UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties. Indeed, you'd actually need gerrymandering for such a system to have any hope of returning seats broadly in proportion to vote share.

(the conspiracy theory about disenfranchisement advanced by the blog article is orthogonal to the tendency of the FPTP electoral system to distort shares of actual votes. It's also a little difficult to take seriously an argument which suggests that a short-lived poll tax abolished in 1991 would be a significant factor in the 2015 election. Especially when the party that enacted it spent 13 of the intervening years out of power, with the electoral system and distribution of voters heavily favouring their rivals at the time. The article is equally ludicrous in suggesting Labour would be disadvantaged by a fraction of voters in strongly Labour-supporting boroughs being under financial pressure to relocate)

You don't have to use FPTP to distort: There's been plenty of debate in Spain, which uses the D'Hondt method. There have always been more than two healthy parties, but ultimately only two get major representation, just like in an FPTP system. And unless we are applying the system to the entire country (which is not how it works), there's still a boost to regional parties.

A decade ago we saw two parties with pretty much the same number of votes, one of Catalonian nationalists, and a typical european leftist party. But the nationalists all got their votes in the same region, gaining very healthy representation overall, while the other party got less than a 5th of the seats, because all their voters do not live in the same place.

What we have to face is that ultimately, the way people are represented is an aesthetic, values-based choice. This doesn't mean that there isn't such thing as partisan gerrymandering (because there is), but that even if we let a computer decide representation, there's still more than one algorithm that is unaware of party affiliation, and each will favor different ideologies in different situations.

The moment I finished my comment I actually thought to myself - "hmmm, FPTP is the problem here" (which I was saying even well before the last election).

The gerrymandering is interesting though, and there's another video link in this thread that explains how you can use it to try to fix this issue (as you said).

> UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with

> being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost

> the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties.

More precisely, FPTP tends to boost the representation of leading national _and local_ parties (the latter being best exemplified by the SNP) at the expense of smaller national parties. Small local parties are usually toast anyway even in proportional systems due to thresholds.

During the 2015 elections the system worked exactly as designed, by favoring parties that are strong in one or more nations of the UK at the expense of parties that are a bit meh in all of them.

FPTP is heavily biased though - you end up in a situation where there's little point voting the way you want, because it won't be effective.

Take the Greens, 3.8% of the vote with 0.15% of the final representation. And I bet that 3.8% would actually have been higher if people had felt like they wouldn't be throwing away their vote.

I understand your sentiment, but I think "bit meh" is maybe a little uncharitable. Half of my voting life has been in NZ (mixed member proportional) and the other half in the UK (FPTP) – so I have a reasonable understanding of the drawbacks of the systems.

The better example would have been UKIP 12.7% of the total votes, and 0.2%(1) of the total MPs, compared to SNP 4.7% of the total votes and 8.6%(56) of the total MPs.

It's just a shame that the Lib Dems wasted the chance for a more proportional voting system on a referendum for an unliked semi-proportional system (AV) that would have favoured them.

"you end up in a situation where there's little point voting the way you want, because it won't be effective."

How much of that situation is due precisely to that mindset?

It seems like circular logic to me.

    10 Why not vote for the guy you want to win?
    20 Because he won't get enough votes
    30 Why won't he get enough votes?
    40 Because not enough people will vote for him.
    50 So why don't more people vote for him?
    60 goto 20

FPTP is arguably broken, but people engaging in "tactical voting" isn't helping matters. You're supposed to vote for who you want to win, period.

FPTP is unequivocally broken.

Voting for "who you want to win, period" doesn't help in FPTP. Then you just get vote splitting - the majority of the population would prefer either of parties A and B to party C, but they have different favourites, so A and B each get 30% of the vote, while C gets 40%. So the party most of the population hates wins.

Tactical voting is IMO preferable to this outcome.

Really? I'm in an area where one of the seats was hotly contested. I, like thousands of others swapped votes on a website where we pledged to vote on behalf of other people.

My local candidate narrowly won (the one I voted for, not the one I chose) – had a number of us not swapped votes, maybe that wouldn't have happened. For me that's a bit of a win of tactical voting - at least people were able to have some influence.

Another thing to note is that party voting and candidate voting are all rolled together. I actually wanted my local guy to win, but I didn't want to vote for him because I wanted to vote for a different party.

That's all very suboptimal.

Out of curiosity - usually party candidates deeply reflect their party platform. Under what circumstances would you want to vote for a party but not their representative candidate?

