This makes no sense to me.
Ulster Unionist Party had 114,935 votes and got two seats. UKIP had 3,841,346 votes and got one seat. Conservative had 11,207,547 votes and received 326 seats.
Ulster Unionist Party had 114,935 votes and got two seats. UKIP had 3,841,346 votes and got one seat. Conservative had 11,207,547 votes and received 326 seats.
Any democratic system is flawed - e.g. letting both tax-generators and tax-consumers vote.
If UKIP's four million votes were entirely within 20 or 30 constituencies, they'd have won them all. But because their votes are spread out across the entire country, other parties pick up those seats instead.
The parties that do best are either those that get a ton of votes everywhere, or those that dig in and solely focus on specific locations where they can get a majority (the Lib Dems used to be good at this).
The Ulster Unionists will get that many votes but in a small number of seats in Northern Ireland. The Conservatives might just win by a small amount but in a large number of seats, each of which translates directly to an MP in Parliament.
For anyone who hasn't watched them , I can wholeheartedly recommend CGP Grey's "Politics in the Animal Kingdom"[0] videos for an brief overview of why FPTP voting is as bad as it seems.
This makes forecasts primed for surprises due to margins of error alone, not including other factors.
It has the (often overlooked, IMO) benefit of a strong 1:1 connection between constituent and MP: even if you didn't vote for the MP, a majority of your neighbours did, and the MP is still your representative in parliament. Organising locally to boot out your MP is much, much simpler than organising nationally to shift balances of power. That has got to be a factor in keeping MPs (more) honest.
In PR, you can be in the deeply problematic situation that you like candidate A and dislike candidate B from party X, but you vote for A actually ends up going to B - in effect, you can only really vote for a party, not a particular candidate. This is a significant shift of power to the parties as they generally control (or heavily influences) who runs where and how the ranking that controls "spill-over" votes will end up. Parties are often run opaquely, through back-room deals and patronage, not terribly democratically.
The change was rejected 68% to 32%.
* the alternative was a bit rubbish, only a minor improvement to the status quo, compared with the systems already successfully in use in Scotland and Wales which combine local representation with PR.
* both main parties and their tame press convinced people that it would basically lead to a combination of anarchy, communism and fascism in order to maintain their hold on power at the expense of democracy.
If you don't believe me, what about David Axelrod:
"POLITICO: But what about the press? You say it has disproportionate power here. Do you think Britain’s conservative print media is more powerful than Fox News?
DA: Yeah, I do. I do think the parties approach media as partisan players. So you see parties disseminating messages through the print media in a way that is unusual.
DA: Fox is certainly very conservative, skews to the Republican side, but there isn’t a kind of lockstep between them and the Republicans. Fox tries to drive the Republican agenda more than reflecting it.
Here there are relationships between the parties and media outlets that are deeper so you see a lot of themes being previewed in the media in a way that you don’t see in the states.
POLITICO: Did you know what you were getting into?
DA: We discussed this when I signed on … I’ve worked in aggressive media environments before but not this partisan."
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...
Frankly changing the voting system would require everyone that votes to understand the implications of the system itself. From what I remember talking about the AV people would think of one thing that's different, call it a problem and no amount of explaining would matter.
If you want to represent political parties then First Past the Post is horrible and seats by percentage is what you want. That would mean that their is really no reason to represent local needs since you really need to run a full country campaign and will probably pick dense packed areas to spend advertising.
If you want the geographic region (however you define it) to have a representative then the opposite is true. First Past the Post means they have to campaign locally if they want to get in. Percentage of seats by party means local campaigning is just a bit of nostalgia and a waste of campaign money.
It comes down to what do you value and what relationship you want between the voter and national government.
You would expect a two party system.