% of vote, UK election results 2015
The surprising result of the election illustrates the distorting effect of First Past The Post (FPTP) voting. The Tories have a 99-seat lead – 15% of the parliament’s seats – on the opposition Labour, with 6.5% more of the vote share. The Lib Dems have lost many seats, falling to 7.9% of the vote share but with only 1.2% of the seats. The Greens have over 1.1 million voters with 1 seat. UKIP had nearly 4m votes, for 1 seat.
This can give the impression that some votes are ‘lost’. It also implies that some parties’ MPs represent more people than others – does Caroline Lucas speak for 1,157,613 people, while any one Tory or Labour MP represents, on average, 34,245 or 40,290 people respectively?
