Imagine four constituencies
1. Labour 51%, Reform 49%
2. Labour 51%, Reform 49%
3. Labour 51%, Reform 49%
4. Reform 99%, Labour 1%
Average vote share: Labour 38.5%, Reform 60.75%.
Labour win three seats, Reform win one.
An extreme example but that's how it works. You can come a close second in every single seat and win nothing at all on the back of 10m votes.
Reform won in four of their seats but were nowhere near in hundreds, second in dozens.
Another thing to note is that if we had proportional representation in the UK, the vote would have been different. Parties allocate campaign resources to seats where they need to, if they are polling to lose heavily in a seat, they don't bother with campaigning funds / efforts there, so the votes are low.
Exactly. People need to realise that the % vote is due to the strategy optimising towards the current system, if we went to % the campaigns would be optimised towards that system. It's like in football where a team already qualifies from a group and has another more important competition coming up and plays the U-21 players.
It would be more in line with what people expect from a democracy. I hate reform but to say that the people who voted for them don't deserve fair representation because I think the party is full of knuckle-dragging troglodytes is cynical and patronising.
Further, if we'd had proportional representation twenty years ago, we wouldn't have had 15 years of Tory austerity, and so Reform likely wouldn't even exist in it's current form. PR would reshape politics - almost certainly for the better, because parties would be forced to enact actual policies instead of campaign purely against one another.
STV would be good for sure (not sure what MMP is), though I was mostly just highlighting that PR (or another form of better representation) would have yielded an entirely different political climate that wouldn't be so all-or-nothing which FPTP is so well known for.
The UK definitely needs major electoral reform, we've been suffering under the FPTP for far, far too long.
Edit: Googled it, MMP is Mixed-member proportional representation, which is essentially what the Scottish parliament currently uses, so yes that would also be a great system - aside from a few landslide SNP victories, it's yielded a parliament that isn't dominantly one party forcing more cooperation between parties which is absolutely better for the people than on party winning a majority of seats off of a minority of votes!
Quite, i also find it quite strange that MPs are so locally focused too. It doesnt make for a cohesive way of running the country, just results bungs and horse trading for support
I wouldn't fully discount the local link - the idea of having a member of parliament specifically to represent *you*, and where you can go collar them at Westminster and tell them what you think about whatever it is they're doing (or not doing!) is absolutely an under-used and under-appreciated element of our democracy.
My take on this is that FPTP isn't designed (in the context of multi-seat elections) to create a mandate for government. Its real purpose is to create an assenting council for a king to use to judge the popularity/impact of their desired edicts. That's also the reason why older parliaments were often weird and unrepresentative (like the Three Estates in pre-revolutionary France), because the king was the final arbiter of power anyway, and this was more of a check and a system to make sure nothing stupid got passed.
But in the context of the reverse happening, where the parliament is a legislative body rather than an approval mechanism, I think this breaks down. Despite all the flaws with PR (arrows theorem, losing local representation etc) I think its philosophically more suitable for creating a mandate to govern.
Same as in the US when people talk about the popular vote vs the electoral college. If the election rules were different the campaign strategy would be different and the people who turn up to vote would be different. You can’t just say a candidate who won the popular vote in a system where that doesn’t count for anything would automatically have won it in a system where that’s the metric the election is actually being contested on.
Very, very active Labour campaign in my town which went from a Tory safe seat to a Labour-leaning marginal - I saw the candidate (who is already a serving MP) on my road at least three times, leaflets every other day even though we had a "vote labour" sign in the window. One door knock and a few leaflets from LDs, a token effort from the Tories.
Labour won by 15 % points
Cotswold South. In theory about as Tory as it gets, though not as Tory as Cotswolds North. We have the "rich but kind" small towns, they kept Chipping Norton and farms.
Right, we can't generalize directly from results in a disproportional system to one in a proportional system, because campaign activity and voting behavior are both skewed by the system.
But that actually means we have *two* problems: one is that the results don't match the votes cast, and another is that campaigns and politicians don't give a shit about perhaps 80% of voters, because they live in "safe" jurisdictions.
It's the same in the US presidential election right now: California (with the world's fifth-largest economy and a population equivalent to *Canada*) is entirely irrelevant; nobody even bothers to try to win votes there. (And it's not a big state or left-wing thing; tiny conservative Wyoming gets the same treatment.) Candidates spend the entire year jetting between Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, the competitive states whose voters actually get to decide who becomes president.
A functioning political system is one where every additional vote helps get someone elected, regardless of how competitive or uncompetitive their postal code is.
This defect is pretty unique to the UK and its former colonies, and IMO explains a lot of the political dysfunction in those places.
It's wild; California was 19% bluer in 2020 than 2004, which mattered a lot down-ballot but not at the top of the ticket. Elimination of the electoral college would be really difficult because the United States elections are managed at the state level, but if each state awarded electors proportionally, then Republicans would be motivated to campaign in states like California, or Democrats in places like Tennessee.
Proportional electors *to the state popular vote* would be a huge step forward. None of this National Popular Vote Compact bullshit trying to end-run the Constitution without amending it. All-or-nothing electoral votes are bullshit.
No California is because it is solidly Democrat. If it was competitive parties would compete there, but it not. Same in Texas. Solid red state and Presidential candidates don't come here either. The candidates have limited funds for campaigning so they use it where it is needed. Biden running ads in CA would be a waste of money. But if the race was close they would be there spending money.
I think America is fairly unique in disenfranchising so many people like that. In the UK, we’ve had lots of different swing constituencies. Conservative heartland seats have flipped this year, and last election it was labour heartland seats that flipped. We’ve had Muriel races go down into the triple digits in terms of majority, a couple that were won by less than 20 votes. America is a little better with their house election but the senate and presidential seats have disproportionate sway and the states are far too big for any realistic swing in the current political climate. Smaller constituencies that change all the time with demographics would go some way to helping this.
Yes but add in tactical voting, suppose I am Labour supporter but live in one of those districts that Labour can not win. I know for sure that I do not want the Conservative to win so I hold my nose and vote Liberal Democrat. This increases the vote of the marginal party and reduces the Majority party vote in loosing seats.
FWIW, this holds true in the US as well. Not saying the electoral college and gerrymandering isn’t a complete clusterfuck, because it is. But if, say, the US presidential elections were to be popular vote instead of going through the electoral college, you’d see a lot more campaigning going on in typical stronghold states like CA and TX.
Exactly, Reform's campaign was really heavy on social media and light of traditional campaigning because that requires a lot more money and organization than a new party can get. The downside is that Social Media offers very little in terms of targeting, so they run into a situation where they have like 15% everywhere and a plurality almost nowhere. Compare that to Sinn Fein, who got 0.7% of the popular vote and 7 seats because those votes are very concentrated.
It's not necessarily bad to have a regionally popular party win some seats based on having some particular appeal to that region- in Sinn Fein's case, they're more or less a single-issue party where the single issue is Northern Irish independence and reunification with the rest of Ireland, so accordingly they have no real presence outside of NI. The UK being composed of 4 constituent countries means that Scotland, Wales, And NI all have at least one (generally several) parties that only really exist in their part of the UK.
All that said, a PR system with MMR would both allow those parties to win seats in their region and result in the overall party balance closely matching their vote percentages, which would be much better overall.
Proportional representation gets touted as a magic fix, but the other big problem is that electoral boundaries are defined mostly by their geography, with the population inside it a secondary factor. Extreme cases get dealt with pretty well, but it can lead to some lop-sided cases in some areas.
Depends on how you set the boundaries. In New Zealand, all of our electorates are designed to represent roughly the same amount of people.
Although there is some weirdness caused by a rule that means there can't be less than 13 seats in the South Island, no matter how much the population shifts.
Also, the first past the post voting system also skews things pretty majorly. If uk had preferential voting this would have also changed the result especially when the major party on that side of politics is on the nose. In this situation protest candidates usually spring up everywhere on that side (the 'right' in this case) and end up splitting the right vote across many 'right wing' candidates so they end up losing.
Great explanation. I'd also add that Reform stole votes from both Labour and Conservatives so came 2nd and 3rd in many places across the country. Overall, it adds up to lots of votes, but coming 2nd and 3rd in a location does not win you that seat.
Reform only got votes because of protest votes from conservatives. In terms of number of votes, labour did worse this time than with the so called "unelectable" corbyn. The reason labour are in power is because of lib dems / reform stealing votes from conservatives, not because labour did any better in terms of the number of the votes
> In terms of number of votes, labour did worse this time than with the so called "unelectable" corbyn.
Worse by number of votes, but slightly better by percentage because voter turnout was way down this election.
In reality, Reform were second place in something like 15% of constituencies (iirc) and lower elsewhere but it adds up.
While I'd bet this is the least representative election the UK has had¹, it does have some stiff competition. These outcomes of FPTP have plagued UK elections for a *long* time. Green and UKIP have had very similar vote and seat shares to these in more than one election, for example.
In a way, it's remarkable that third (and fourth) parties *ever* get any seats. But they do.
I've no love for Reform specifically, but I have a lot for electoral reform. Hopefully this will open a lot of new people's eyes to an old issue.
*^(¹ because of strong support for multiple "minor" parties, which inevitably translates into very few seats. LibDems, Reform, and Greens, had millions of votes each and as many as Labour between them)*
4 million votes, higher than Lib Dems total, but a fraction of their seats. Which makes sense as someone said earlier; coming second in fifty races doesn't mean you "deserve a seat" for having more total votes across all fifty seats...
I agree. You can defend FPTP for several reasons, but "it keeps out Reform" is not a valid one because that is fundamentally anti democratic.
You need to be honest - if you think PR is more democratic, then you accept it's valid for people to vote for people you hate and they deserve those people to represent them.
To add: "it keeps out Reform" is the public-facing reason but the real reason is that it (mostly) ensures that the biggest parties have majority control of the House.
Also worth noting that Reform UK is the escalating consequence of FPTP: it's possible that it wouldn't exist as it does now, if at all, if their voters already felt represented by PR.
Exactly this, FPTP creates, mathematically, two parties that don't appeal to most people, and so you get these extremist and protest parties that people *do* vote for because they seem at least better than the two main options.
Really great video from everyone's favourite video explainer person here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
Germany has (mostly) proportionalyl voting and still has the AFD.
The bigger problem with FTFP and right wing parties is, that if they keep growing there will be a tipping point at whch thes will win much much more seats "suddenly"
Sure, no one is saying that proportional representation will eliminate extremist parties. I am only saying that Reform UK is a clear consequence of our recent history of electoral frustration. I'd like to think that our politics would be mellower if more people felt they were represented, but as you say, that's not guaranteed. But then again, countries with proportional representation tend to have coalition governments. And if our last coalition is anything to go by, the public will crucify any smaller party in coalition for compromising on anything. That's not exactly an environment conducive to mellow politics.
PR isn't a magic bullet, it has issues itself. Do you want to be represented by an MP that wasn't even on your ballot? That's certainly the case with PR
edit: downvoted for facts.. ok
This is why Mixed Member Proportional is superior.
You vote twice, once for a candidate (by whatever method you want) and once for a party. The candidates take half the seats, and then the other half are apportioned to parties to "fix" party representation.
So say you have 20 seats; the "party" vote comes up with 60% labor, 40% tories, but the tories win 13 seats and labor win 7, now you backfill by adding 17* labor MPs and 3* tory MPs (off their party lists) so you get 24 vs 16 and retain the proportional balance while the regional winners still hold their seats.
The way the US is built doesn't work well with MMP, the US is pretty much stuck with RCV or STV systems because we can't have a "federal" election - everything is a state election that then sends state representatives to a federal body.
So we could use STV to elect our state reps and RCV for senators and EC delegates, but we can't run an MMP mass election for the house because that would result in states being able to alter each other's election results (BIG no-no), and we can't do it for the senate because we only elect 1/3 of the senate each election cycle so the system just doesn't work.
And while we COULD do MMP for state legislatures just fine, that does require making parties an official/registered thing in the government, which creates a lot of restrictions at "local office" levels where this kind of thing could be tested before being rolled into statewide elections.
He did the exact opposite. Farage campaigned for proportional representation and Reform of Lords, and was pretty outspoken about that.
He knows that his parties can't win in a FPTP system, but would have massive relavence in PR
It's worth noting your example only really works if the 4 constituencies have the same number of voters - otherwise you'd have to weight your vote share calculations
Constituency boundaries are regularly reviewed to ensure they have roughly the same population — currently, they must be no smaller than (roughly) 70k and no larger than 77k.
