Under most voting systems, all elected representatives have equal voting power in Parliament - that is, each time a vote takes place, all representatives have a vote which counts the same.

However, a number of systems have been proposed over the years, under which the voting power wielded by representatives would differ, according to the numbers of votes which elected them.

In the context of a FPTP election, giving MPs who were elected with more votes (either because they represent a larger constituency, or because they gained a bigger majority) could have the following benefits:

  • Parliamentary constituencies would not have to be the same size and could reflect natural communities - variations in constituency size would be taken account of by differences in MPs' voting power
  • For the same reason, boundary reviews would not have to take place often
  • MPs in safe seats would have an incentive to work in their constituency to maximize their voting power

Some proposed variants of this method would weight MPs' voting power by the number of votes their party gained nationwide. A party that gained a smaller percentage of seats than votes would have that adjusted by giving each of their MPs more voting power, while a party that gained more seats than votes would have their MPs' voting power adjusted downwards. Under such a system, all votes would count more or less equally and parties would have to ensure they appealed to a wider social and geographical demographic than they currently do. 

A variant known as votes-weighted representation is designed to be used with a simplified form of STV. In STV, excess votes for winning candidates are redistributed via second and subsequent preferences among the other candidates. Under VWR, excess votes would not be redistributed but would be accounted for by giving more voting power to winning candidates who accrued more excess votes, and less voting power to candidates to accrued fewer excess votes.

Variants have also been proposed which would enable voters to allocate their vote "dynamically" on specific issues.

LCER believes the principles underlying weighted-votes systems are interesting, but that this family of systems would be difficult to sell to the British public. The campaign for fair votes rests on the simple and fairly unassailable principle that in an election, all votes should be worth the same. There are various ways to ensure that all votes count more or less equally, but it's hard to justify trying to achieve this by means of a system which is designed to give our elected representatives unequal amounts of voting power.