There’s been a lot of politics going on recently. The Euros, Britain, France, and of course the USA: it’s politics all over.
An upside of all the politics news is that we’ve been getting a look at different styles of democratic politics, different ways of filling those assemblies with legislators.
The Brits have come in for some mockery here. Their July 4th election is reported as a landslide for the hard Left Labour Party. What kind of landslide was it? Well, on an overall turnout of a tad less than sixty percent, Labour got a tad less than 34 percent of the vote. That means that a tad more than one in five eligible voters turned out to vote for them—20.24 percent on my calculator.
Twenty percent, huh? I guess there are landslides, and landslides.
And then there’s Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which we at VDARE.com naturally favor. They got 14.3 percent of the vote, which has won them five seats in the House of Commons. Meanwhile the soft-left Liberal Democrats got 12.2 percent of the vote, placing fourth behind Labour, the Conservatives, and Reform. So how many seats did they get in the House? Seventy-two!
Did you hear that right? Reform placed third in the vote count with 14.3 percent; they got five seats; the Liberal Democrats placed fourth in the vote count with 12.2 percent; they got 72 seats.
Once again: the fourth-placed party by vote share got fourteen times as many seats as the third-placed.
These are the peculiarities of voting systems. A well-read student of psephology could give you a two-hour lecture on the topic. Straightforward, it ain’t.
The particular peculiarity in play here is the one called ”first past the post voting.” You have a list of candidates people can vote for. The people vote, the votes are counted. Whichever candidate got the most votes gets the seat.
It’s easy to see how it can have odd results. Suppose there are just three parties putting up candidates in every constituency; and suppose that in every single constituency the Party A candidate got 34 percent of the vote, Party B got 33 percent, and Party C also got 33 percent. The resulting Assembly would consist entirely of Party A members, even though two-thirds of voters rejected them.
And that’s just the kind of anomaly you can get—and, as the U.K. July 4th results illustrate, do get—with first-past-the-post, which is one of the simpler voting systems.
Google ”Types of Voting System.” I just did, and there they are: First Past the Post, Single Transferable Vote, Additional Member System, Alternative Vote Plus, Two-Round System (where there’s a runoff), Alternative Vote, Proportional Representation, … Hoo-ee.
You might just want to pause here and recall the last time—it wasn’t very long ago, if you pay attention at all to American politics—the last time you heard or read some politician or pundit, most likely a lefty, telling you that our Electoral College system is unfair and makes a travesty of democracy.
The speaker should try telling that to Nigel Farage, or to Nigel’s equivalents in nations using one of the other electoral systems. They all have little anomalies, little traps and paradoxes in them. Human ingenuity has not yet devised an electoral system totally free of all unfairness.
The founders of our Republic worked hard on this. Is the system they came up with—the Electoral College and so on, the system they wrote into our Constitution—totally fair in all its aspects to all concerned? Possibly not, but neither is any other system. Our system has served us well for a quarter of a millennium. Let’s leave it alone.
