing. A system that can potentially encourage parties and candidates to work less because they know they will win is one that it deeply flawed in my opinion.

There is another significant fault with FPTP: it encourages tactical voting. This happens when a voter knows that the party they would preferably vote for has no chance of winning in their constituency, and choose to vote tactically to keep another party out. This is fundamentally unhealthy because it means that many people throughout the UK vote for a candidate or party 'not as bad as the other'.

There is something that addresses the many issues with our voting system: an entirely new one that represents parties fairly. The Additional Member System that is used in the Scottish Parliament is one alternative that is proven to be fairer. The Conservatives, who regularly score low in Scotland in both the UK and Scottish elections unfortunately managed to secure 15 MSPs in the Scottish Parliament because the voting system ensured that they were represented fairly. Moreover, there are other superior alternatives such as Party List - the most used voting system throughout the world.

It seems ridiculous that in the UK we still continue to use our outdated system which represents parties unfairly and wastes people's votes. Countries such as Germany, Australia, Spain and the Netherlands use proportional representative systems, and it is about time that the UK followed suit and kept up with modern democracy.