Draft post Title: Funding UK electoral reform: the case for a National Commission

LLM disclosure: I drafted this post with LLM help to compress an existing donor briefing into Forum-appropriate form, then rewrote it into my own voice. Final judgement and any errors are mine.

Epistemic status: I have skin in the game — I’m fundraising for this work. I’ve tried to argue the case as I see it and to flag the weaknesses honestly. I’m posting partly to find funders and partly to have the case pressure-tested by people who evaluate this kind of intervention for a living. If you only have two minutes, the cost-leverage section is the bit I’d most like pushback on.

In Richmond upon Thames this month, the Liberal Democrats won every single one of the council’s 54 seats on 51% of the vote. In Wigan, Reform won 96% of the seats they contested on 46%. In Milton Keynes, the Lib Dems became the biggest party on the council despite coming fourth in vote share. In a Birmingham ward called Tyseley and Hay Mills, a councillor was elected on 20.5% — about eight in ten voters there now have a representative they didn’t choose. Reform gained 1,431 seats nationally; Labour lost roughly a thousand and control of around 35 councils (Left Foot Forward; The Independent).

This is on top of a 2024 general election that was already the most disproportionate in British history — Labour winning 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote, a Gallagher index of 24.4 (fifth worst nationally anywhere in the world). What May 2026 told us is that 2024 wasn’t a freak. It’s the new normal, and on current projections it gets worse before it gets better.

I’m writing this because I think there’s an unusually well-timed and unusually cheap opportunity to do something about it, and because the case may be of interest to EA-adjacent funders for similar reasons that work on US voting reform was. I chaired the Center for Election Science from 2018 to 2025, during which CES won approval voting ballot measures in Fargo and St. Louis.

I honestly didn’t want to get back into voting reform after that. My family and I moved from San Francisco to London after the 2024 US Presidential election — I knew I couldn’t stand another four years of US Politics, and London was meant to be the part of my life where I did something else. Then I started looking at the polling: Reform UK on track to win the next general election on roughly a third of the vote, an outcome very few people actually want and the current system can’t prevent. I’m an engineer by background, and I have a hard time looking at a system about to fail that obviously and just walking away.

The way I actually got involved was, of all places, at my daughter’s swim class. I fell into conversation with another parent and got introduced to Annabel Mullin, who runs Citizen Sector. A few conversations later it was clear that the UK has both more public appetite for reform than I’d realised and a serious campaign already in motion, and that the CES experience of actually getting a voting method changed was usefully transferable. So I’m now helping with fundraising and strategy for Citizen Sector, in coalition with Fair Vote UK and Open Britain, and I’m building proportional.uk as a plain-English explainer of viable alternative systems.

The short version: the near-term ask is not to switch the UK to proportional representation tomorrow. That isn’t on offer and asking for it directly would lose. The near-term ask is to make a National Commission on Electoral Reform politically unavoidable in this Parliament — the same kind of evidence-and-legitimacy process that produced MMP in New Zealand and the proportional designs of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd. The full programme is costed at £3.4M–£5M over 18–24 months. If you’ve ever looked at the budgets of US state-level voting reform campaigns, that should sound suspiciously cheap, and the rest of this post is mostly an attempt to explain why it really is.

If you’d like to skip ahead to how to engage, it’s at the bottom.

Why a commission, not a referendum

A National Commission on Electoral Reform would be an independent panel of citizens and experts charged with asking whether First Past the Post is still fit for purpose and, if not, what should replace it. The commission would recommend; Parliament would decide.

Why a commission rather than a straight push for PR or another referendum? Because the UK already ran the experiment. The 2011 Alternative Vote referendum was held with essentially no public evidence process behind it, and it lost decisively. The reforms that have actually moved democracies — New Zealand to MMP, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd — all came through commissions first and votes afterwards. The commission builds the legitimacy that any later system change requires.