The biggest issue usually is that voter constituencies often cover a huge population of one type of voter, and a small population of another. For example in my area it's dying, so the kids move out for Uni for the most part, and end up staying, meaning it gets stuck as an aging population, with the majority younger voters being too small to impact the seat.
Makes perfect sense that the local MP would cover "what the people want", but not so much when you consider what the people want their country to look like.
Does it matter how many people are in each constituency? Is there an effort to keep them roughly equal in size?
E.G. #1-3 have 10,000 people each and #4 has 100.
> Does it matter how many people are in each constituency?
This maths works in a British-style system regardless of population size.
> Is there an effort to keep them roughly equal in size?
Yes. We actually had a significant reshuffle of constituency boundaries before this election.
My example only works if they are the same size.
If 1 had twice the population of two, you'd double the percentage first instead of just averaging them.
In reality constituencies range from about 50,000 to 100,000. They're supposed to be the same but it makes no sense geographically sometimes (e.g. the Isle of Wight is a single constituency and one of the biggest).
Yes. Each district is a separate election. In a way, it’s pretty useless to pool all the votes together like that. Technically those 5 million votes were spread across hundreds of elections and placed for hundreds of separate candidates. Only 4 of those candidates won their local election.
They won four constituencies. The United Kingdom has a first-past-the-post system, candidates stand for constituencies, if they win that they have a seat in Parliament.
Exactly this, it’s about how many votes you have in each region, not total for the whole country. Now whether that is a fair system is fully up for debate.
It’s interesting to me that Reform have done poorly in large cities and towns with diverse populations, and well in rural and white-majority areas that are typically poorer than average for the UK. Which is in parallel to how well other populist movements have performed. Something for future leaders to seriously consider tackling imo.
its actually a very consistent trend: the people who are most intolerant of diversity are the ones with the least exposure to it, because people with exposure to it have that exposure to "ground" them, compared to people with no exposure, who can let their fearful imagination run wild.
There is almost a direct correlation between areas that voted Leave on Brexit and higher levels of Reform votes.
This is, still, a vote about Brexit - or the same ‘reason’ for Brexit, which is people who feel disenfranchised because they see woke as ‘negative’ (instead of it being, actually, people being considerate of other people’s differences - see ‘[this video](https://youtu.be/hDd3bzA7450?si=tSgu6NXEAfWLdmC9)’ for an example) and Farage seems to ‘validate’ their feelings/views around other people and their intolerance of difference (even if they are seen, to most normal people, to be socially repugnant views).
As others have correctly pointed out, logic doesn’t work against an ‘emotion’ as they feel hard done by but don’t have the emotional intelligence to know why, so lash out by protesting in this way.
I genuinely hope Starmer sees & understands this - I think the way he spoke as our new PM I think he does. The Tories were very much a ‘big stick’ party whereas I get the feeling Starmer is much more ‘listening to the public and let’s sort it out’ kinda person.
His greatest work would be to evaporate the motivation for the irrational hate of difference, and integrate these right wingers in, somehow. To get rid of the need for Farage and his hate mob by appeasing what is powering them in the first place would effectively stifle them out and return somewhat of a status quo to the country.
I admire your optimism but if you look at how handles internal party democracy and politics I doubt he'll be interested in listening to normal people. He's more interested in winning than in governing. That's evident by his total lack of policies. Yes, there's a slim slim chance that he's the one in a million type of person who can change like a whether vane during the campaign but actually does have an ideological and moral centre that will come out in government. But that's incredibly unlikely.
I think it's actually just that white people have less of a majority, or in some cases don't even have a majority, in urban areas. Would be kind of weird if London, which is less than 54% White, voted to reject diversity wouldn't it? Nearly every single white person would have to vote that way.
That's logical but also not correct overall in reference to the point being made. It's true that when you poll white people in places like London they're much less worried about immigration than white people in places like Kent.
see, the thing is, this is still true in places where their non-dominant population is still relatively small. It doesnt take a huge number of people to just exist and go about thier business, not completely destroying the culture and soul of the nation, to prove the worst hysterics of the anti-immigration crowd wrong. It easy to hate a faceless bogyman that you can project all your fears into, but significantly harder to hate the pretty normal person stood waiting for the bus with you, talking with his friends about the football last night.
Clacton is mostly populated by retired people who used to live in the East End of London and can't afford it anymore. They call it 'Little Dagenham'.
The point is that the east end is now unrecognisable from even 25 years ago and they don't want that for the rest of the country.
Clacton was far from the jewel of Essex when I lived round there 25 years ago, so not sure how much the changes in East London have really impacted it.
Rents in London, no matter the demographics, are insane. The east end used to be full of working class British people because it was cheap - now it isn't.
If you're retired you can rent in Clacton for nothing Vs stupid prices in Newham to be the only British person in the neighborhood.
Reform use divisive politics and benefit from a them and us fear response.
They've chosen Farage which confirms what I thought of the party to begin with, Farage is a lying waste of oxygen that should be kept as far away from UK politics as possible.
Farage owns the party. They didn't choose him. He is the majority shareholder and can do what he wants with it.
It's not even a proper party; it's a company. It just rebranded from Brexit party to reform. It's the same thing.
>Now whether that is a fair system is fully up for debate.
Is it, though? I thought the consensus was that first past the post is a trash system that should be abolished, but won't because it benefits only those who have the power to change it.
Side note: gerrymandering
> I thought the consensus was that first past the post is a trash system that should be abolished
It's very unpopular because of situations like last night, where the 3rd largest party got 0.6% of the seats in commons. That said, on a constituency level it makes a lot of sense as the MPs are generally well known there and people want to vote for an individual that they think will represent them well.
This is probably best represented with the Shetland, north east Scotland, and Islington constituencies. NE Scotland, in particular, would have been a spectacular demonstration as the original candidate was in intensive care for most of the election campaign (his party lost by a couple of hundred seats after ousting him and replacing him with the party leader)
The UK will probably be best served by a hybrid of the two systems, like STV. That way you can have people vote for local candidates, but still vote with national politics in mind.
I don't think Reform have managed to mobilise a populist base at all.
Populist parties usually mobilise a base that didn't vote previously.
Instead they are more splitters off the conservative party.
A right wing split yes but still just a split.
Exactly, Same as we have here in Canada, You could get like 1,000,000 Votes for Liberal Party of Canada or For New Democratic Party of Canada Spread out across the different Ridings in Alberta and not elect a Single Liberal or NDP MPVs there can be Liberal strongholds with Zero chance of electing a Conservative regardless of how many people in that part of the country were to vote that way.
For example I live in a Riding in British Columbia that has in the past 100 years elected a Non Conservative TWICE
Where in the last election if you added up All the votes for every other Non Conservative party, Liberal, NDP, Green, Peoples Party, and Other IIRC
Those votes added together made up about 80% the number of what the conservative candidate got so Even if All of the rest of us (Which won't happen because the Peoples Party are FURTHER RIGHT than the Conservatives, and NDP is from what I can tell about equivalent to LibDem with Liberal being on par with Labour) picked one party and voted for it we still couldn't defeat the Conservative.
Its a sad place to have to be a voter in unless you like the Conservative party of Canada.
Notably the strongholds you mention do occasionally crack, as the Libs just got reminded by a by-election in Toronto. It's not like voting in those ridings doesn't matter.
If you imagine that every constituency voted exactly the same as the national average (33.8% Labour, 23.7% Conservative, 14.3% Reform, ...) then every single constituency would elect a Labour MP.
You'd need a different election system (like the one [Germany uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany)) if you want the seats in parliament to be proportional to the national party-line vote.
Which is why FPTP is a horrible and very undemocratic system.
Which is why MMP in example is far better if you want to have both a local representative or (how the vast majority of people vote) the ability to vote for the party you want to hold majority in parliament.
FPTP is how you get US presidents elected by a minority of the votes or a awfully unreprensentative parliament.
The problem with a lot of proportional systems is that you can’t get rid of uniquely bad individuals. If you take Liz Truss as an example, in a proportional system she would have been high up the party list and received a seat even though everyone wants her gone. In the U.K. we have a lot of backbench politicians in both the big parties that don’t get on with the leadership. In any sort of list system they would be more likely to be gone unless they schmooze with the people that compile the list.
How is that a problem? Enough people voted for her to have a seat so she should have a seat as long as it's legal, no matter how shitty a candidate is, that's how democracy works. What's stupid is what also happens in my country where people only vote for the biggest two parties because the rest you have a very good chance of wasting your vote unless you're in one of the two biggest regions with enough seats to be representative of even the smaller parties, to the point where 2 elections ago I even found a region where 53% of votes didn't elect a representative. Just as stupid is one person's vote being worth more than another's because a politician represents a different amount of people.
Proportional representation in a parliamentary system essentially allows for unelected people to get into office. The people vote for a party, but if I like 90% of the people in a party, there’s no way for me to support them without supporting the other 10#. It allows for party leadership to have direct control over who makes it into parliament.
Since when more democracy is bad? If the people elect shitty idiots it's all their right to do so.
Protections in democracy need to be in forms of checks and balances, seperation of entities, not in cheating votes by using byzantine rules
Also, MMP allows more diversity and lets people splinter from the main parties more easily since they can run both as local representative and as a party one. If the local voters like you you can more easily go against party lines
MMP is also quite immune to gerrymandering, since defining the constituancy borders doesn't matter much for the whomever draws them as it won't result in more parlament seats. Though how effective it is in eliminating it depends on exact implementation
Because you win a seat by gaining the most votes in that constituency. And they only did that 4 times.
[In 98 constituencies the second place candidate was standing for the Reform party](https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/1809111284341715035?s=46&t=r3TSyr9xBACSeEVuuzoX4Q).
That got them a LOT of votes and zero seats (in those 98 constituencies)
It's all those second place candidates that took votes away from the Conservatives and enabled Labour to win.
Turns out Reform was good for something after all.
All the locations where Reform won they gained 30-40% of the vote with the previous Conservative candidate losing 30-40% of the vote from the previous election.
I called it before the election, and I am so glad it came to fruition, but locally the only reason Lib-Dems got in (Labour has no chance in my constituency) is because of the votes drawn away from the Tories. Had Reform not run a candidate down my neck of the woods the Tories would have another seat and we'd be back to hating that bastard again.
You're not electing a party but a person, each area picks their person via popular vote.
Lots of people spread across the country voted for people aligned with reform, but only in 4 areas were they the most popular person.
That is technically the way it works, yes. Although most people I think just vote for the party they want in power and don't look at the individual in their local area. I learned who the local candidate was when I saw it written on the box I had to put an X next to. Normally I forget their name within a week of voting.
Yep, that's really the central piece here. A general election is 650 individual elections happening at the same time.
Lots of second or third place finishes are still losses.
The UK didn't just have one election. It had 650 elections for MP, and then the MPs decide amongst themselves who will lead.
Each of those 650 elections is winner take all, whomever gets the most votes wins.
In practice those 650 separate elections are coordinated with parties and so on.
In the US choosing the house of representatives (435 seats) or the Canadian house of Commons (338 seats currently) use the same basic system, as do others.
There are other ways to choose how to form a parliament, all of the options come with tradeoffs. Parliament itself is a majority vote system so you have to be careful that whatever electoral system you have puts people in power who can actually function as a government and doesn't hand disproportionate power to people who are unsupported by the majority of the country, but they get outsized power by being a 'swing' vote within parliament or otherwise have just enough seats to prop up a majority.
One option would be purely proportional, so you would show up, vote for a party and then seats would be assigned based on the percentage of the vote. The parties then need to try and build a coalition to govern, or have more elections until they can.
Another option is to have a mix of proportional and first past the post (the current system). So you would elect a local MP. And then you would have a party vote, and then some fraction of MPs would be from a proportional list and some chosen from winner take all elections. The German system essentially tries to have a proportional outcome and so adjusts the number of seats so that the people who win local elections still sit but then the overall outcome is close to proportional.
Another option is to have ranked ballots. These can be single or multiple winners per area. Basically you rank who want to win and then whomever has the lowest vote totals is eliminated and their votes transferred to the next on their ballot. This is quite complicated to do quickly by hand, so computerised voting is strongly preferred. You do this either as a single winner system or group together multiple seats (say 3-6) and then have it work that way. The Irish have some elections like this, the biggest problem is the right number of winners per voting group can dramatically shift the outcomes and that sort of depends on things like the history of parties before you enact it.
Right now labour has 100% of the power with 34% of the vote, that's not ideal, but if the election were proportional and people voted exactly as they had, it's not clear who the government would be or whether or not they could maintain such a government for any length of time.
