andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2017-06-09 08:50 pm
andrewducker) wrote2017-06-09 08:50 pm
Politics on the knife edge
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.
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.
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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?
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