A commission also defuses what would otherwise be the most fractious question in the room: which system to switch to. Most of the UK reform sector has signed the Good Systems Agreement, which delegates the specific-system choice to the commission itself and aligns the coalition on a shared principle: any genuinely proportional system would be a substantial improvement on the status quo. From my time at CES I’ve seen first-hand how much energy reform movements can burn arguing approval voting versus ranked choice versus STV — getting that argument off the critical path until after a commission exists is itself a meaningful coalition win.

The mechanism is also already on the shelf and ready to use. The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections has published draft terms of reference. Open Britain’s NCER petition has over 10,000 signatures. The Representation of the People Bill is live in Parliament (second reading 2 March 2026) — the first major UK elections bill in over a decade. That Bill is the obvious vehicle. It doesn’t currently include electoral system reform, but it could, and we have a network established already to get it introduced in the House of Lords. Public pressure is what we need to have the Commons to keep it in the bill.

Why now

Two things are true at the same time now that weren’t before.

Public support is at a record. The British Social Attitudes survey puts support for PR at 60%, the highest it’s ever been. Our own 1,000-voter survey puts it at 70%, with the support cutting cleanly across party, age, region, and class. The interesting finding for funders worried about polarisation: even Reform voters back fairness-framed messaging. Ask “Labour won a third of the votes but two-thirds of the seats — how is that fair?” and Reform voters are with you. The fairness frame works almost universally, which means a single national message strategy is viable without expensive demographic segmentation.

The second thing is Labour’s electoral arithmetic. The most recent MRP polling (Electoral Calculus / PLMR, April 2026) has Reform UK on track to lead the next government — most likely in a Reform–Conservative coalition with Farage as Prime Minister — on a 24% vote share, with Labour collapsing from 412 seats to 86 on 17% of the vote. Reform briefly peaked at an outright majority on 31% in January 2026’s polling; their share has softened a little since (partly to a new party further right of them), but the underlying dynamic — a fragmented five-party electorate producing seat distributions wildly disconnected from vote shares — has if anything become more pronounced. Whatever you think of either party, a government formed on a quarter of the vote is not a stable democratic outcome, and a Labour party staring down 86 seats has strong rational self-interest in changing the rules before those rules destroy it. A Reform–Conservative government will have no incentive whatsoever to fix the system that handed it power.

The cost-leverage case, versus the US

This is the part of the case I’d most like people to push back on, because it’s the part I think is most unusual.

If you’ve funded US voting reform, you know the prices. Massachusetts Question 2 (RCV, 2020) cost roughly $10M and lost. Alaska’s RCV-plus-top-four-primary campaign cost $6.8M and won one state. Maine’s RCV measure cost roughly $2M and won one state. These are the prices because every US state reform is essentially a constitutional-amendment-grade fight, run via ballot initiative, against opposition infrastructure that’s had decades to learn how to kill them — and then the fight has to be re-run in every other state, one at a time.

The UK is structurally a different shape of problem:

• Reform happens through ordinary national legislation. There is no state-by-state ballot-initiative infrastructure to build or to fight through.
• No constitutional amendment is required.
• Public opinion is already at 60% before any campaign starts. US reform campaigns typically start below majority and have to move opinion before they can move legislation.
• The commission model has working precedent in NZ, Scotland, and Wales.
• A 50-organisation civil society coalition is already coordinated around the live legislation.

The full programme to make NCER politically unavoidable is costed at £3.4M–£5M over 18–24 months. The current Phase 2 (validated message testing, creative development, supporter pipeline) is £58k, of which £45.5k is already committed and underway. So very roughly: £4M here funds a national institutional shift in the world’s sixth-largest economy. In the US, the same money funds one state campaign — and, on the historical track record, often loses it.

The most important place I think the argument is fragile is below, in its own section.

The team

The campaign is being run by people who are inside the live legislative process this work targets, not adjacent to it.

Dr Annabel Mullin (Director, Citizen Sector) leads policy and communications at Elect Her, where she co-leads the coalition of women’s organisations amending the same Bill. She holds a doctorate from UCL (2024, ESRC-funded quantitative longitudinal research), co-founded Stand for Something and Advance Together, and ran the digital-first Kensington campaign that turned a safe Conservative seat into a marginal — direct, painful experience of what FPTP does to new political entrants.