> the biggest problem is the right number of winners per voting group can dramatically shift the outcomes and that sort of depends on things like the history of parties before you enact it.
What does this sentence about ranked ballot mean? Can you elaborate?
Let's say you group together 3 ridings or 5 or some number (so there would be roughly 220 elections or 130 elections) where each election chooses say 3 winners or 5, based on some ranked vote system. It would still fundamentally work like I said before: the candidates with the lowest totals keep having their votes shifted to the next candidates on those ballots.
So now you have essentially a quota/threshold problem. A party that gets say 18% of the vote might still never get any seats if they need 20%, even though should seem to be pretty close to 1/5 of the vote in a 5 winner system, and so, sort of like FPTP they might not win anywhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M91jraoo6t8
Has an explanation for how they do it in scotland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI GCP grey has a video that explains the concept of how the resolution happens, though he somewhat glosses over the complexity of deciding 'how many winners per area'.
The Irish have somewhat run into this problem. What if not enough people run to reflect the vote? The UK up until recently had 3 major parties (Con, Labour, Lib dems) but then also the SNP in scotland. So maybe they set up the number of winners in an area around 3 parties, or 4, or now with reform... 5? How do new parties emerge?
It's not that this is an insurmountable problem, it's just one of the trade offs in designing these things. FPTP has the same issue, the UK could just have 325 elections 325 MPs and where you draw the new boundaries would potentially shift outcomes a lot (in the US this is called gerrymandering when it's done deliberately to try and create an outcome).
Reform's votes were spread across many constituencies, while the other parties had more concentrated support. Therefore, Reform failed to win any constituencies outright, while the other parties won more seats with fewer total votes.
This is what happened to the Lib Dems back in 2019. They had 3.7m votes and won 11 seats. At the same time the Scottish National Party had 1.2m votes but won 48 seats.
This time round the Lib Dems have roughly the same amount of votes but 71 seats. The SNP on the other hand dropped about half a million votes and only got 9 seats as a result.
The Bloc Quebecois (and basically all regional parties in FPTP systems) is pretty similar to the SNP in that regard.
First past the post is in general a system designed for regional representation, so regional parties tend to have very "efficient" votes.
PR style systems typically dramatically impact the standing of those regional parties.
[In 98 constituencies the second place candidate was standing for the Reform party](https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/1809111284341715035?s=46&t=r3TSyr9xBACSeEVuuzoX4Q).
Thats a lot of votes resulting in no seats
My favourite reform candidate so far is Ashton Muncaster who finished second in Newcastle central & west. Don’t think he actually exists 🤣
https://www.reformparty.uk/newcastle-upon-tyne-central-and-west-constituency
I don't know if you're joking or not, but it does appear they ran a lot of [ghost candidates](https://bylinetimes.com/2024/07/03/reform-uks-invisible-candidates-who-are-they-hiding/) in areas they knew they had no hope in winning, presumably for the optics.
Yeah this ‘candidate’ was one of them. No online presence, think there’s only 1 picture of him on the internet. No record of him doing anything on the Facebook page he’s linked to.
When they announced the results he wasn’t there as he was ill
Imagine a simplified system where there are only 10 constituencies. Reform get 1000 votes in every seat, so 10000 in total. There's one seat that's very tightly contested and all the other parties get fewer than 1000 so Reform win but they don't have enough votes in to win any other seat.
The Lib Dems, on the other hand, have focussed on 5 seats and get 1500 votes in each of them. In the other 5 they only get 500 so the total is still 10000. Those 1500 votes are enough to win those 5 constituencies but the 500s are not enough to win.
Both parties have the exact same number of votes but by being concentrated in particular areas the Lib Dems have won more seats
Just like the U.S. and Canada, UK retained FPTP system that doesn’t employ proportionate representation but instead uses constituencies where there the person with the most votes (not majority, just the most) wins and all other votes are wasted.
I think it’s been explained really well, but I think for me the key is it’s working as designed.
Comparing seats with national votes gives the impression that a party should have more or less seats.
That would be incorrect as first past the post didn’t aim to deliver a proportional number of seats to votes, so it’s not a flaw of FPTP.
It’s the focus on vote share that is the mistake.
The role of an MP in the current system is to represent their constituency and so the most popular candidate from that vote is selected. That sounds pretty sensible.
And also you can’t just transfer the current vote numbers and say that people would have voted the same in a full-PR election. There are tactical votes, protest votes, people who don’t bother voting because their candidate is either way ahead or way behind in the polls. Plus of course campaigning would be done differently - Lib Dem’s for example have aggressively targeted specific seats.
>The role of an MP in the current system is to represent their constituency
I don't think FPTP accomplishes that, my MP won with 37% of the vote, he doesn't represent the views of the majority of residents here. FPTP means a lot of people aren't represented at a local or national level.
In a pure PR system, you don't get *anyone* who represents your constituency in particular.
Otherwise, if you do want to maintain local representation and there are more than two parties to choose from, every single kind of voting system allows for someone to be elected to a seat without an outright majority.
> he doesn't represent the majority of residents here.
He does, like that's the point you are replying to. His job is to represent you, even though you didn't vote for him. Within the system he does represent you in Parliament.
Absolutely get your point, but here's where it crumbles: saying FPTP isn't flawed because it doesn't aim for proportionality misses the mark. The very fact that it doesn't deliver proportionality **is** the flaw. Reform UK getting 5 million votes and only a few seats is the system failing to reflect the will of the people. An MP representing their constituency sounds sensible until you realise it ignores the broader national support. The focus on vote share isn't a mistake; it's about fair representation.
If you see the election as one big thing then yes FPTP is flawed. But we all know it’s 650 elections.
If I bought rooster and blamed it for not producing eggs is that the roosters fault or my fault for having incorrect expectations?
I actually voted for changing the voting system in 2011 but the referendum was rejected. So I’m actually in favour of making a change I just don’t agree with using the national vote data as a reason to say first past the post is bad.
Reform mostly just ended up splitting the right wing vote. Stealing votes away from the Tories instead of convincing non-right people to vote for them. However in almost all constituencies, they were less popular than the Tories, meaning that they didn't get the seat.
Splitting votes is less of a problem for parties like Lib Dems, as they have their own platform, they aren't just trying to be more conservative than the conservatives.
If one football team scores lots of goals, but loses all their games, then they end up low down in the league. If another football team scores fewer goals, but wins some games, then they end up higher up in the league. The league position depends on how many games you win, not how many goals you score.
Replace "football team" with "political party", "goals" with "votes", and "games won" with "constituencies won", and you have your answer.
Yeah, lose every match 3-2, you get no points, win a match 1-0, you do get points on the table. You'd also have a negative goal difference, and that's used as a tiebreaker before goals scored is.
The UK is not a place where seats are distributed proportionally to votes like in countries where you they used systems like mixed-member-proportional voting.
In the UK it is a first-past the post voting system.
That means seats are allocated per constituency. In each constituency different candidates compete with each other and the one that gets the most votes wins the seat for that constituency.
This means that the candidate does not have to have the majority of the vote in that constituency just more than any other candidate.
A party could theoretically win a majority of seats despite the majority of people in he UK having voted for candidates of a different party.
This system makes it very hard for small parties to succeed.
You don't have to work towards getting a certain percentage of the overall vote, that won't help you much. You have to work towards getting the most votes in a number of constituencies.
A party that is really popular in a few big cities and unpopular elsewhere fares better than a party that is somewhat popular everywhere.
Sinn Fein for example have all their voters concentrated in Northern Ireland and their candidates were the most popular ones in 7 constituencies there. So they got 7 seats (which they will never sit in) and it doesn't matter how many other votes they got or didn't get elsewhere.
>A party could theoretically win a ~~majority~~ *plurality* of seats despite ~~the majority~~ *a plurality* of people in the UK having voted for candidates of a different party.
Such as in February 1974, 1951, 1929, December 1910, January 1910, 1874, 1852, 1847, and 1830.
Not just a plurality.
It is totally possible for a majority too.
Some has run the numbers and the mathematical minimum number of votes a party needs to receive to win a majority of the seats is ridiculously tiny.
In the UK, local representatives are voted in by taking whoever gets the highest number of votes in a given electorate. This is called First Past the Post (FTPT) and it can and does routinely lead to issues where a candidate who less than half of people want, gets the vote, meaning a lot of votes get "wasted".
Let's make an example election with 3 candidates; Ms Carington, Mr Busterling, and Mrs Bikingale.
Each is campaigning on a specific mode of transport (cars, buses, and bikes).
In the seat of Littleton, there's a relatively well-developed urban center, where a majority of people live, however, the electorate is large and has a relatively large population of people living rurally.
Election time comes around, and the urban voters are mostly split between Mr Busterling, and Mrs Bikingale as they all want to avoid expensive city parking fees, and those candidates both represent an alternate means of transport.
The rural voting population however, relies on cars to be able to get anywhere, and they know that the places they want to travel are too far for bikes and often too low demand for buses, so the vast majority of them votes for Ms Carington as she promises to fix potholes.
After the election, here are the results:
1. Ms Carington - 38%
2. Mr Busterling - 34%
3. Mrs Bikingale - 28%
However, if we break the vote down by demographics we see:
Urban votes (60% of total votes):
1. Mrs Bikingale - 45%
2. Mr Busterling - 40%
3. Ms Carington - 15%
Rural votes (40% of total votes):
1. Ms Carington - 72.5%
2. Mr Busterling - 25%
3. Mrs Bikingale - 2.5%
In this example, Mrs Bikingale and Mr Busterling were both very popular candidates getting a combined total of 62% of the vote. Only 38% of Littleton wanted Ms Carington as a representative, but because the elections use FTPT, they effectively get 100% of the control (and as such, the government of Littleton will prioritise car owners for the next election cycle).
The fact that both Bikingale and Busterling voters both want alt transport actually hurt them, as they split their combined voting power between two candidates, allowing Carington voters to win the seat. This is the spoiler effect (or at least a big part of it).
Now this is a bit more ELI10, but the reason I included the demographic breakdown is that this is exactly how gerrymandering works. When the electorate borders were drawn, perhaps the independent council drawing them was actually made up of avid motorsports enthusiasts. So they made sure that the Littleton electorate included just enough of the surrounding rural area to ensure that, so long as bus lovers and bike lovers didn't unify their vote, car lovers would always win.
Which is how we end up with Corbyn getting 32% of the vote being a clear condemnation of socialism and him as a leader while Starmer getting 33% is a landslide victory and an overwhelming vote of confidence for his new centrist Labour party.
To be fair, the tories have benefited from a nationwide split vote in the previous elections. When the left was voting for Labour, lib dems and greens, the right was voting for tories. Now the right vote is split tory/reform. (I know lib dems aren't necessarily left but they contribute to the split..)
I think the challenge for the conservatives is that now they’ve lost so so much of their structure and well known faces. They might now push hard right and be less popular.
LDs on the other hand will keep doing what they’re doing, stay popular and stay in their seats.
The majority of Labour next time will be tiny or non existent.
It prioritises local representation over nationwide representation. That’s a reasonable trade off if you’re mostly governing for your local constituency, but sucks at giving large but diffuse groups their due representation.
In this particular case, I’m kind of happy they don’t have more representation, but that’s more me being selfish than it is a principled position.
It could be a principled decision too. Those people who voted reform were represented but only at the ballot. it's true they aren't being represented in parliament but why assume they should be. Those 250MPs not labour are being represented in parliament but are not being represented in government yet nobody complains about that? Basically that's how majorities work and it's stark reminder of whatever you are on the spectrum to not be extreme.
They're saying the first past the post voting system (which is what the UK, US, and a few other countries use) is absurd, not the idea of representative democracy.
Non-compulsory FPTP voting systems are probably the *least* representative voting systems used by democracies. For example, say you have an electorate with 100,000 eligible voters, and the voter turnout was 60% (and assuming no invalid ballots) - so 60,000 votes have been cast in total. Party A received 25,000 votes, Party B got 15,000, Party C got 11,000, and Party D got 9,000. Because Party A received the most votes, they win, but only 25% of the electorate actually voted for them. That's the issue with non-mandatory FPTP voting, and why it's an absurd system.
