maniacmartin

I am going to outline what I consider to be the British electoral voting system’s most fundamental flaw, and why I think it must be changed.

The current setup
The UK is divided into areas called constituencies. People can stand for election in a constituency, and represent their chosen party. Citizens then vote for a party within their constituency. In national elections, what they are really voting for is only the party.

Within each constituency, votes are totalled and the party with the most votes then represents that constituency. On a map, this area would be coloured with a colour to represent that party.

Then, nationally, they add up the number of constituencies represented by each party. The party with the highest number of constituencies coloured their colour wins, and this party gets to run the country.

What’s unfair about this system?
The major flaw of this system is that only the votes of the strongest party in the constituency get carried across to the national tallying stage. All other votes within the constituency effectively don’t count at all.

Consider this extreme example. A country has 3 major parties: A, B and C.
In every constituency, party A gets 40% of the votes.
In about half of the constituencies, party B gets 60% of the votes, and party C gets no votes
In the other half of the constituencies, party B gets no votes, and party C gets 60% of the votes.

Now, in every constituency, either party B or party C will win, since they have 60% of the votes.
On a map, about half of the constituencies will be coloured with B’s colour and about half with C’s colour. No constituencies “voted” B at all. In national counts, party B or C will get to run the government.

But let’s do a national summation of votes for all 3 parties:
Party A got 40% of votes in 100% of constituencies ….. = 40% of national votes
Party B got 60% of votes in 51% of constituencies …… = 30% of national votes
Party C got 60% of votes in 49% of constituencies ……. = 30% of national votes.

Here it is clear to see that the country should be ran by party A, but in fact party A got no seats at all since you only get a seat if you win within a constituency.

Clearly this is a very extreme example, but it does show massive flaws in our voting system at present. The system disadvantages smaller parties, or parties whose voters are spread out as opposed to voters who live in clusters thus in the same constituency.
It does make a difference however. According to The BBC
, in 2005, Labour got 35.3% of votes - slightly more than the Conservatives’ 32.3% (top right of page). Yet Labour got a whopping 356 seats - 158 more than the Conservatives’ 198. This is just one of many statistics that show just how unfair the current system is.

This is why I believe the only way is to count votes nationally, and use this to determine the leading party. Evidently, this new system poses problems itself - such as the leading party hardly holding any seats in Parliament in some cases, but I’m sure a fair system could be devised.