Kyle Taylor (Founder & Executive Director, Fair Vote UK) chairs the 50-organisation civil society coalition on the Representation of the People Bill, was founding secretariat of the APPG for Fair Elections, holds an MSc in survey design and quantitative methods, and previously served as Chief of Staff to a UK Minister of State for Justice. He led civil society’s response to Cambridge Analytica and the EU referendum investigations and is the author of the Little Black Book series on data, democracy, social media, and AI.

Felix Sargent (Advisor, fundraising & US-context strategy — and the author of this post). I chaired the Center for Election Science from 2018 to 2025, when CES won approval voting ballot measures in Fargo and St. Louis — the closest US analog to what Citizen Sector is trying to do at national scale in the UK. I’m also building proportional.uk as a public explainer of viable alternative voting systems to help people visualize what a post-FPTP UK could look like.

Where this could fail

A few failure modes I take seriously, in roughly descending order of how much they worry me:

Counterfactual risk: NCER happens without us. It’s possible the commission gets onto the agenda without our influence campaign — through Lords amendments, cross-party pressure on the Bill, or a different shock event entirely. If we’re in that world, the marginal value of the £4M is smaller than the headline figure suggests. I don’t think it’s the modal outcome: the Bill currently excludes electoral system reform, and the legislative window for adding it closes without sustained public pressure on the Commons. But I’d put the probability at maybe 20–30%, and it should be priced into any funding decision.

Execution risk: the creative doesn’t land. Phase 2 (£58k of message testing and live-environment ad work) is structured precisely to surface this. If the messages don’t move supporters and donors in testing, we report that to funders and don’t proceed to Phase 3. That’s the design working correctly — test-then-scale, not scale-on-faith — but it does mean some Phase 2 spend can end up being us learning we don’t yet have a winning message at scale.

Attention risk: the news cycle drowns us out. UK politics is currently extremely volatile. The Burnham/Starmer leadership noise is consuming significant political bandwidth, and a serious Labour leadership contest (or change of PM) could absorb attention NCER needs. Constituency-level pressure doesn’t depend on national headlines, which mitigates this, but it doesn’t eliminate it. There’s also an opposite-sign version: a Labour leadership shock could create an opening if a new leader is looking for distinctive reform policy. Net: uncertain, and outside our control.

Implementation risk: a commission whose report Parliament ignores. Even if NCER is established, a Labour government could decide acting on the recommendations is too politically risky and run out the clock. Labour’s electoral arithmetic pushes against this (staring down 86 seats makes inaction more costly), but the probability is meaningfully above zero.

Cost-leverage comparison qualifier. The US-vs-UK cost contrast above isn’t quite apples-to-apples. US state-level RCV is system change on the ground; what we’re funding here is the political pressure to open the process that could later lead to system change. £4M doesn’t on its own complete the path from “commission established” to “FPTP replaced”. I still think the leverage argument holds — the realistic alternative is funding individual US state campaigns at $6–10M each, with similar conditional uncertainty about whether the won state moves the national needle — but a careful comparison should weight the difference.

If you’ve evaluated this kind of conditional, multi-step intervention before, the pressure-test I’d most value is on the joint probability that (a) the £4M moves NCER from “possible” to “happens”, and (b) NCER moves the UK from “stuck” to “actually changes the system”. I think the joint probability is high enough to fund. I’d like to be wrong on the downside if I am.

What I’m looking for

If any of this is potentially interesting, I’d most like to hear from people who:

• have funded electoral reform, institutional reform, or democracy work before and have views on how to evaluate this kind of opportunity
• can pressure-test the case — particularly the cost-leverage argument, which is the load-bearing claim and the one I’d most like to either firm up or back down on
• know donors or foundations who might take an interest
• would be open to a 30-minute call or to reading the full donor briefing

You can DM me here or email felix@felixsargent.com, or reach Kyle (kyle@fairvote.uk) or Annabel (annabel@citizensector.org) directly. I’m happy to share the full briefing or to have a longer conversation.

Pushback in the comments is genuinely welcome — including pushback on the framing of this post itself.