6 ms·

This makes no sense to me. Ulster Unionist Party had 114,935 votes and got two seats. UKIP had 3,841,346 votes and got one seat. Conservative had 11,207,547 vo

• th0br0 11y ago
  That's the 'first-past-the-post' system at work here. Sadly it's unlikely to change anytime soon :(
  • M8 11y ago
    Well, at least there won't be too much overspending. So it worked out well this time. Any democratic system is flawed - e.g. letting both tax-generators and tax-consumers vote.
• luxpir 11y ago
  It's broked. The party in power rarely see it as broked. Ergo, no proportional representation.
  • mechazawa 11y ago
    It still does not make any sense though. How is it possible that the amount of seats a party get seem so pseudo random?
    • petercooper 11y ago
      Because it depends on geography as voting in the UK is based on who you vote for your local MP. If UKIP's four million votes were entirely within 20 or 30 constituencies, they'd have won them all. But because their votes are spread out across the entire country, other parties pick up those seats instead. The parties that do best are either those that get a ton of votes everywhere, or those that dig in and solely focus on specific locations where they can get a majority (the Lib Dems used to be good at this).
    • QuantumCookie 11y ago
      In short: The First Past the Post Voting system. The Ulster Unionists will get that many votes but in a small number of seats in Northern Ireland. The Conservatives might just win by a small amount but in a large number of seats, each of which translates directly to an MP in Parliament. For anyone who hasn't watched them , I can wholeheartedly recommend CGP Grey's "Politics in the Animal Kingdom"[0] videos for an brief overview of why FPTP voting is as bad as it seems. [0] http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/ http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/
    • coldpie 11y ago
      Suppose you have 20 districts, each electing its own MP, and each with exactly four citizens. One citizen in each votes UKIP, one votes Labour, and two vote Conservative. Conservatives will win 20 seats, despite getting only 50% of the national vote, and the other parties will have none despite getting 25% each.
    • kmfrk 11y ago
      You've got 650 marginal elections where people can only pick one party - and not a coalition through prioritized votes. Compare this to the US where each congressional election is usually between two or three candidates/parties. This makes forecasts primed for surprises due to margins of error alone, not including other factors.
    • mseebach 11y ago
      It's not random at all, it's just that the national vote doesn't factor at all (only the vote in each seat does). It has the (often overlooked, IMO) benefit of a strong 1:1 connection between constituent and MP: even if you didn't vote for the MP, a majority of your neighbours did, and the MP is still your representative in parliament. Organising locally to boot out your MP is much, much simpler than organising nationally to shift balances of power. That has got to be a factor in keeping MPs (more) honest. In PR, you can be in the deeply problematic situation that you like candidate A and dislike candidate B from party X, but you vote for A actually ends up going to B - in effect, you can only really vote for a party, not a particular candidate. This is a significant shift of power to the parties as they generally control (or heavily influences) who runs where and how the ranking that controls "spill-over" votes will end up. Parties are often run opaquely, through back-room deals and patronage, not terribly democratically.
      • ZeroGravitas 11y ago
        The existence of "safe seats" in the current FPTP system, into which parties can (and do) parachute their key players makes your take on FPTP too optimistic. See my comments elsewhere for links about voting systems, already in use in the UK, that seek to balance local representation and proportionality. PR (and FPTP for that matter) can encompass a variety of actual voting systems with important differences between them.
        • mseebach 11y ago
          I did not mean to imply that FPTP is flawless, it certainly is not - merely that it has some benefits and PR has some drawbacks that often get overlooked in the pursuit of "numerical fairness".
  • jgrahamc 11y ago
    We had a referendum on changing the voting system in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum,_2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot... The change was rejected 68% to 32%.
    • ZeroGravitas 11y ago
      Some context though: * the alternative was a bit rubbish, only a minor improvement to the status quo, compared with the systems already successfully in use in Scotland and Wales which combine local representation with PR. * both main parties and their tame press convinced people that it would basically lead to a combination of anarchy, communism and fascism in order to maintain their hold on power at the expense of democracy.
      • jgrahamc 11y ago
        The "tame press". Seriously?
        • ZeroGravitas 11y ago
          Yes, seriously. If you don't believe me, what about David Axelrod: "POLITICO: But what about the press? You say it has disproportionate power here. Do you think Britain’s conservative print media is more powerful than Fox News? DA: Yeah, I do. I do think the parties approach media as partisan players. So you see parties disseminating messages through the print media in a way that is unusual. DA: Fox is certainly very conservative, skews to the Republican side, but there isn’t a kind of lockstep between them and the Republicans. Fox tries to drive the Republican agenda more than reflecting it. Here there are relationships between the parties and media outlets that are deeper so you see a lot of themes being previewed in the media in a way that you don’t see in the states. POLITICO: Did you know what you were getting into? DA: We discussed this when I signed on … I’ve worked in aggressive media environments before but not this partisan." http://www.politico.eu/article/the-axelrod-exit-interview/ http://www.politico.eu/article/the-axelrod-exit-interview/
• petercooper 11y ago
  Unionists are in the majority in the geographical areas of those two seats (the Northern Irish population is still a little segregated). UKIPpers are not in the majority anywhere (except Clacton, maybe!) but are spread across the entire country.
• cositarica 11y ago
  don't care. at least UKIP got one seat. FUCK UKIP.
• Sherlock 11y ago
  What's interesting from a game theory point of view is to have so many different parties with a FPTP electoral system. You would expect a two party system.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    It was, until this election, essentially a two and a half party system, with some other parties in Northern Ireland.
• protomyth 11y ago
  Its a matter of what exactly you want to represent in your government. If you want to represent political parties then First Past the Post is horrible and seats by percentage is what you want. That would mean that their is really no reason to represent local needs since you really need to run a full country campaign and will probably pick dense packed areas to spend advertising. If you want the geographic region (however you define it) to have a representative then the opposite is true. First Past the Post means they have to campaign locally if they want to get in. Percentage of seats by party means local campaigning is just a bit of nostalgia and a waste of campaign money. It comes down to what do you value and what relationship you want between the voter and national government.