Politics on the knife edge

[andrewducker]

This article talks about there having being only 2,227 votes necessary to make Corbyn Prime Minister. And also only 287 votes necessary to give the Conservatives a majority by themselves.

That's a total of 2,514 votes out of 46,000,000 people - 0.005%, to shift 11 seats between victory for one group and victory for another.

While any voting system has points where a shift of a few votes will tip things over the edge, FPTP seems particularly prone to this. By breaking things into 650 individual elections, you are going to get many more where things are incredibly close, and 3 votes means everything.

AMS/MMP (as used in Scotland for MSPs) uses much larger groups for the additional proportional representatives, so there's much less chance of an individual area being that close to a tipping point. And STV (also used in Scotland, for councils) also clusters representatives together, for a similar effect.

It just seems ridiculous that targetting such a tiny number of votes can trigger such a massive difference in result.

Comments

[randomdreams]

>It just seems ridiculous that targetting such a tiny number of votes can trigger such a massive difference in result.

Over here in the US, WE THINK SO TOO.

[momentsmusicaux]

I rather like AMS. It had the benefit of you having a local MP for a smallish constituency, which is a problem with the type of PR used for EU elections, where your constituency is just enormous (eg THE WHOLE OF SCOTLAND). And you also get smaller parties getting in, so here we have a Green MSP.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I find STV too unwieldy for large elections (i.e. if you were electing 20 representatives), and if you are only electing 3-4 at a time (as we do for council elections) it means that smaller parties like the Greens aren't going to get represented very much.

Which you can see in the results from this year's council elections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_local_elections,_2017#Results
The Greens got 4% of first preference votes, but only 2% of the seats.

AMS also has a minimising effect on the smaller parties, but it's not as much:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Parliament_election,_2016#Votes_summary
(6.6% of the regional vote became 4.7% of the seats)
and it would be a smaller difference if the proportion of list MSPs was higher (50% rather than the current 43%).

[theandrewhickey]

I don't like list systems, because they mean that the choice of representatives is in the hands of party leaders rather than voters. While STV may slightly underrepresent smaller parties, it does at least represent every *voter*.
List systems assume that all a party's MPs are interchangeable, which anyone looking at, say, Clive Lewis and Kate Hoey, or Tim Farron and Danny Alexander, or Ken Clarke and Theresa May, knows isn't the case.
I'd still just-about choose AMS over FPTP, which really is the single worst possible voting system, but I care more about preferentiality than proportionality, and STV gives at least a reasonable amount of both.

[doug]

Link missing?

[andrewducker]

Thanks - fixed!

[jack]

It absolutely *is* ridiculous, FPTP makes things a lot more winner-take-all than they need to be. But I think "number of votes that would change everything" is a good soundbite but exaggerates the problem even more than it actually exists, since you probably wouldn't have exactly the votes in the constituencies that matter most.

[skington]

This is the flip side of "in most constituencies, your vote doesn't count", isn't it?

Out of interest, how may votes would Labour have needed in 2010, and in 1992? Is this a new problem, or has the Internet made it easier to realise how ridiculous it is?

(Of course this is arguably by design: a two-party majoritarian system is designed to give the winning party a larger share of seats than strict PR would grant.)

Related: a Labour source in the Guardian today was saying "we could have gained another 15 seats if we knew where we were going to be competitive". Is this also a bad thing, or should we encourage our political parties to be good at electoral craft like this, knowing which voters to target?

[coth]

If what I have heard about the YouGov poll that predicted the hung Parliament is correct (go see Nicholas Whyte's blog for the link to the "Three Things to Know" video) then we can know exactly that in future.

[andrewducker]

I remember the same discussion in 2010. A few hundred moved votes would have allowed for a Lab/Lib coalition.

[lilysea]

I really wish you guys would switch over to a preference system, like Australia.

http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/hor_count.htm

[andrewducker]

That would be STV. And yeah, me too.

[mair-aw.livejournal.com]

"Although Mr Corbyn was only 2,227 votes from having the opportunity to form a coalition government, Ms May’s Conservatives were only 287 votes from being able to form a working majority."

I read one this morning that put the latter figure at 75 - was that article written before the Kensington count came in?

[mair-aw.livejournal.com]

(I think the 75 is flipped votes, rather than extra votes, so 150 extra votes, I suppose)