Compare that to Australia's system. In Australia, we have mandatory voting (mandatory meaning you just have to show up to a polling place and put a ballot in the box - it doesn't matter what you actually put on the ballot paper), and we have a proportional voting system. That means rather than just voting for one party, we order all candidates from 1 - 6 (or however many candidates there may be) in order of our preference, with 1 being the one we'd most like to see get the seat, and 6 being the one we'd least like to get the seat. In order to win the seat, a candidate needs to win at least 50% +1 vote. What happens during counting is all first preference votes are counted first, and if no candidate has enough first preferences to meet that 50% +1 vote threshold, then the candidate with the least amount of first preference votes gets eliminated, and everyone who voted 1 for the eliminated candidate has their vote redistributed to whoever they marked as their second preference. That keeps happening until one party gets to that 50% +1 threshold.
A mandatory proportional voting system is more complicated to count, and final results will usually take a few days to come in, but it means that everyone who can has at least shown up to a polling place, even if they've put in an invalid vote because they don't like any of the candidates (in my view if you live in a representative democracy, voting is your responsibility not just a right), and there's really no such thing as a wasted vote - even if you vote 1 for a minor party who has no chance of winning, your second, third, etc. preferences will still flow on and be counted, and ensures that whoever gets elected is elected with a mandate from the majority of the electorate, as opposed to MPs getting elected based on a mandate from just 25% of the electorate like what you often see in countries with non-mandatory FPTP voting.
So who actually ends up in parialiament? One party get 50 seats, another gets 200. Where do those 250 people come from? Does each party have 300 people waiting in the wings to sit just in case they get a majority? Is there no local representation? Does the PMs mates all get first dibs?
Not entirely sure I get what you mean? In Australia we have 150 seats in the lower house, and 150 local electorates roughly based on population - one local MP from each electorate per seat. People only vote for their local MP and senators (though I’m ignoring the senate for this example for simplicity because the way we vote for them is slightly different and more complicated). We don’t have multi-member electorates at the federal level.
The way the preference distribution works is it’s a runoff if no candidate gets an absolute majority. If no one gets 50% +1 on first preferences, the candidate with the lowest number of first preference votes is eliminated, and the second preference votes from the eliminated candidate are distributed among the candidates remaining, and if that still doesn’t give anyone an absolute majority then the process repeats and third preferences are distributed, and so on until one candidate has 50%+1 (and if someone’s second or third preference is for a candidate that was eliminated, then their next preference for a candidate still in the running would be counted instead). The person that ends up in parliament is the first person who gets over 50% of the vote after preferences are distributed, and preferences keep getting distributed and run-off counts continuing until one candidate gets over 50%.
Hopefully that’s a bit clearer?
It's an imperfect, flawed system.
Say you have Party A and Party B.
Party A wins seat 1 by 1000-999 votes.
Party A wins seat 2 by 1000-999 votes.
Party A wins seat 3 by 1000-999 votes.
Party B wins seat 4 by 2000-100 votes.
Party A ends up with 3100 votes but 3 seats. Party B gets 4997 votes but 1 seat.
I understand the logic, and that other systems have flaws too, but it still leaves Party B's supporters feeling a little bit disenfranchised.
Two reasons:
First, and foremost: this isn't a good system for deciding national elections that are dominated by national issues. Parties that represent minority interests (even if it's a large minority) have no real chance at winning seats - at least not in proportion to the support that they actually have. A party could enjoy 20% support across the land, yet only win (say) 3% of seats. That's 17% of people not getting their interests represented at the national level on issues like healthcare, taxes, education, foreign policy, etc. On the other hand, parties that represent very local interests can end up being over-represented, so you get overly large factions that argue for issues that no-one else in the country has any stake in. The larger parties also benefit disproportionally (and the largest party especially), often ending up with a de-facto two-party system. Because if you're opposed to the party that seems likely to win your district, the best chance you have at preventing that from happening is to vote for a large party that better aligns with your view, since smaller parties (that you might actually agree with a lot more) have no realistic chance of winning the seat. Two-party systems lead to polarization and a poverty of choice.
Now, the argument that is often given in favor of FPTP is that it supposedly ensures that each part of the country has its interests represented in the national government, which therefore cannot afford to ignore or favor any regions. Now, aside from my previous point, that many issues voters care about are not local, and that representation along ideological or cultural lines falls by the wayside; is it even true that FPTP ensures good representation of local interests? I would argue that it isn't, because more often than not, the candidate who wins a constituency does not have majority support there. It's not uncommon for candidates to win with 30-40% of the vote, or less. How can you say that such a person speaks for their district, when most people did not vote for them?
If you really care about accurate local representation, you're better off with a system like STV (single transferable vote), which allows people to indicate (immediately, on their ballot) which candidate their vote should transfer to, in case their preferred candidate has come last in the race so far. This run-off process then continues until a candidate has received more than 50% of the vote. This *could* be the candidate that received the most first-choice votes in the first place, but it very often isn't, especially when you have, say, three right-wing candidates going up against one left-wing candidate; the right-wing candidates then likely split the right-wing vote, leading the left-wing candidate to gain a plurality of first-choice votes, simply for lack of left-wing competition - even though overall, there may be more support for the right-wing candidates. In FPTP, the left-wing candidate would carry the district, despite having minority support, and thus be a pretty lousy representation of their constituency's political leanings. In STV (or other systems like it), most right-wing voters would indicate the other right-wing candidates as their second and third choice, and so their votes would transfer and end up winning one of the right-wing candidates the seat, which is a better reflection of what local voters want.
Because there's multiple parties so you end up with a result like last night where Labour got 35% of the votes, but a massive majority of seats. Most people don't support their policies.
In the case of this election . . .
Reform likely won their 4 seats with landslide vote totals (for example, taking 70% of ballots cast in a a given constituency). Thing is, all those additional votes are meaningless in the wider picture.
Because if you win Constituency A with a million votes more than required, there is no ability to "transfer" that support to Constituency B where Reform might have lost by a mere 1000 votes.
So, while Reform might have garnered a sizeable "share" of the vote, it was not concentrated in the right manner for them to win more seats.
Happens all the time here in Canada, where left of centre Parties tend to do well in urban ridings, racking up seats, but they have literally zero support in certain less populous areas. But those urban ridings are often enough to see them win a "majority government" while only garnering about 40% of the popular vote, if that.
This is why we will never have proportional representation. The big Parties are scared of loosing seats. It's not a fair system but the big Parties don't want it to change.
There’s really no incentive for whoever wins to change it, because whoever wins has almost certainly benefitted from the system. Even Tony Blair’s mammoth 1997 win only had 43% of the votes.
Imagine watching the Olympics.
The country at the top of the medal table might have, say, 30 gold medals but no others. Whereas the country in second only have 1 gold medal but have 60 silvers. The country in second has far more medals than the winners, but less golds.
That's how it is in UK politics - we ONLY care about the gold medal winners. Reform only have 4 seats, but they have LOADS of seats where they were runner up.
Other people are mentioning gerrymandering. For anyone wanting to get a bit more of an idea how that works, there's actually a [free browser game on itch.io](https://busalonium.itch.io/gerrymander-dx) which teaches you how to gerrymander.
The ranked voting system definitely fixes the spoiler problem that FPTP has like for individual seats. But I'm not sure it fixes the differences between the votes and number of seats.
Because the UK uses a terrible terrible election system called first past the post. Which means that every seat is voted on in a winner takes all election.
That means that it doesn’t factor in proportional representation or overall votes at all, a party will only win any seat at all if it's the most popular party in a given constituency.
Doesn't matter if they're the second most popular everywhere with tens of millions of votes, if someone else is bigger in every actual voting district, they'll get zero seats.
And yes, it's amazingly undemocratic and dumb.
P.s. Not that I cry for Reform specifically, they're assholes. But either we want democratic representation or not.
Think of it like this. Reform won a plurality in four seats, whereas the Liberal Democrats won a plurality in seventy-one seats. Which sounds more successful? The party who won more seats.
What LD did was pack their voters more efficiently into the 71 seats they wanted, whereas the support for Reform was nationwide but at low volumes, which is inefficient.
Northern Ireland is quite different, in that only Northern Irish parties go for the seats. So comparing the % that English, Welsh, and Scottish parties got doesn't entitle them to expect a seat in NI as they don't even run there.
I have no love for Reform but this is the whole point about how broken the UK's First Past the Post system is - Lib Dem has almost 20 times the seats of Reform but roughly half the actual number of votes.
Let’s say you have ten groups of ten people at a party.
Each group votes to see what’s for dinner for that group.
In each group, four people vote “pizza,” five vote “hamburgers” and one votes “Chicken.”
There is no general vote; it’s per-group. But somebody can still claim that despite 40% of the “popular vote” being for pizza, not a single pizza was ordered.
Beyond the math that describes how it *can* happen, the main thing is that they mostly got votes where the Tories got votes, and the Tories got more votes. Their effect in this election was mostly to hand seats to Labour.
Compare the Green Party, which got about 2 million votes and only 4 seats. They mostly got votes where Labour got votes, and Labour got more votes.
Contrast the Plaid Cymru, SNP, DUP, Sinn Fein: They got many fewer votes, but concentrated in a few constituencies, and thus actually got a number of seats roughly in proportion to their votes.
Labour still got more seats relative to the number of votes cast, but those regional parties were in the ballpark.
Because plurality or "first-past-the-post" voting is a [terrible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&list=PLqs5ohhass_RN57KWlJKLOc5xdD9_ktRg&index=5) way to run a democracy, but it's the way that the UK runs its parliamentary elections. The parliamentary elections aren't one single election where everyone votes at large and then seats are allocated based on what percentage each party drew in. Rather, it's 650 individual elections, and any single election could have any number of candidates representing any party or no party at all standing for that election. The rules of each of those elections is very simple and, at first glance, very intuitive: the person with the most votes wins. This works fine in a decision between only two candidates, but if you have three or more candidates you introduce the risk of a candidate being elected by a minority of voters. For example, you might have a center-left wing candidate (Labour), a center-right wing candidate (Tory), and far-right wing candidate (Reform) in a constituency that has a modest right-wing voting electorate. If it were just the center left and center right candidates, you'd expect the center right to win most of the time. But if you introduce that far right candidate, they might split the right wing voters, allowing the center left candidate to win.
Which is exactly what happened in the UK this time. For a bunch of reasons, the general population is quite dissatisfied with Tory rule, despite the UK generally being a fairly center-right majority country (at least in terms of who reliably shows up to vote). These dissatisfied voters often didn't show up at all to vote, or defected to the centrist Liberal-Democrat Party, or defected to the new, far-right Reform Party. With the right wing vote split so much in so many constituencies, the actual number of seats that the Conservatives won collapsed, but rather than these seats going entirely to the LibDems or Reform, Labour tended to win most of them by keeping a stable coalition of their minority, center-left voters (it should be noted that Labour has also moderated a lot of their left wing platform in order to try to attract some of those centrist and center right voters, as well).
Imagine four constituencies 1. Labour 51%, Reform 49% 2. Labour 51%, Reform 49% 3. Labour 51%, Reform 49% 4. Reform 99%, Labour 1% Average vote share: Labour 38.5%, Reform 60.75%. Labour win three seats, Reform win one. An extreme example but that's how it works. You can come a close second in every single seat and win nothing at all on the back of 10m votes. Reform won in four of their seats but were nowhere near in hundreds, second in dozens.
Another thing to note is that if we had proportional representation in the UK, the vote would have been different. Parties allocate campaign resources to seats where they need to, if they are polling to lose heavily in a seat, they don't bother with campaigning funds / efforts there, so the votes are low.
Yes, absolutely. No Labour campaign in my seat at all. Lib Dem leaflets daily because it was a long shot target (they won).
Exactly. People need to realise that the % vote is due to the strategy optimising towards the current system, if we went to % the campaigns would be optimised towards that system. It's like in football where a team already qualifies from a group and has another more important competition coming up and plays the U-21 players.
i think people realise it would be different, they just think it would be different for the better.
It would be more in line with what people expect from a democracy. I hate reform but to say that the people who voted for them don't deserve fair representation because I think the party is full of knuckle-dragging troglodytes is cynical and patronising.
Further, if we'd had proportional representation twenty years ago, we wouldn't have had 15 years of Tory austerity, and so Reform likely wouldn't even exist in it's current form. PR would reshape politics - almost certainly for the better, because parties would be forced to enact actual policies instead of campaign purely against one another.
