UK's 2015 election 'the most disproportionate in history' say campaigners - Polidicks

[img]http://i.imgur.com/sR5ar4R.png[/img] [url]http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32954807[/url] [quote]The 2015 general election was the "most disproportionate in British history", the Electoral Reform Society has said. In a new analysis the society - which campaigns to change the voting system - has assessed how the make up of Parliament would have differed had other voting systems been used. The research shows UKIP could have won as many as 80 MPs and the Greens 20. UKIP received 3.9 million votes and the Greens 1.2 million, and they ended up with one MP each.[/quote] How it could have been: [img]http://imgkk.com/i/plua.png[/img] [img]http://imgkk.com/i/mg1q.png[/img] [url]http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/blog/system-crisis[/url]

Confirming what we already know, the polls are rigged.

[QUOTE=Adlertag1940;47856379]Confirming what we already know, the polls are rigged.[/QUOTE] No, it's just a shit vote system for more than 2 parties, politics changed but the voting system didnt

[QUOTE=Adlertag1940;47856379]Confirming what we already know, the polls are rigged.[/QUOTE] Our voting system favours the old established parties which are deeply engrained into peoples lives. My dad was literally hastling me saying "If you don't vote Labour, etc etc." Ended up voting Liberal Democrat and look how they ended up.

[img]http://imgkk.com/i/mg1q.png[/img] Thank fucking god someone calculated an election result under the alternative vote. It shows exactly what I have been saying all along: it does fuck-all for increasing the representation of minor parties (compared to FPTP) because that is not the point of instant-runoff voting. The point is ensuring an elected candidate has a majority of the vote, how is that supposed to make it easier for minor party candidates to be elected?

It's ironic that the Conservative party campaigned against AV considering that now they would have benefited from it.

[QUOTE=The mouse;47856535]It's ironic that the Conservative party campaigned against AV considering that now they would have benefited from it.[/QUOTE] Well I would on principle because it is a stupid system.

Its better this happened tbh, I could see a tory/ukip coalition if we used the other system. Then people would really be bitching and moaning. I find it hilarious how most campaigners are liberals who are butthurt there wasn't a chance for a labour/green coalition. They'd be the first to tell people to fuck off if this system had favoured their party instead of the tories.

I didn't realise UKIP got that many votes. That's scary.

american, so complete outsider here, but maybe you know... UKIP might be doing something right? just saying, i don't know what's going on in the uk, but numbers like that don't show up for no reason [editline][/editline] i mean look at the lib situation in america, republicans had to wake up considering dems in our nation were clearly gaining some attention of some sort

UKIP got millions of votes, and could have got 80 seats under PR but under PR is that not 79 constituencies that didn't vote majority UKIP but get a UKIP representative anyway, if I'm wrong someone educate me but that doesn't sound like something I'd prefer An election isn't just on the national scale, you're electing your representative in parliament that voices the concerns of your constituency, with an attitude to those concerns that the voting body in the constituency has determined by their vote.

[QUOTE=Dr.Critic;47856643]UKIP got millions of votes, and could have got 80 seats under PR but under PR is that not 79 constituencies that didn't vote majority UKIP but get a UKIP representative anyway, if I'm wrong someone educate me but that doesn't sound like something I'd prefer An election isn't just on the national scale, you're electing your representative in parliament that voices the concerns of your constituency, with an attitude to those concerns that the voting body in the constituency has determined by their vote.[/QUOTE] thank you, you've explained this with a lot better english than I could ever be bothered to try and type I say this every time someone mentions this shit, our current voting system is perfectly fine

[QUOTE=Dr.Critic;47856643]UKIP got millions of votes, and could have got 80 seats under PR but under PR is that not 79 constituencies that didn't vote majority UKIP but get a UKIP representative anyway, if I'm wrong someone educate me but that doesn't sound like something I'd prefer An election isn't just on the national scale, you're electing your representative in parliament that voices the concerns of your constituency, with an attitude to those concerns that the voting body in the constituency has determined by their vote.[/QUOTE] Under List PR, the nation is divided into multi-member constituencies like STV, of say 8 MPs per constituency (could be more or less). Candidate lists (don't necessarily have to be parties, could be independents) receive seats roughly in proportion to the vote they receive. If a list gets like 39% of the vote they can expect to get 3 of the 8 seats. If a list gets 15% of the vote they can expect 1 seat. If a list gets less than 12.5% of the vote what can happen is three things: that list through a pre-election arrangement might cartel with another list (pool to that list), that list might be allocated a remainder seat (as in quota methods of List PR), or they get no seats. For the list that won 3 of the 8 seats, how do they determine who individually wins those seats? Lists are a rank of candidates and in closed systems, the top three candidates on the list would get the seats. In open systems voters have a second vote to put against candidates they'd most prefer to be elected from that list and the election within the list is run as a SNTV vote. Candidate with most votes is guaranteed a seat if the list is allocated at least one seat. Anyways that's just the general idea of List PR but the truth is it's a whole family of voting systems so there is heaps more to it than that.

[QUOTE=Dr.Critic;47856643]UKIP got millions of votes, and could have got 80 seats under PR but under PR is that not 79 constituencies that didn't vote majority UKIP but get a UKIP representative anyway, if I'm wrong someone educate me but that doesn't sound like something I'd prefer An election isn't just on the national scale, you're electing your representative in parliament that voices the concerns of your constituency, with an attitude to those concerns that the voting body in the constituency has determined by their vote.[/QUOTE] Then maybe you shouldn't have one seat constituencies but rather have multiple seats divided proportionally? Sweden has a proportional system for voting yet there are only candidates from my own constituency listed on the election slip. The constituency with the highest population will have 39 seats to divide and the constituency with the lowest population has 8 seats to divide. Additionally 39 other seats are adjustment seats. Total number of seats in parliament is 349. To me the FPTP system just seems mindboggingly unfair to the smaller parties. I mean 23 000 votes per seat versus 3.8 million votes per seat, seriously?

This is, of course, assuming people would vote in the exact same manner under a different system.

[QUOTE=Shibbey;47856794]This is, of course, assuming people would vote in the exact same manner under a different system.[/QUOTE] Yeah, afaik a fair amount of people voted Tory in their swing seats to stop UKIP getting into power, which wouldn't've worked under a proportional system.

Anyways for the images above showing the List PR outcome they need to be taken with a grain of salt. I dunno how they worked it out but I'm assuming they treated the entire UK (less Northern Ireland) as a single electorate. In reality the vote would be closer to the STV outcome. The magnitude of constituencies would be too large if the constituencies were like Britain, Wales, Scotland etc so they'd have the same electorates under List PR as they would in STV, and the outcome would be almost identical to STV. This is all unless there is a national level of adjustment seats. [editline]2nd June 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=Shibbey;47856794]This is, of course, assuming people would vote in the exact same manner under a different system.[/QUOTE] Actually the UK is very interesting in that regard. The outcome of elections in each constituency is as if the voters thought it was a proportional vote. The UK is an anomaly for single-member constituency systems because, when you look at the votes at least, there is no clear two-party system at play. For example in single-winner elections here under alternative vote, you look at primary preferences and it is quite clear that support for parties is divided mostly between Labor and the Liberals/Nationals and very few people put their primary preferences down for minor parties, despite their being no harm done in doing that under a preferential voting system such as AV, unlike FPTP.