Posted on 05/08/2015 9:38:22 AM PDT by RightGeek
Ukip supporters have woken up this morning to find that the party retains only 1 MP, but they will surely feel cheated by an election system that has handed the SNP over 56 MPs for a much smaller number of votes.
Despite bringing in almost 4 million votes, making Ukip the third biggest party by vote share, this election has seen the fall of their leader Nigel Farage and second MP Mark Reckless.
The spectacular success of the SNP in Scotland throws into sharp relief the unfairness of the first-past-the-post system on smaller parties.
By the time Farage lost his seat at 10.30am, the SNP had amassed 1.43 million votes, and earned 56 places in Westminster, with all of Scotland declared.
By contrast 3.73 million votes for UKIP only converted into 1 MP at time of writing.
(Excerpt) Read more at mirror.co.uk ...
Compare this with the 2014 European Parliament elections in the UK which use proportional representation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_election,_2014_%28United_Kingdom%29 and in which UKIP was duly rewarded for having the highest number of total votes.
Bottom line is UKIP needs to develop better candidates. I think most of their votes were protest votes, and not because voters felt that the UKIP candidate was necessarily the best candidate.
How are districts apportioned?...............
First past the post means a party with diffuse but high support gets very little in the way of seats.
Most European countries use PR because its more democratic and ensures every voter’s vote is not wasted.
By riding boundary commissions. There is no partisan gerrymandering in the UK. Canada also has the same system to draw riding boundaries for the federal House Of Commons.
Yeah, PR worked very well for small-d democrats in the Weimar Republic. PR leads to political polarization and extremism.
It's also worth noting that UKIP's better performance in the EP is also a result of better election performance in EP elections than UK parliamentary elections. UKIP received more votes in EP elections than any other party -- more than the Tories or Labor. A fair conclusion is that UK voters want to express more Euroskepticism in the European Parliament than the House of Commons. Perhaps domestic issues outweigh Euroskepticism in House of Commons elections.
Why? It's kind of scary to think that the voting public can't think for themselves and need a sweet talking politician to sweep them off their feet.
If they can't see what is happening to their country and don't have the brains to vote out the morons who are complicit to the destruction of the country, then they deserve the people they elect.
It was designed by the Tories and Labour to benefit Labour and the Tories.
UKIP got 5 million votes, the Scottish National Party got 1.5 million.
You can guess which one has 0-1 seat and which one has over 50.
EP elections are more for making political statements, the quality of the candidates doesn’t matter as much.
Its not unfair. Its one system that allows people in a specific region to choose their own representatives, rather than allocating seats to the largest parties based on a national list determined by party bosses. First past the post is much fairer than national list type of elections.
Maybe it’sso because they are one issue socialists.
From my understanding the Tories need a clear vote majority to translate into more seats. Is that due to Labour constituencies having more non-citizen populations?
The smaller parties had to pay much more for their seats, UKIP losing out with several millions for the party's one seat.
But that's how the game is played and everyone knew the rules beforehand.
This is one of the Boundary Commission rules. If a constituency is more than 12,000 km^2, it may have a smaller population than other constituencies. I like that rule. We ought to introduce that rule for the House of Representatives.
PR would be a disaster in the UK.
In this election the right of center parties won a slight majority of the vote but that was ATYPICAL.
Thatcher never would have won with PR.
They’ve been using the same election system since long before there was a Labour party.
Going to the Australian system was overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum 4 years ago.
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