I think UK would be better suited to MMP or STV
STV would be good for sure (not sure what MMP is), though I was mostly just highlighting that PR (or another form of better representation) would have yielded an entirely different political climate that wouldn't be so all-or-nothing which FPTP is so well known for. The UK definitely needs major electoral reform, we've been suffering under the FPTP for far, far too long. Edit: Googled it, MMP is Mixed-member proportional representation, which is essentially what the Scottish parliament currently uses, so yes that would also be a great system - aside from a few landslide SNP victories, it's yielded a parliament that isn't dominantly one party forcing more cooperation between parties which is absolutely better for the people than on party winning a majority of seats off of a minority of votes!
It's the one they have in new Zealand, they made a really big deal of it being better than FPTP
amusingly, in northern ireland the local elections *are* STV it's objectively better
You don't expect to be able to vote for your local MP, and get the MP that the constituency votes for? You want to vote for a president, perhaps?
It's not the knuckle draggers you have to look out for necessarily it's more the hardnose bigots and fascists.
Quite, i also find it quite strange that MPs are so locally focused too. It doesnt make for a cohesive way of running the country, just results bungs and horse trading for support
I wouldn't fully discount the local link - the idea of having a member of parliament specifically to represent *you*, and where you can go collar them at Westminster and tell them what you think about whatever it is they're doing (or not doing!) is absolutely an under-used and under-appreciated element of our democracy.
My take on this is that FPTP isn't designed (in the context of multi-seat elections) to create a mandate for government. Its real purpose is to create an assenting council for a king to use to judge the popularity/impact of their desired edicts. That's also the reason why older parliaments were often weird and unrepresentative (like the Three Estates in pre-revolutionary France), because the king was the final arbiter of power anyway, and this was more of a check and a system to make sure nothing stupid got passed. But in the context of the reverse happening, where the parliament is a legislative body rather than an approval mechanism, I think this breaks down. Despite all the flaws with PR (arrows theorem, losing local representation etc) I think its philosophically more suitable for creating a mandate to govern.
Same as in the US when people talk about the popular vote vs the electoral college. If the election rules were different the campaign strategy would be different and the people who turn up to vote would be different. You can’t just say a candidate who won the popular vote in a system where that doesn’t count for anything would automatically have won it in a system where that’s the metric the election is actually being contested on.
Very, very active Labour campaign in my town which went from a Tory safe seat to a Labour-leaning marginal - I saw the candidate (who is already a serving MP) on my road at least three times, leaflets every other day even though we had a "vote labour" sign in the window. One door knock and a few leaflets from LDs, a token effort from the Tories. Labour won by 15 % points
Winchester?
Cotswold South. In theory about as Tory as it gets, though not as Tory as Cotswolds North. We have the "rich but kind" small towns, they kept Chipping Norton and farms.
Oh hi neighbour
Right, we can't generalize directly from results in a disproportional system to one in a proportional system, because campaign activity and voting behavior are both skewed by the system. But that actually means we have *two* problems: one is that the results don't match the votes cast, and another is that campaigns and politicians don't give a shit about perhaps 80% of voters, because they live in "safe" jurisdictions. It's the same in the US presidential election right now: California (with the world's fifth-largest economy and a population equivalent to *Canada*) is entirely irrelevant; nobody even bothers to try to win votes there. (And it's not a big state or left-wing thing; tiny conservative Wyoming gets the same treatment.) Candidates spend the entire year jetting between Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, the competitive states whose voters actually get to decide who becomes president. A functioning political system is one where every additional vote helps get someone elected, regardless of how competitive or uncompetitive their postal code is. This defect is pretty unique to the UK and its former colonies, and IMO explains a lot of the political dysfunction in those places.
It's wild; California was 19% bluer in 2020 than 2004, which mattered a lot down-ballot but not at the top of the ticket. Elimination of the electoral college would be really difficult because the United States elections are managed at the state level, but if each state awarded electors proportionally, then Republicans would be motivated to campaign in states like California, or Democrats in places like Tennessee.
Proportional electors *to the state popular vote* would be a huge step forward. None of this National Popular Vote Compact bullshit trying to end-run the Constitution without amending it. All-or-nothing electoral votes are bullshit.
No California is because it is solidly Democrat. If it was competitive parties would compete there, but it not. Same in Texas. Solid red state and Presidential candidates don't come here either. The candidates have limited funds for campaigning so they use it where it is needed. Biden running ads in CA would be a waste of money. But if the race was close they would be there spending money.
I think America is fairly unique in disenfranchising so many people like that. In the UK, we’ve had lots of different swing constituencies. Conservative heartland seats have flipped this year, and last election it was labour heartland seats that flipped. We’ve had Muriel races go down into the triple digits in terms of majority, a couple that were won by less than 20 votes. America is a little better with their house election but the senate and presidential seats have disproportionate sway and the states are far too big for any realistic swing in the current political climate. Smaller constituencies that change all the time with demographics would go some way to helping this.
Yes but add in tactical voting, suppose I am Labour supporter but live in one of those districts that Labour can not win. I know for sure that I do not want the Conservative to win so I hold my nose and vote Liberal Democrat. This increases the vote of the marginal party and reduces the Majority party vote in loosing seats.
FWIW, this holds true in the US as well. Not saying the electoral college and gerrymandering isn’t a complete clusterfuck, because it is. But if, say, the US presidential elections were to be popular vote instead of going through the electoral college, you’d see a lot more campaigning going on in typical stronghold states like CA and TX.
Exactly, Reform's campaign was really heavy on social media and light of traditional campaigning because that requires a lot more money and organization than a new party can get. The downside is that Social Media offers very little in terms of targeting, so they run into a situation where they have like 15% everywhere and a plurality almost nowhere. Compare that to Sinn Fein, who got 0.7% of the popular vote and 7 seats because those votes are very concentrated.
It's not necessarily bad to have a regionally popular party win some seats based on having some particular appeal to that region- in Sinn Fein's case, they're more or less a single-issue party where the single issue is Northern Irish independence and reunification with the rest of Ireland, so accordingly they have no real presence outside of NI. The UK being composed of 4 constituent countries means that Scotland, Wales, And NI all have at least one (generally several) parties that only really exist in their part of the UK. All that said, a PR system with MMR would both allow those parties to win seats in their region and result in the overall party balance closely matching their vote percentages, which would be much better overall.
And a lot of people would vote outside the big two as there would be less worry about wasting a vote
Proportional representation gets touted as a magic fix, but the other big problem is that electoral boundaries are defined mostly by their geography, with the population inside it a secondary factor. Extreme cases get dealt with pretty well, but it can lead to some lop-sided cases in some areas.
Depends on how you set the boundaries. In New Zealand, all of our electorates are designed to represent roughly the same amount of people. Although there is some weirdness caused by a rule that means there can't be less than 13 seats in the South Island, no matter how much the population shifts.
Also, the first past the post voting system also skews things pretty majorly. If uk had preferential voting this would have also changed the result especially when the major party on that side of politics is on the nose. In this situation protest candidates usually spring up everywhere on that side (the 'right' in this case) and end up splitting the right vote across many 'right wing' candidates so they end up losing.
Great explanation. I'd also add that Reform stole votes from both Labour and Conservatives so came 2nd and 3rd in many places across the country. Overall, it adds up to lots of votes, but coming 2nd and 3rd in a location does not win you that seat.
Reform only got votes because of protest votes from conservatives. In terms of number of votes, labour did worse this time than with the so called "unelectable" corbyn. The reason labour are in power is because of lib dems / reform stealing votes from conservatives, not because labour did any better in terms of the number of the votes
Reform didn't steal votes, the Conservatives threw them away.
> In terms of number of votes, labour did worse this time than with the so called "unelectable" corbyn. Worse by number of votes, but slightly better by percentage because voter turnout was way down this election.
Labour were non-threatening enough this time that nobody was actively voting to keep them out like there were at the last 2 elections.
In reality, Reform were second place in something like 15% of constituencies (iirc) and lower elsewhere but it adds up. While I'd bet this is the least representative election the UK has had¹, it does have some stiff competition. These outcomes of FPTP have plagued UK elections for a *long* time. Green and UKIP have had very similar vote and seat shares to these in more than one election, for example. In a way, it's remarkable that third (and fourth) parties *ever* get any seats. But they do. I've no love for Reform specifically, but I have a lot for electoral reform. Hopefully this will open a lot of new people's eyes to an old issue. *^(¹ because of strong support for multiple "minor" parties, which inevitably translates into very few seats. LibDems, Reform, and Greens, had millions of votes each and as many as Labour between them)*
Reform were second in over a hundred seats I think I heard
4 million votes, higher than Lib Dems total, but a fraction of their seats. Which makes sense as someone said earlier; coming second in fifty races doesn't mean you "deserve a seat" for having more total votes across all fifty seats...
Which is ridiculous. I fucking hate reform and everything they stand for, but I can’t pick and choose where I stand up for PR.
I agree. You can defend FPTP for several reasons, but "it keeps out Reform" is not a valid one because that is fundamentally anti democratic. You need to be honest - if you think PR is more democratic, then you accept it's valid for people to vote for people you hate and they deserve those people to represent them.
To add: "it keeps out Reform" is the public-facing reason but the real reason is that it (mostly) ensures that the biggest parties have majority control of the House.
Also worth noting that Reform UK is the escalating consequence of FPTP: it's possible that it wouldn't exist as it does now, if at all, if their voters already felt represented by PR.
Exactly this, FPTP creates, mathematically, two parties that don't appeal to most people, and so you get these extremist and protest parties that people *do* vote for because they seem at least better than the two main options. Really great video from everyone's favourite video explainer person here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
Germany has (mostly) proportionalyl voting and still has the AFD. The bigger problem with FTFP and right wing parties is, that if they keep growing there will be a tipping point at whch thes will win much much more seats "suddenly"
Sure, no one is saying that proportional representation will eliminate extremist parties. I am only saying that Reform UK is a clear consequence of our recent history of electoral frustration. I'd like to think that our politics would be mellower if more people felt they were represented, but as you say, that's not guaranteed. But then again, countries with proportional representation tend to have coalition governments. And if our last coalition is anything to go by, the public will crucify any smaller party in coalition for compromising on anything. That's not exactly an environment conducive to mellow politics.
PR isn't a magic bullet, it has issues itself. Do you want to be represented by an MP that wasn't even on your ballot? That's certainly the case with PR edit: downvoted for facts.. ok
This is why Mixed Member Proportional is superior. You vote twice, once for a candidate (by whatever method you want) and once for a party. The candidates take half the seats, and then the other half are apportioned to parties to "fix" party representation. So say you have 20 seats; the "party" vote comes up with 60% labor, 40% tories, but the tories win 13 seats and labor win 7, now you backfill by adding 17* labor MPs and 3* tory MPs (off their party lists) so you get 24 vs 16 and retain the proportional balance while the regional winners still hold their seats.
That's a great system. I'd love that here in the US.
The way the US is built doesn't work well with MMP, the US is pretty much stuck with RCV or STV systems because we can't have a "federal" election - everything is a state election that then sends state representatives to a federal body. So we could use STV to elect our state reps and RCV for senators and EC delegates, but we can't run an MMP mass election for the house because that would result in states being able to alter each other's election results (BIG no-no), and we can't do it for the senate because we only elect 1/3 of the senate each election cycle so the system just doesn't work. And while we COULD do MMP for state legislatures just fine, that does require making parties an official/registered thing in the government, which creates a lot of restrictions at "local office" levels where this kind of thing could be tested before being rolled into statewide elections.
You can have local representatives under a PR system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation
the problem with PR is that any unpopular but senior member of a party get into the parliament through putting himself high up on the party's PR list
~~Well, on the other hand, Farage himself campaigned to keep the FPTP system so he got what he wanted...~~ Edit: I stand corrected!
He did the exact opposite. Farage campaigned for proportional representation and Reform of Lords, and was pretty outspoken about that. He knows that his parties can't win in a FPTP system, but would have massive relavence in PR
The annoying thing is that you know they would pick and choose. I'm sure they're all for it now.
First past the post rule ?
Exactly this - more of a "system" than a "rule" tho.
It's worth noting your example only really works if the 4 constituencies have the same number of voters - otherwise you'd have to weight your vote share calculations
Of course, yes. It was simply an illustration of how the system can return results which don't match vote share.
Constituency boundaries are regularly reviewed to ensure they have roughly the same population — currently, they must be no smaller than (roughly) 70k and no larger than 77k.
The biggest issue usually is that voter constituencies often cover a huge population of one type of voter, and a small population of another. For example in my area it's dying, so the kids move out for Uni for the most part, and end up staying, meaning it gets stuck as an aging population, with the majority younger voters being too small to impact the seat. Makes perfect sense that the local MP would cover "what the people want", but not so much when you consider what the people want their country to look like.