The leadership of the Greens are/were most closely aligned with my values – certainly at the time when the Blairites were still heading up the Labour party. So I wanted to vote Green as the party.

My local Labour representative, however, is a pretty good person to have looking out for the area. He was born and raised in the estates opposite my house - to a working class immigrant family, no less. In his time representing the area he's done a lot of good and he has a lot of experience. For me, that's all good - but his party values of continued austerity and benefit cuts don't sit well with me.

You see my conundrum? :)

Heh, failure of imagination on my part. Thanks for the clarification :)

your conundrum is that you have a distinctly minority opinion, but you would like to influence the outcome "more than your share"? so, instead of advocating unequal income distribution, you favor unequal outcome?

Erm, no, not in the slightest – well, I think not in the slightest – I'm going to be totally honest, I don't really understand all of your comment.

But I don't want to influence the outcome "more than my share". I'd like everyone to have an equal share of influence. More than anything I'd like the political process to be one that everyone is engaged in and ultimately moves the country in a direction that is good for everyone.

Not necessarily. This is a bit of an issue now in Canada because with have 3 (or more) left-wing parties, and 1 right wing party

This has led to a lot of ABC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anything_But_Conservative) voting.

Beyond strategic reasons mentioned elsewhere, the main ones are (a) local candidate of desired party is unqualified/unpopular/etc and (b) local candidate of less desired party is more qualified/more popular/etc. (Seeing as "popularity" is, for better or worse, a pretty important quality in a political candidate; this includes "I went to the same high school as candidate X, they seem like a good person.")

This happens easily in more-than-two party systems like Canada or the U.K. Since each party overlaps with another a bit on certain issues, and many voters only seem to feel strongly about a few issues, those voters are ideologically okay with more than one party. Even if they have a "favourite" party, they will consider the candidates of those other parties as well.

It could also have the effect of making the main parties vulnerable to an "insurgency" from activist elements through the leadership elections and candidate selection.

We already have systems like Condorcet voting that make tactical voting unnecessary. As usual, the hard part is getting them implemented; I'm not optimistic.

If you want a real 'travesty' why are you focusing on The Greens rather than UKIP? UKIP got 3.5 times the votes that the Greens got, but got just as many seats as the Greens did. And the same argument about the votes likely being even higher if people weren't afraid of throwing their vote away could also be made.

Yet you don't hear too many people complaining about that outcome.

Yup. I think that's wrong too. I'm no fan of UKIP, but with so little influence after being the preferred party of 12.7% of the voters something surely isn't right.

It's also worth remembering that FPTP is designed to encourage strong single party governments over large multi party coalitions.

Whether you think that is a reasonable goal is a case of personal perspective imo. I dislike the position that implies FPTP is a flat out inferior system rather than one which has some advantages and some disadvantages (as do all other systems).

Bingo! No system is perfect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

They all have some advantages and disadvantages.

Weak coalition governments like Italy has had in much of recent history are what you can end up with with purely proportional voting, and they have some serious problems of their own.

I think FPTP with a STV type of system is nice - you can still vote for who you want to, without having to vote tactically, but there's still going to be a stronger result.

Here is a short CGP Grey video on Gerrymandering

https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY

The entire "Politics in the Animal Kingdom" series is great, I think... http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/

Good video. Thanks!

I've seem a number of comments about that 36.9% - I had a quick look and it is actually higher than the Labour win in 2005 (35.2%) which had a lower turnout as well.

http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/uktable.htm

[I'm not a Labour, Conservative or LibDem supporter so I have no particular axe to grind here].

One thing to keep in mind is that this is a manufactured issue used by people who refuse to accept election results they don't like, and they use to it delegitimize the outcome.

You'll find that the same people who go on about it are the same people who think George W Bush stole the 2000 election.

My experience is that people go on about it all across the spectrum, including lots of people who not only don't think George W. Bush did steal the 2000 election, but who would have thought it was a good and justified thing if he had.

Gerrymandering is a real issue and a real thing that really effects election results, and, simultaneously, an effective distraction from the more serious problem of representation caused by FPTP in single-member districts. So, not only is it a popular target of the disaffected, its something the disaffected are redirected to vent their anger at by both sides of the partisan duopoly in different times and places, because while it is a real thing, none of the methods used to attack it fundamentally change the structures reinforcing the partisan duopoly, and in any given condition certain of the methods for fighting it will reinforce the position of one side or the other of that duopoly against the other within the basic duopoly-reinforcing structure.