Antidemocratic elections

Ok, Hi. You all know how into election design I am, and this last British election, while disastrous in its own right, also provides an opportunity to discuss how fundamentally antidemocratic the single member district, first past the post system used by the US and UK is.  There are many problems with it, and I will try to explain them in an engaging manner. My primary contention is as long as we're giving this whole democracy theory a shake, its goal is to make as many votes as possible have an impact on the outcome. The British/American election system, by which voters are divided into constituencies/districts, each of which elects 1 representative by simple plurality vote, is an obsolete menace to the fair representation of the public's views.

First- location. People can vote all they want in droves- if 10% of the electorate across the country endorses a particular party's agenda, they still get no seats unless they have a plurality in a given location. Meanwhile the largest parties (the most likely to command pluralities) end up winning a far bigger share of the seats than they earn of the popular vote. This is not Democracy!

You can also have the opposite problem cause the same result- a party can overwhelmingly win one district by more than they need to carry it, but reap no additional benefits from doing so. This is currently being displayed in North Carolina, where the GOP legislature has packed over 90% of the state's African-American residents (22% of the population) into just 3 of the state's 13 congressional districts, so their voices don't affect any other elections. That's pretty close to a representative share of the electorate but there are huge advantages for the conservatives in keeping the other districts from having any minority input, and those 3 districts do not need to be as homogeneous as they are to produce these results- the net result is massive under-representation for the Democratic Party, as only these three majority minority districts can elect democratic pluralities. The result? Republicans won (on their best day ever in 2014) 55% of the vote but got 77% of the seats, while the Dems got 45% of the vote but only 23% of the seats. The ratios for each are 1.4 of representation for the Republicans, and .51 for the Democrats. This is not Democracy!

These twin tendencies of First Past the Post and Single Member districts produce a chilling effect on political activity, because the tendency to vote strategically is so strong, not only can minor to moderately sized parties win no representation at all, but this is self-reinforcing, as people become less and less willing to vote for parties that they believe in- 20% of the American public favors Socialism. How many Socialists do we have in Congress? (1- Bernie Sanders). Lemme see, 1:535 is... less than 20%, yet no one will vote to represent their interests because under a first past the post system, how many votes you get is only as important as where those votes came from. This is not Democracy!

What it is instead, is a system in which some people's votes matter and others' do not. If you live in a safe seat, it doesn't matter to the dominant party if they win by the slimmest of pluralities or 80 % of the vote- they're overwhelmingly likely to win there, which means those people get less attention from political figures except during primary season than those living in swing districts. This can be fixed in a lot of ways- multimember districts and list voting (perhaps at a larger level) would both make those votes more valuable. Because there is only one seat to be decided, the scale of victory doesn't matter except for bragging rights- in a multimember district, a strong party would have incentive to compete for all the seats, with a super-high margin of victory divided among several candidates, while a minor party could likely gain some representation by hitting a minority threshold, not needing a plurality. All sides would have reason (at least mathematically) to campaign everywhere and hold the approval of as many constituencies as possible. I'll write more soon about an ideal system, but here's my autopsy of Anglo-American-Canadian-French Democracy. Every other semi-democracy and even the few true democracies has fixed at least some of these problems in their electoral system! We need to catch up quickly.

All British parties except the conservatives, including both the Heroic SNP and the Villainous UKIP are fully behind reform and transition to a list system which would eliminate the necessity for the last row!  We see in this system that the SNP, the Tories, Labour, Plaid Cymru, and most Northern Irish parties get significant subsidies through geography, while the Greens, Libdems,  and UKIP get shafted.  That may be a worthwhile bargain from my usual Socialist standpoint, bu it does mean a huge number of wasted votes on all sides.  I'd rather try to carry the day on skill and persuasion, not an obsolete election system- it's also worth noting that with a list system, Cameron would have needed to go into coalition with UKIP (which he couldn't do without being known as the menace he truly is) or the DUP (which would probably have precluded his current plan to scrap the Irish peace treaty, just sayin').  Either way, the UK would be slightly better off than they are now.  It will take more than fixing a broken electoral system to fix the worrying fact that half of all Britons voted for the Tories or UKIP, though.

British election results- Parties- results from wikipedia

Party Name and my opinion of them	Scottish National Party (Scotland only) Heroes	Plaid Cymru, Party of Wales (Wales only) Good	Greens goodish	Labour centrists	Libdems centrists	Tories evil	UKIP Really, Really evil	Ulster Union Party (N. Ireland only) evil	Democratic Union Party (N. Ireland only) evil	Sinn Fein (N. Ireland only) damned post modern hipsters	Social Democratic and Labour Party (N. Ireland only) good
Votes	1.4 million	180000	1.1 million	9.4 million	2.4 million	11.3 million	4 million	115000.00%	185000	175000	100000
Votes (%)	5.00%	0.60%	4.00%	30.40%	8.00%	36.80%	12.00%	0.40%	0.60%	0.60%	0.30%
Seats won /650	56	3	1	232	8	330	1	2	8	4	3
Seats won (%)	8.60%	0.50%	0.20%	35.00%	1.20%	51.00%	0.20%	0.40%	1.20%	0.60%	0.50%
Vote/seat ratio	25,000 to 1	60,000 to 1	1,100,000 to 1	40,500 to 1	300,000 to1	34,000 to 1	4,000,000 to 1	57,500 to 1	23,000 to 1	44,000 to 1	33,000 to 1
representation %/votes	1.72	.83	0.05	1.15	0.15	1.38	0.02	0.75	2	1	1.6

Clarifications- representation%/Votes%- this last row expresses how far each party deviated from the vote percentage that they earned. Ideally (from a democratic perspective) each number in this lowest row should be 1. Less than that means a party got fewer votes than it would have under a system which counted all votes equally, more than that means they got more.  For example Labour got 115% of what they should have, Greens got 5%, and Sinn Fein actually got the "correct" amount.

What do you think- should I add in the numbers of seats that each side would get under a list system?

Yes

Under a pure list list system (with a bit of rounding), the SNP would receive 32, Plaid 4, the greens 26, Labour 198, Libdems 52, Tories 240, UKIP 78, UUs 3, the DUP 4, Sinn Fein 4, and the SDLP 2.

Solidarität, Genossinnen und Genossen