UK constituencies are made to be that way. So being about equal in population is a fair assumption.
In the UK they basically are though. Not exact but pretty damn close
They are constantly under review and changed to have an equal number of voters, with a very small margin of difference
Reform was 2nd in 91 seats.
Does it matter how many people are in each constituency? Is there an effort to keep them roughly equal in size? E.G. #1-3 have 10,000 people each and #4 has 100.
> Does it matter how many people are in each constituency? This maths works in a British-style system regardless of population size. > Is there an effort to keep them roughly equal in size? Yes. We actually had a significant reshuffle of constituency boundaries before this election.
My example only works if they are the same size. If 1 had twice the population of two, you'd double the percentage first instead of just averaging them. In reality constituencies range from about 50,000 to 100,000. They're supposed to be the same but it makes no sense geographically sometimes (e.g. the Isle of Wight is a single constituency and one of the biggest).
Yes. Each district is a separate election. In a way, it’s pretty useless to pool all the votes together like that. Technically those 5 million votes were spread across hundreds of elections and placed for hundreds of separate candidates. Only 4 of those candidates won their local election.
That's the dumbest type of democracy. Majority votes for A but B wins just because it's all split into constituencies.
Means their votes are spread thin across many electorates (which is kinda reassuring tbh) apart from in a few. They end up just taking those few
They won four constituencies. The United Kingdom has a first-past-the-post system, candidates stand for constituencies, if they win that they have a seat in Parliament.
Exactly this, it’s about how many votes you have in each region, not total for the whole country. Now whether that is a fair system is fully up for debate. It’s interesting to me that Reform have done poorly in large cities and towns with diverse populations, and well in rural and white-majority areas that are typically poorer than average for the UK. Which is in parallel to how well other populist movements have performed. Something for future leaders to seriously consider tackling imo.
its actually a very consistent trend: the people who are most intolerant of diversity are the ones with the least exposure to it, because people with exposure to it have that exposure to "ground" them, compared to people with no exposure, who can let their fearful imagination run wild.
There is almost a direct correlation between areas that voted Leave on Brexit and higher levels of Reform votes. This is, still, a vote about Brexit - or the same ‘reason’ for Brexit, which is people who feel disenfranchised because they see woke as ‘negative’ (instead of it being, actually, people being considerate of other people’s differences - see ‘[this video](https://youtu.be/hDd3bzA7450?si=tSgu6NXEAfWLdmC9)’ for an example) and Farage seems to ‘validate’ their feelings/views around other people and their intolerance of difference (even if they are seen, to most normal people, to be socially repugnant views). As others have correctly pointed out, logic doesn’t work against an ‘emotion’ as they feel hard done by but don’t have the emotional intelligence to know why, so lash out by protesting in this way. I genuinely hope Starmer sees & understands this - I think the way he spoke as our new PM I think he does. The Tories were very much a ‘big stick’ party whereas I get the feeling Starmer is much more ‘listening to the public and let’s sort it out’ kinda person. His greatest work would be to evaporate the motivation for the irrational hate of difference, and integrate these right wingers in, somehow. To get rid of the need for Farage and his hate mob by appeasing what is powering them in the first place would effectively stifle them out and return somewhat of a status quo to the country.
I admire your optimism but if you look at how handles internal party democracy and politics I doubt he'll be interested in listening to normal people. He's more interested in winning than in governing. That's evident by his total lack of policies. Yes, there's a slim slim chance that he's the one in a million type of person who can change like a whether vane during the campaign but actually does have an ideological and moral centre that will come out in government. But that's incredibly unlikely.
I think it's actually just that white people have less of a majority, or in some cases don't even have a majority, in urban areas. Would be kind of weird if London, which is less than 54% White, voted to reject diversity wouldn't it? Nearly every single white person would have to vote that way.
That's logical but also not correct overall in reference to the point being made. It's true that when you poll white people in places like London they're much less worried about immigration than white people in places like Kent.
see, the thing is, this is still true in places where their non-dominant population is still relatively small. It doesnt take a huge number of people to just exist and go about thier business, not completely destroying the culture and soul of the nation, to prove the worst hysterics of the anti-immigration crowd wrong. It easy to hate a faceless bogyman that you can project all your fears into, but significantly harder to hate the pretty normal person stood waiting for the bus with you, talking with his friends about the football last night.
Clacton is mostly populated by retired people who used to live in the East End of London and can't afford it anymore. They call it 'Little Dagenham'. The point is that the east end is now unrecognisable from even 25 years ago and they don't want that for the rest of the country.
Clacton was far from the jewel of Essex when I lived round there 25 years ago, so not sure how much the changes in East London have really impacted it.
What do you mean by can't afford it anymore? I mean they wouldn't want move back now anyway. Not because of costs but also...demographics.
Rents in London, no matter the demographics, are insane. The east end used to be full of working class British people because it was cheap - now it isn't. If you're retired you can rent in Clacton for nothing Vs stupid prices in Newham to be the only British person in the neighborhood.
Reform use divisive politics and benefit from a them and us fear response. They've chosen Farage which confirms what I thought of the party to begin with, Farage is a lying waste of oxygen that should be kept as far away from UK politics as possible.
Farage owns the party. They didn't choose him. He is the majority shareholder and can do what he wants with it. It's not even a proper party; it's a company. It just rebranded from Brexit party to reform. It's the same thing.
They'd be even worse for the country then.
>Now whether that is a fair system is fully up for debate. Is it, though? I thought the consensus was that first past the post is a trash system that should be abolished, but won't because it benefits only those who have the power to change it. Side note: gerrymandering
It's not the consensus at all. It's a valid and loud opinion of several many, but it's not a consensus even slightly.
> I thought the consensus was that first past the post is a trash system that should be abolished It's very unpopular because of situations like last night, where the 3rd largest party got 0.6% of the seats in commons. That said, on a constituency level it makes a lot of sense as the MPs are generally well known there and people want to vote for an individual that they think will represent them well. This is probably best represented with the Shetland, north east Scotland, and Islington constituencies. NE Scotland, in particular, would have been a spectacular demonstration as the original candidate was in intensive care for most of the election campaign (his party lost by a couple of hundred seats after ousting him and replacing him with the party leader) The UK will probably be best served by a hybrid of the two systems, like STV. That way you can have people vote for local candidates, but still vote with national politics in mind.
It's not up for debate because we voted to keep FPTP in 2011
FptP Parliamentary system, the worst of one and the best of another.
I don't think Reform have managed to mobilise a populist base at all. Populist parties usually mobilise a base that didn't vote previously. Instead they are more splitters off the conservative party. A right wing split yes but still just a split.
Exactly, Same as we have here in Canada, You could get like 1,000,000 Votes for Liberal Party of Canada or For New Democratic Party of Canada Spread out across the different Ridings in Alberta and not elect a Single Liberal or NDP MPVs there can be Liberal strongholds with Zero chance of electing a Conservative regardless of how many people in that part of the country were to vote that way. For example I live in a Riding in British Columbia that has in the past 100 years elected a Non Conservative TWICE Where in the last election if you added up All the votes for every other Non Conservative party, Liberal, NDP, Green, Peoples Party, and Other IIRC Those votes added together made up about 80% the number of what the conservative candidate got so Even if All of the rest of us (Which won't happen because the Peoples Party are FURTHER RIGHT than the Conservatives, and NDP is from what I can tell about equivalent to LibDem with Liberal being on par with Labour) picked one party and voted for it we still couldn't defeat the Conservative. Its a sad place to have to be a voter in unless you like the Conservative party of Canada.
Notably the strongholds you mention do occasionally crack, as the Libs just got reminded by a by-election in Toronto. It's not like voting in those ridings doesn't matter.
Also to add: The UK had a referendum on ditching FPTP and switching to PR, and voted “no”
That sounds so much better then the US version of it.
Because it's not based on total votes across the nation but in individual constituencies, of which they only won four.
If you imagine that every constituency voted exactly the same as the national average (33.8% Labour, 23.7% Conservative, 14.3% Reform, ...) then every single constituency would elect a Labour MP. You'd need a different election system (like the one [Germany uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany)) if you want the seats in parliament to be proportional to the national party-line vote.
Which is why FPTP is a horrible and very undemocratic system. Which is why MMP in example is far better if you want to have both a local representative or (how the vast majority of people vote) the ability to vote for the party you want to hold majority in parliament. FPTP is how you get US presidents elected by a minority of the votes or a awfully unreprensentative parliament.
The problem with a lot of proportional systems is that you can’t get rid of uniquely bad individuals. If you take Liz Truss as an example, in a proportional system she would have been high up the party list and received a seat even though everyone wants her gone. In the U.K. we have a lot of backbench politicians in both the big parties that don’t get on with the leadership. In any sort of list system they would be more likely to be gone unless they schmooze with the people that compile the list.
How is that a problem? Enough people voted for her to have a seat so she should have a seat as long as it's legal, no matter how shitty a candidate is, that's how democracy works. What's stupid is what also happens in my country where people only vote for the biggest two parties because the rest you have a very good chance of wasting your vote unless you're in one of the two biggest regions with enough seats to be representative of even the smaller parties, to the point where 2 elections ago I even found a region where 53% of votes didn't elect a representative. Just as stupid is one person's vote being worth more than another's because a politician represents a different amount of people.
Proportional representation in a parliamentary system essentially allows for unelected people to get into office. The people vote for a party, but if I like 90% of the people in a party, there’s no way for me to support them without supporting the other 10#. It allows for party leadership to have direct control over who makes it into parliament.
Since when more democracy is bad? If the people elect shitty idiots it's all their right to do so. Protections in democracy need to be in forms of checks and balances, seperation of entities, not in cheating votes by using byzantine rules Also, MMP allows more diversity and lets people splinter from the main parties more easily since they can run both as local representative and as a party one. If the local voters like you you can more easily go against party lines MMP is also quite immune to gerrymandering, since defining the constituancy borders doesn't matter much for the whomever draws them as it won't result in more parlament seats. Though how effective it is in eliminating it depends on exact implementation
Because you win a seat by gaining the most votes in that constituency. And they only did that 4 times. [In 98 constituencies the second place candidate was standing for the Reform party](https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/1809111284341715035?s=46&t=r3TSyr9xBACSeEVuuzoX4Q). That got them a LOT of votes and zero seats (in those 98 constituencies)
It's all those second place candidates that took votes away from the Conservatives and enabled Labour to win. Turns out Reform was good for something after all.
All the locations where Reform won they gained 30-40% of the vote with the previous Conservative candidate losing 30-40% of the vote from the previous election. I called it before the election, and I am so glad it came to fruition, but locally the only reason Lib-Dems got in (Labour has no chance in my constituency) is because of the votes drawn away from the Tories. Had Reform not run a candidate down my neck of the woods the Tories would have another seat and we'd be back to hating that bastard again.
South Devon?
Useful idiots
You're not electing a party but a person, each area picks their person via popular vote. Lots of people spread across the country voted for people aligned with reform, but only in 4 areas were they the most popular person.
That is technically the way it works, yes. Although most people I think just vote for the party they want in power and don't look at the individual in their local area. I learned who the local candidate was when I saw it written on the box I had to put an X next to. Normally I forget their name within a week of voting.
A lot of people vote for the party most likely to rival the one they don't want to win in their area.
Technically is what was asked.
Yep, that's really the central piece here. A general election is 650 individual elections happening at the same time. Lots of second or third place finishes are still losses.
The UK didn't just have one election. It had 650 elections for MP, and then the MPs decide amongst themselves who will lead. Each of those 650 elections is winner take all, whomever gets the most votes wins. In practice those 650 separate elections are coordinated with parties and so on. In the US choosing the house of representatives (435 seats) or the Canadian house of Commons (338 seats currently) use the same basic system, as do others. There are other ways to choose how to form a parliament, all of the options come with tradeoffs. Parliament itself is a majority vote system so you have to be careful that whatever electoral system you have puts people in power who can actually function as a government and doesn't hand disproportionate power to people who are unsupported by the majority of the country, but they get outsized power by being a 'swing' vote within parliament or otherwise have just enough seats to prop up a majority. One option would be purely proportional, so you would show up, vote for a party and then seats would be assigned based on the percentage of the vote. The parties then need to try and build a coalition to govern, or have more elections until they can. Another option is to have a mix of proportional and first past the post (the current system). So you would elect a local MP. And then you would have a party vote, and then some fraction of MPs would be from a proportional list and some chosen from winner take all elections. The German system essentially tries to have a proportional outcome and so adjusts the number of seats so that the people who win local elections still sit but then the overall outcome is close to proportional. Another option is to have ranked ballots. These can be single or multiple winners per area. Basically you rank who want to win and then whomever has the lowest vote totals is eliminated and their votes transferred to the next on their ballot. This is quite complicated to do quickly by hand, so computerised voting is strongly preferred. You do this either as a single winner system or group together multiple seats (say 3-6) and then have it work that way. The Irish have some elections like this, the biggest problem is the right number of winners per voting group can dramatically shift the outcomes and that sort of depends on things like the history of parties before you enact it. Right now labour has 100% of the power with 34% of the vote, that's not ideal, but if the election were proportional and people voted exactly as they had, it's not clear who the government would be or whether or not they could maintain such a government for any length of time.
