That sucks, eh? We feel for you. In a First Past the Post election, only one candidate wins each riding — and winning by one vote is the same as winning by thousands. Every vote cast for every other candidate effectively counts for nothing. Your vote ends up with no seat, no share of power, and no influence over what happens next. It's as if you hadn't voted.

Only A "Small Party" Problem? You might think: "that only happens to voters who support fringe candidates and small parties - I'm too smart to waste my vote that way - it's obvious that that's a waste of effort". But that’s not the case. In every BC and federal election, huge numbers of voters for major party candidates — Conservative voters in Vancouver, NDP voters in the Interior, Liberal votes across rural Canada — vote for candidates who finish second or third in their riding. This isn't a small-party problem. It affects supporters of every party, in every region, in every election. In fact, in the 2019 federal election, the largest group of disappointed voters were Conservatives — nearly 2.5 million of them voted for a losing Conservative candidate —  more than any other party. 

Unrepresented Voters Everywhere: The result is a sea of disappointed voters and silenced voices. In some parts of BC, a significant share of voters support parties that win few or no seats in their region. Those voters have no representative in the legislature who reflects their views — not because their numbers are small, but because their votes are spread across a number of ridings rather than concentrated enough to be the locally biggest group.

Discouraged Before Voting: This also affects how people think before they even reach the voting booth. Many voters feel they can’t afford to vote honestly — if your preferred candidate has little chance of winning in your riding, voting for them feels like throwing your vote away. So you hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils instead. Larger parties encourage you to think of strategic voting as the savvy way to use your vote, but it's actually a symptom of a warped system that penalizes sincere voting. Why shouldn't you be free to vote your true political convictions?

Congrats! Opposition is Important: If your candidate won a seat, congratulations! You helped elect the candidate you wanted. If they're part of the opposition, their job is genuinely important — scrutinizing government legislation, holding ministers to account, and making sure that views other than the government’s get heard in the chamber. All of that work is crucial to our democracy.

But here’s the catch: under First Past the Post, the opposition is almost always smaller than it should be.

Weak Opposition: Because of the way votes translate into seats, a second-place party that wins a third of the vote or more might end up with far fewer seats. In BC's 2001 election, 42% of the voters chose someone other than a Liberal candidate, but only two non-Liberals were elected, and no party won formal status, so there was technically no opposition party at all. In just about every election, the opposition benches end up being way thinner than the actual distribution of public opinion warrants. That means less scrutiny of the government, fewer questions, less capacity to examine legislation in depth, and a government that faces less challenge than voters actually intended.

Wasted Efforts: Your preferred party also faces other significant challenges. It takes a ton of effort to put candidates up for election, especially in ridings where they have little hope of winning. It's doubly hard because there's no incentive to organize locally — who wants to join a perpetually losing and futile effort? This often leads to lower-quality candidates being recruited — everyone (including themselves) know that they're sacrificial lambs — and no sustained party organization and activity between elections. This is largely a waste of time for everyone involved, rather than being an opportunity to energize our democracy at the grassroots level.

Limited Influence: And when a party wins a majority government — which First Past the Post can deliver on as little as 35–40% of the popular vote — the imbalance becomes stark. The government controls everything: the agenda, the committees, and the calendar. The opposition can speak, but it cannot compel. In those circumstances, a government that chooses to ignore its critics can do so almost entirely, not because public opinion supports that, but because the seat count does.

Trying Their Best, But Handicapped: Your representative is probably doing their best to do the job they were elected to do, but they're forced by our voting system to do it with less backup, support, and resources than you and your fellow voters actually asked for with your votes.

Congratulations! This is the best-case scenario for you. Your candidate won, your party is in power, and the government is going to get on with doing everything you elected them to do. Politics is great, right? Or is it?

Even here, First Past the Post introduces problems that most winning voters never notice — until they do.

Governments are missing voices from the regions they don’t win. No party wins seats everywhere. A governing party with little or no representation from certain parts of the province or country has no one in its caucus or cabinet who really knows those communities — their economic realities, their local priorities, their particular concerns. Those regions are not just underrepresented in the legislature; they're absent from the internal conversations where policy actually gets shaped.

Safe seats (and you) are taken for granted. If your riding reliably votes the same way every election, your party already knows it has your vote. It doesn’t need to earn it, and — because it knows it will keep it — it doesn’t need to maintain a serious presence in your community. Local party organizations in safe ridings are often skeletal. Candidates are sometimes recruited as an afterthought ("a doorpost could be elected in this riding if it had the right party label"). Your voice feeds back into the party machine only weakly, because the party has no structural reason to listen carefully to you. You are counted on, not courted.

Swing ridings get the attention — and the rewards. Because First Past the Post elections are decided in a relatively small number of competitive ridings, parties pour their resources, their leaders’ time, and their most attractive promises into those ridings. Infrastructure announcements, funding commitments, high-profile visits — these flow disproportionately to the ridings that actually determine outcomes. You see this dynamic writ large in the US presidential elections, where the candidates spend all their time in the half dozen swing states. If you don’t live in one of those ridings, you are propping up a system that is principally paying attention to someone other than you.

Even good politicians in vulnerable seats can be swept away. The cruelest irony of First Past the Post is that it can be bad for good politicians — particularly for capable, experienced representatives in swing ridings. A conscientious MP or MLA who has served their community well, worked hard, and maintained the trust of their own supporters can still lose their seat — not because they didn't do their job, but simply because the broader political tide shifted and they happened to be standing in the most vulnerable place. For talented people considering a career in public service, this is a real deterrent to entering politics. And when a shift in the political mood sweeps out a bunch of incumbents in swing ridings, parties can suddenly lose some of their most seasoned and community-connected members, leaving them unnecessarily weakened.

Majority governments can stop listening — even to their own voters. When a party wins a majority, it holds 100% of the legislative power, even if it has the support of much less than a majority of the voting public. This means it doesn't experience ongoing pressure even from its supporters to remain attentive or responsive — the math guarantees four years in office regardless. Governments may enter power with the best of intentions, but the insulation a majority provides is real, and it shows. Governments in this position tend to become distant, arrogant, and dismissive in ways that frustrate even the voters who supported them. The system doesn’t just allow this to happen — it actively creates the conditions that promote such behaviour.