Will Farage claim a 'stolen' election if he gets a large popular vote share but few seats?

In brief…

• Nigel Farage has previously claimed the UK needs a new voting system after his former UKIP party received millions of votes but just one seat in parliament in 2015
• The populist leader could rake in millions of votes on July 4 with Reform UK, but may experience a similar outcome
• This may be why he could claim the election has been stolen, just like Donald Trump did in 2020, The News Agents say.

As you may know, in a UK general election you vote for the local MP in your constituency rather than the leader of a political party.

This means a party can rack up a lot of individual votes without that being reflected as seats won in parliament. This is what is known as the popular vote share.

Nigel Farage himself experienced this in 2015, when UKIP, his former party, got nearly four million votes but secured just one seat in the House of Commons.

So if many individuals from across the UK give Reform their vote, but the party fails to win over entire areas, will he take inspiration from his friend Donald Trump and claim the election has been “stolen”?

Trump notoriously claimed this in the 2020 presidential election, falsely alleging there was widespread voter fraud despite little evidence to prove this.

Here’s what the News Agents think.

“Yes, I can see him [Farage] saying the election has been stolen”, says Jon Sopel, who thinks his supporters will believe him too.

But whether you win the popular vote share or not, you must “play by the rules of the game”, Sopel adds.

And that is why he says Hillary Clinton lost “fair and square” in the 2016 presidential elections despite winning three million more individual votes than Trump.

Farage, however, does not like the rules of the game here in the UK and wants to see them changed, as Emily Maitlis mentions.

So this is why Farage might say the election has been “rigged rather than stolen”, she adds.

And of course Farage wouldn’t like the rules given his electoral misfortune in 2015, Maitlis notes.

Do we need a new voting system?

Surprisingly, this is one area where Farage and the Greens see eye to eye - and that is for the tearing up of the UK’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system.

Instead, the Reform leader has previously called for a system of proportional representation - or PR.

Farage has won two different elections under this type of system in the European elections in 2014 and 2019, as Lewis Goodall points out.

But “famously”, Farage has never won a seat for himself under FPTP.

Goodall argues that in a sense the voting system is “unfair” to smaller parties like Reform or the Greens as it “denudes them of influence in the parliament”.

“It means that we basically take seats away from them that in almost any other electoral system they would get”.

This is what Farage will point to if the election doesn’t go his way, Goodall adds, who also says the Reform leader will also take aim at postal votes.

The News Agent says that Farage has claimed consistently and with little evidence that these votes are subject to mass fraud.

Remind you of someone?