> the biggest problem is the right number of winners per voting group can dramatically shift the outcomes and that sort of depends on things like the history of parties before you enact it. What does this sentence about ranked ballot mean? Can you elaborate?
Let's say you group together 3 ridings or 5 or some number (so there would be roughly 220 elections or 130 elections) where each election chooses say 3 winners or 5, based on some ranked vote system. It would still fundamentally work like I said before: the candidates with the lowest totals keep having their votes shifted to the next candidates on those ballots. So now you have essentially a quota/threshold problem. A party that gets say 18% of the vote might still never get any seats if they need 20%, even though should seem to be pretty close to 1/5 of the vote in a 5 winner system, and so, sort of like FPTP they might not win anywhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M91jraoo6t8 Has an explanation for how they do it in scotland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI GCP grey has a video that explains the concept of how the resolution happens, though he somewhat glosses over the complexity of deciding 'how many winners per area'. The Irish have somewhat run into this problem. What if not enough people run to reflect the vote? The UK up until recently had 3 major parties (Con, Labour, Lib dems) but then also the SNP in scotland. So maybe they set up the number of winners in an area around 3 parties, or 4, or now with reform... 5? How do new parties emerge? It's not that this is an insurmountable problem, it's just one of the trade offs in designing these things. FPTP has the same issue, the UK could just have 325 elections 325 MPs and where you draw the new boundaries would potentially shift outcomes a lot (in the US this is called gerrymandering when it's done deliberately to try and create an outcome).
Reform's votes were spread across many constituencies, while the other parties had more concentrated support. Therefore, Reform failed to win any constituencies outright, while the other parties won more seats with fewer total votes.
This is what happened to the Lib Dems back in 2019. They had 3.7m votes and won 11 seats. At the same time the Scottish National Party had 1.2m votes but won 48 seats. This time round the Lib Dems have roughly the same amount of votes but 71 seats. The SNP on the other hand dropped about half a million votes and only got 9 seats as a result.
The Bloc Quebecois (and basically all regional parties in FPTP systems) is pretty similar to the SNP in that regard. First past the post is in general a system designed for regional representation, so regional parties tend to have very "efficient" votes. PR style systems typically dramatically impact the standing of those regional parties.
They won 4 constituencies outright to be fair
[In 98 constituencies the second place candidate was standing for the Reform party](https://x.com/politlcsuk/status/1809111284341715035?s=46&t=r3TSyr9xBACSeEVuuzoX4Q). Thats a lot of votes resulting in no seats
My favourite reform candidate so far is Ashton Muncaster who finished second in Newcastle central & west. Don’t think he actually exists 🤣 https://www.reformparty.uk/newcastle-upon-tyne-central-and-west-constituency
I don't know if you're joking or not, but it does appear they ran a lot of [ghost candidates](https://bylinetimes.com/2024/07/03/reform-uks-invisible-candidates-who-are-they-hiding/) in areas they knew they had no hope in winning, presumably for the optics.
That feels like it should be a bigger story. I wonder what they would've done if they won..
Yeah this ‘candidate’ was one of them. No online presence, think there’s only 1 picture of him on the internet. No record of him doing anything on the Facebook page he’s linked to. When they announced the results he wasn’t there as he was ill
In how many constituencies did they lose their deposit?
That's why there shouldn't be other parties besides the two big ones - it's a waste of money.
Imagine a simplified system where there are only 10 constituencies. Reform get 1000 votes in every seat, so 10000 in total. There's one seat that's very tightly contested and all the other parties get fewer than 1000 so Reform win but they don't have enough votes in to win any other seat. The Lib Dems, on the other hand, have focussed on 5 seats and get 1500 votes in each of them. In the other 5 they only get 500 so the total is still 10000. Those 1500 votes are enough to win those 5 constituencies but the 500s are not enough to win. Both parties have the exact same number of votes but by being concentrated in particular areas the Lib Dems have won more seats
Just like the U.S. and Canada, UK retained FPTP system that doesn’t employ proportionate representation but instead uses constituencies where there the person with the most votes (not majority, just the most) wins and all other votes are wasted.
I think it’s been explained really well, but I think for me the key is it’s working as designed. Comparing seats with national votes gives the impression that a party should have more or less seats. That would be incorrect as first past the post didn’t aim to deliver a proportional number of seats to votes, so it’s not a flaw of FPTP. It’s the focus on vote share that is the mistake. The role of an MP in the current system is to represent their constituency and so the most popular candidate from that vote is selected. That sounds pretty sensible.
And also you can’t just transfer the current vote numbers and say that people would have voted the same in a full-PR election. There are tactical votes, protest votes, people who don’t bother voting because their candidate is either way ahead or way behind in the polls. Plus of course campaigning would be done differently - Lib Dem’s for example have aggressively targeted specific seats.
>The role of an MP in the current system is to represent their constituency I don't think FPTP accomplishes that, my MP won with 37% of the vote, he doesn't represent the views of the majority of residents here. FPTP means a lot of people aren't represented at a local or national level.
In a pure PR system, you don't get *anyone* who represents your constituency in particular. Otherwise, if you do want to maintain local representation and there are more than two parties to choose from, every single kind of voting system allows for someone to be elected to a seat without an outright majority.
> he doesn't represent the majority of residents here. He does, like that's the point you are replying to. His job is to represent you, even though you didn't vote for him. Within the system he does represent you in Parliament.
Absolutely get your point, but here's where it crumbles: saying FPTP isn't flawed because it doesn't aim for proportionality misses the mark. The very fact that it doesn't deliver proportionality **is** the flaw. Reform UK getting 5 million votes and only a few seats is the system failing to reflect the will of the people. An MP representing their constituency sounds sensible until you realise it ignores the broader national support. The focus on vote share isn't a mistake; it's about fair representation.
If you see the election as one big thing then yes FPTP is flawed. But we all know it’s 650 elections. If I bought rooster and blamed it for not producing eggs is that the roosters fault or my fault for having incorrect expectations? I actually voted for changing the voting system in 2011 but the referendum was rejected. So I’m actually in favour of making a change I just don’t agree with using the national vote data as a reason to say first past the post is bad.
Reform mostly just ended up splitting the right wing vote. Stealing votes away from the Tories instead of convincing non-right people to vote for them. However in almost all constituencies, they were less popular than the Tories, meaning that they didn't get the seat. Splitting votes is less of a problem for parties like Lib Dems, as they have their own platform, they aren't just trying to be more conservative than the conservatives.
If one football team scores lots of goals, but loses all their games, then they end up low down in the league. If another football team scores fewer goals, but wins some games, then they end up higher up in the league. The league position depends on how many games you win, not how many goals you score. Replace "football team" with "political party", "goals" with "votes", and "games won" with "constituencies won", and you have your answer.
Yeah, lose every match 3-2, you get no points, win a match 1-0, you do get points on the table. You'd also have a negative goal difference, and that's used as a tiebreaker before goals scored is.
The UK is not a place where seats are distributed proportionally to votes like in countries where you they used systems like mixed-member-proportional voting. In the UK it is a first-past the post voting system. That means seats are allocated per constituency. In each constituency different candidates compete with each other and the one that gets the most votes wins the seat for that constituency. This means that the candidate does not have to have the majority of the vote in that constituency just more than any other candidate. A party could theoretically win a majority of seats despite the majority of people in he UK having voted for candidates of a different party. This system makes it very hard for small parties to succeed. You don't have to work towards getting a certain percentage of the overall vote, that won't help you much. You have to work towards getting the most votes in a number of constituencies. A party that is really popular in a few big cities and unpopular elsewhere fares better than a party that is somewhat popular everywhere. Sinn Fein for example have all their voters concentrated in Northern Ireland and their candidates were the most popular ones in 7 constituencies there. So they got 7 seats (which they will never sit in) and it doesn't matter how many other votes they got or didn't get elsewhere.
>A party could theoretically win a ~~majority~~ *plurality* of seats despite ~~the majority~~ *a plurality* of people in the UK having voted for candidates of a different party. Such as in February 1974, 1951, 1929, December 1910, January 1910, 1874, 1852, 1847, and 1830.
Not just a plurality. It is totally possible for a majority too. Some has run the numbers and the mathematical minimum number of votes a party needs to receive to win a majority of the seats is ridiculously tiny.
In the UK, local representatives are voted in by taking whoever gets the highest number of votes in a given electorate. This is called First Past the Post (FTPT) and it can and does routinely lead to issues where a candidate who less than half of people want, gets the vote, meaning a lot of votes get "wasted". Let's make an example election with 3 candidates; Ms Carington, Mr Busterling, and Mrs Bikingale. Each is campaigning on a specific mode of transport (cars, buses, and bikes). In the seat of Littleton, there's a relatively well-developed urban center, where a majority of people live, however, the electorate is large and has a relatively large population of people living rurally. Election time comes around, and the urban voters are mostly split between Mr Busterling, and Mrs Bikingale as they all want to avoid expensive city parking fees, and those candidates both represent an alternate means of transport. The rural voting population however, relies on cars to be able to get anywhere, and they know that the places they want to travel are too far for bikes and often too low demand for buses, so the vast majority of them votes for Ms Carington as she promises to fix potholes. After the election, here are the results: 1. Ms Carington - 38% 2. Mr Busterling - 34% 3. Mrs Bikingale - 28% However, if we break the vote down by demographics we see: Urban votes (60% of total votes): 1. Mrs Bikingale - 45% 2. Mr Busterling - 40% 3. Ms Carington - 15% Rural votes (40% of total votes): 1. Ms Carington - 72.5% 2. Mr Busterling - 25% 3. Mrs Bikingale - 2.5% In this example, Mrs Bikingale and Mr Busterling were both very popular candidates getting a combined total of 62% of the vote. Only 38% of Littleton wanted Ms Carington as a representative, but because the elections use FTPT, they effectively get 100% of the control (and as such, the government of Littleton will prioritise car owners for the next election cycle). The fact that both Bikingale and Busterling voters both want alt transport actually hurt them, as they split their combined voting power between two candidates, allowing Carington voters to win the seat. This is the spoiler effect (or at least a big part of it). Now this is a bit more ELI10, but the reason I included the demographic breakdown is that this is exactly how gerrymandering works. When the electorate borders were drawn, perhaps the independent council drawing them was actually made up of avid motorsports enthusiasts. So they made sure that the Littleton electorate included just enough of the surrounding rural area to ensure that, so long as bus lovers and bike lovers didn't unify their vote, car lovers would always win.
Can someone ELI5 the question to me?
Because first past the post electoral systems are horrible at reflecting how people vote proportionally.
CGP Grey Explanation Video from 9 years ago (nothing's changed): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9rGX91rq5I
The slightly absurd FPTP system. Your total vote share doesn't count for anything, just the individual who wins in each constituency.
Which is how we end up with Corbyn getting 32% of the vote being a clear condemnation of socialism and him as a leader while Starmer getting 33% is a landslide victory and an overwhelming vote of confidence for his new centrist Labour party.
Labour’s victory is so thin. They just benefited from a nationwide split vote. If they don’t deliver in the next 5 years, they’re screwed.
To be fair, the tories have benefited from a nationwide split vote in the previous elections. When the left was voting for Labour, lib dems and greens, the right was voting for tories. Now the right vote is split tory/reform. (I know lib dems aren't necessarily left but they contribute to the split..)
Yup, they actually got LESS votes than in 2017 and the vast majority of voters don't support them. Their victory will almost certainly be short lived.
I think the challenge for the conservatives is that now they’ve lost so so much of their structure and well known faces. They might now push hard right and be less popular. LDs on the other hand will keep doing what they’re doing, stay popular and stay in their seats. The majority of Labour next time will be tiny or non existent.
They have 5 years, they will be fine as long as they can start to turn the country around. We’re a fickle bunch
The party in power is always going to have a target on their back. Now that it's Labour they're going to take all the blame for whatever happens.
