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

[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.