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 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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? :)
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.
This has led to a lot of ABC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anything_But_Conservative) voting.
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.
Yet you don't hear too many people complaining about that outcome.
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).
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.
(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)