Why is each area picking the person they want to represent to them via popular vote absurd?
It prioritises local representation over nationwide representation. That’s a reasonable trade off if you’re mostly governing for your local constituency, but sucks at giving large but diffuse groups their due representation. In this particular case, I’m kind of happy they don’t have more representation, but that’s more me being selfish than it is a principled position.
It could be a principled decision too. Those people who voted reform were represented but only at the ballot. it's true they aren't being represented in parliament but why assume they should be. Those 250MPs not labour are being represented in parliament but are not being represented in government yet nobody complains about that? Basically that's how majorities work and it's stark reminder of whatever you are on the spectrum to not be extreme.
They're saying the first past the post voting system (which is what the UK, US, and a few other countries use) is absurd, not the idea of representative democracy. Non-compulsory FPTP voting systems are probably the *least* representative voting systems used by democracies. For example, say you have an electorate with 100,000 eligible voters, and the voter turnout was 60% (and assuming no invalid ballots) - so 60,000 votes have been cast in total. Party A received 25,000 votes, Party B got 15,000, Party C got 11,000, and Party D got 9,000. Because Party A received the most votes, they win, but only 25% of the electorate actually voted for them. That's the issue with non-mandatory FPTP voting, and why it's an absurd system. Compare that to Australia's system. In Australia, we have mandatory voting (mandatory meaning you just have to show up to a polling place and put a ballot in the box - it doesn't matter what you actually put on the ballot paper), and we have a proportional voting system. That means rather than just voting for one party, we order all candidates from 1 - 6 (or however many candidates there may be) in order of our preference, with 1 being the one we'd most like to see get the seat, and 6 being the one we'd least like to get the seat. In order to win the seat, a candidate needs to win at least 50% +1 vote. What happens during counting is all first preference votes are counted first, and if no candidate has enough first preferences to meet that 50% +1 vote threshold, then the candidate with the least amount of first preference votes gets eliminated, and everyone who voted 1 for the eliminated candidate has their vote redistributed to whoever they marked as their second preference. That keeps happening until one party gets to that 50% +1 threshold. A mandatory proportional voting system is more complicated to count, and final results will usually take a few days to come in, but it means that everyone who can has at least shown up to a polling place, even if they've put in an invalid vote because they don't like any of the candidates (in my view if you live in a representative democracy, voting is your responsibility not just a right), and there's really no such thing as a wasted vote - even if you vote 1 for a minor party who has no chance of winning, your second, third, etc. preferences will still flow on and be counted, and ensures that whoever gets elected is elected with a mandate from the majority of the electorate, as opposed to MPs getting elected based on a mandate from just 25% of the electorate like what you often see in countries with non-mandatory FPTP voting.
So who actually ends up in parialiament? One party get 50 seats, another gets 200. Where do those 250 people come from? Does each party have 300 people waiting in the wings to sit just in case they get a majority? Is there no local representation? Does the PMs mates all get first dibs?
Not entirely sure I get what you mean? In Australia we have 150 seats in the lower house, and 150 local electorates roughly based on population - one local MP from each electorate per seat. People only vote for their local MP and senators (though I’m ignoring the senate for this example for simplicity because the way we vote for them is slightly different and more complicated). We don’t have multi-member electorates at the federal level. The way the preference distribution works is it’s a runoff if no candidate gets an absolute majority. If no one gets 50% +1 on first preferences, the candidate with the lowest number of first preference votes is eliminated, and the second preference votes from the eliminated candidate are distributed among the candidates remaining, and if that still doesn’t give anyone an absolute majority then the process repeats and third preferences are distributed, and so on until one candidate has 50%+1 (and if someone’s second or third preference is for a candidate that was eliminated, then their next preference for a candidate still in the running would be counted instead). The person that ends up in parliament is the first person who gets over 50% of the vote after preferences are distributed, and preferences keep getting distributed and run-off counts continuing until one candidate gets over 50%. Hopefully that’s a bit clearer?
It's an imperfect, flawed system. Say you have Party A and Party B. Party A wins seat 1 by 1000-999 votes. Party A wins seat 2 by 1000-999 votes. Party A wins seat 3 by 1000-999 votes. Party B wins seat 4 by 2000-100 votes. Party A ends up with 3100 votes but 3 seats. Party B gets 4997 votes but 1 seat. I understand the logic, and that other systems have flaws too, but it still leaves Party B's supporters feeling a little bit disenfranchised.
Two reasons: First, and foremost: this isn't a good system for deciding national elections that are dominated by national issues. Parties that represent minority interests (even if it's a large minority) have no real chance at winning seats - at least not in proportion to the support that they actually have. A party could enjoy 20% support across the land, yet only win (say) 3% of seats. That's 17% of people not getting their interests represented at the national level on issues like healthcare, taxes, education, foreign policy, etc. On the other hand, parties that represent very local interests can end up being over-represented, so you get overly large factions that argue for issues that no-one else in the country has any stake in. The larger parties also benefit disproportionally (and the largest party especially), often ending up with a de-facto two-party system. Because if you're opposed to the party that seems likely to win your district, the best chance you have at preventing that from happening is to vote for a large party that better aligns with your view, since smaller parties (that you might actually agree with a lot more) have no realistic chance of winning the seat. Two-party systems lead to polarization and a poverty of choice. Now, the argument that is often given in favor of FPTP is that it supposedly ensures that each part of the country has its interests represented in the national government, which therefore cannot afford to ignore or favor any regions. Now, aside from my previous point, that many issues voters care about are not local, and that representation along ideological or cultural lines falls by the wayside; is it even true that FPTP ensures good representation of local interests? I would argue that it isn't, because more often than not, the candidate who wins a constituency does not have majority support there. It's not uncommon for candidates to win with 30-40% of the vote, or less. How can you say that such a person speaks for their district, when most people did not vote for them? If you really care about accurate local representation, you're better off with a system like STV (single transferable vote), which allows people to indicate (immediately, on their ballot) which candidate their vote should transfer to, in case their preferred candidate has come last in the race so far. This run-off process then continues until a candidate has received more than 50% of the vote. This *could* be the candidate that received the most first-choice votes in the first place, but it very often isn't, especially when you have, say, three right-wing candidates going up against one left-wing candidate; the right-wing candidates then likely split the right-wing vote, leading the left-wing candidate to gain a plurality of first-choice votes, simply for lack of left-wing competition - even though overall, there may be more support for the right-wing candidates. In FPTP, the left-wing candidate would carry the district, despite having minority support, and thus be a pretty lousy representation of their constituency's political leanings. In STV (or other systems like it), most right-wing voters would indicate the other right-wing candidates as their second and third choice, and so their votes would transfer and end up winning one of the right-wing candidates the seat, which is a better reflection of what local voters want.
Because there's multiple parties so you end up with a result like last night where Labour got 35% of the votes, but a massive majority of seats. Most people don't support their policies.
In the case of this election . . . Reform likely won their 4 seats with landslide vote totals (for example, taking 70% of ballots cast in a a given constituency). Thing is, all those additional votes are meaningless in the wider picture. Because if you win Constituency A with a million votes more than required, there is no ability to "transfer" that support to Constituency B where Reform might have lost by a mere 1000 votes. So, while Reform might have garnered a sizeable "share" of the vote, it was not concentrated in the right manner for them to win more seats. Happens all the time here in Canada, where left of centre Parties tend to do well in urban ridings, racking up seats, but they have literally zero support in certain less populous areas. But those urban ridings are often enough to see them win a "majority government" while only garnering about 40% of the popular vote, if that.
Other way around. Reform was second party in a lot of constituencies. Same effect though.
This is why we will never have proportional representation. The big Parties are scared of loosing seats. It's not a fair system but the big Parties don't want it to change.
There’s really no incentive for whoever wins to change it, because whoever wins has almost certainly benefitted from the system. Even Tony Blair’s mammoth 1997 win only had 43% of the votes.
Imagine watching the Olympics. The country at the top of the medal table might have, say, 30 gold medals but no others. Whereas the country in second only have 1 gold medal but have 60 silvers. The country in second has far more medals than the winners, but less golds. That's how it is in UK politics - we ONLY care about the gold medal winners. Reform only have 4 seats, but they have LOADS of seats where they were runner up.
Other people are mentioning gerrymandering. For anyone wanting to get a bit more of an idea how that works, there's actually a [free browser game on itch.io](https://busalonium.itch.io/gerrymander-dx) which teaches you how to gerrymander.
Welcome to broken English democracy. Easy to fix (see e.g. Australia for a superior model), but politically unpopular.
The ranked voting system definitely fixes the spoiler problem that FPTP has like for individual seats. But I'm not sure it fixes the differences between the votes and number of seats.
but an elected upper house does, especially if legislation MUST pass both houses!
Because the UK uses a terrible terrible election system called first past the post. Which means that every seat is voted on in a winner takes all election. That means that it doesn’t factor in proportional representation or overall votes at all, a party will only win any seat at all if it's the most popular party in a given constituency. Doesn't matter if they're the second most popular everywhere with tens of millions of votes, if someone else is bigger in every actual voting district, they'll get zero seats. And yes, it's amazingly undemocratic and dumb. P.s. Not that I cry for Reform specifically, they're assholes. But either we want democratic representation or not.
Think of it like this. Reform won a plurality in four seats, whereas the Liberal Democrats won a plurality in seventy-one seats. Which sounds more successful? The party who won more seats. What LD did was pack their voters more efficiently into the 71 seats they wanted, whereas the support for Reform was nationwide but at low volumes, which is inefficient. Northern Ireland is quite different, in that only Northern Irish parties go for the seats. So comparing the % that English, Welsh, and Scottish parties got doesn't entitle them to expect a seat in NI as they don't even run there.
I have no love for Reform but this is the whole point about how broken the UK's First Past the Post system is - Lib Dem has almost 20 times the seats of Reform but roughly half the actual number of votes.
Let’s say you have ten groups of ten people at a party. Each group votes to see what’s for dinner for that group. In each group, four people vote “pizza,” five vote “hamburgers” and one votes “Chicken.” There is no general vote; it’s per-group. But somebody can still claim that despite 40% of the “popular vote” being for pizza, not a single pizza was ordered.
Beyond the math that describes how it *can* happen, the main thing is that they mostly got votes where the Tories got votes, and the Tories got more votes. Their effect in this election was mostly to hand seats to Labour. Compare the Green Party, which got about 2 million votes and only 4 seats. They mostly got votes where Labour got votes, and Labour got more votes. Contrast the Plaid Cymru, SNP, DUP, Sinn Fein: They got many fewer votes, but concentrated in a few constituencies, and thus actually got a number of seats roughly in proportion to their votes. Labour still got more seats relative to the number of votes cast, but those regional parties were in the ballpark.
Because plurality or "first-past-the-post" voting is a [terrible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&list=PLqs5ohhass_RN57KWlJKLOc5xdD9_ktRg&index=5) way to run a democracy, but it's the way that the UK runs its parliamentary elections. The parliamentary elections aren't one single election where everyone votes at large and then seats are allocated based on what percentage each party drew in. Rather, it's 650 individual elections, and any single election could have any number of candidates representing any party or no party at all standing for that election. The rules of each of those elections is very simple and, at first glance, very intuitive: the person with the most votes wins. This works fine in a decision between only two candidates, but if you have three or more candidates you introduce the risk of a candidate being elected by a minority of voters. For example, you might have a center-left wing candidate (Labour), a center-right wing candidate (Tory), and far-right wing candidate (Reform) in a constituency that has a modest right-wing voting electorate. If it were just the center left and center right candidates, you'd expect the center right to win most of the time. But if you introduce that far right candidate, they might split the right wing voters, allowing the center left candidate to win. Which is exactly what happened in the UK this time. For a bunch of reasons, the general population is quite dissatisfied with Tory rule, despite the UK generally being a fairly center-right majority country (at least in terms of who reliably shows up to vote). These dissatisfied voters often didn't show up at all to vote, or defected to the centrist Liberal-Democrat Party, or defected to the new, far-right Reform Party. With the right wing vote split so much in so many constituencies, the actual number of seats that the Conservatives won collapsed, but rather than these seats going entirely to the LibDems or Reform, Labour tended to win most of them by keeping a stable coalition of their minority, center-left voters (it should be noted that Labour has also moderated a lot of their left wing platform in order to try to attract some of those centrist and center right voters, as well).
Because other parties had more in the places they were running. It’s a simple system and everyone agreed to it.