Percentages

We explained elsewhere how the UK system worked. It’s been more or less the same for as far back as we can remember.

The country is divided into constituencies, each with one MP. You vote for your local MP. In your area, the person with the most votes wins and gets a seat in Parliament.

So, there’s nothing for how many votes you get. You just need more votes than the other candidates. If there’s a constituency with 50,000 voters and only 1 actually votes, for party X, then X wins. It doesn’t matter if you win by 1 vote or 50,000. If you win, you win.

It’s not a national vote. It’s a local vote. The constituencies are different sizes. Adding the votes together does not have any relevance to the outcome. It’s not a referendum like the Brexit one.

The system is well known. Yes, other countries use different systems, but that’s other countries. We’re not saying ours is better or worse than any other, just that it is what it is. All parties, candidates and voters know what the system is, and parties co-ordinate their campaigns to get the best from it for them.

If governments felt other systems might be ‘fairer’, whatever that means, they could change it. The bottom end parties want change because they think they could do better, but the top parties like it because it has made them top.

And if you did change the system, people would vote differently. There would be different tactical voting. If I live in an area and like party Z. But Z has no chance in my area, and I really hate party X. I know that Y is the main competitor to X, so I vote for Y to keep X out.

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