14,000 in the right places could easily topple a government in a tight election because of FPTP - although one can obviously not choose in reality.

In 2017 for example the minimum number of votes across the country needed to take down Theresa May (or more realistically have her form a true minority government) was something like 2500.

We have an extremely disproportional electoral system.

That would have been 2500 in exactly the right places. 2500 in exactly the right places could also have given the Conservative Party even more seats.

If we are talking about 0.25% on average then I doubt it could have changed much in these local elections (back in May in England and Northern Ireland).

If anybody wants to play with the data from the General Election in 2017 they can do so here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2017_United_Kin...

Sort the table by "Mjrty." in ascending order. Right at the top we see wins for SNP, Labour, SNP, Labour, and Labour that easily could have been wins for Lib Dem, Tories, Tories, Tories, and Tories.

67m is the UK population, not the GB population.

And 67m is nothing close to the size of the electorate of the local elections that number comes from.

And as another commenter wrote, a small number of votes can matter a great deal.