The UK held a referendum on the Parliamentary voting system in 2011, in which the public voted to continue the first-past-the-post system (Alamy) 4 min read19 min Dozens of academics have written to the government to warn that the current voting system risks producing distorted results on an “unprecedented” scale at the next general election. The letter, coordinated with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections and campaign group Make Votes Matter, and shared exclusively with PoliticsHome, says that the first-past-the-post system will struggle to cope with the UK’s emerging multi-party politics. It warns that it will lead to “random and arbitrary” outcomes, which will risk undermining democratic legitimacy and further damaging public trust in politics. The group points to the 2024 general election, in which Labour and the Conservatives together secured their lowest combined vote share in a century. Since then, fragmentation has grown, not subsided, with polls regularly putting the two main parties below 40 per cent, with Reform UK and the Greens surging, and the Liberal Democrats on double digits. Under first-past-the-post, which is used at UK general elections, …