Why the UK Election Results are the Worst in History

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4.9 • 797 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2015

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello internet. The UK had an election we need to talk about, because after the debates finished, the people voted and the ballots tallied, the results were this.
0:07.0	But Parliament ended up looking like this, which isn't exactly representative, and by exactly, I mean, at all.
0:14.0	Red earned 30% of the vote and 36% of the seats, which is sort of close, but the rest is madness.
0:20.0	Orange earned 8% of the vote,
0:22.2	but got one eighth of that, while yellow's 5% just about doubled, and purple earned 13% and got
0:27.4	squat. Meanwhile, blue's 37% of the people boosted to 51% of the seats in Parliament. The blue
0:33.7	boost is even bigger when you consider that 51% of the seats gives you basically 100% of the control.
0:39.3	How did this happen?
0:40.3	In the UK, national elections aren't really national.
0:43.3	They're a bunch of local elections.
0:44.3	The UK is divided into constituencies, each of which elects one member of parliament, MP, to represent them.
0:50.3	This local, national divide, is where the trouble begins.
0:53.3	Imagine a parliament with just three constituencies, and it's easy to see how it wouldn't always align with the citizens.
1:00.0	Some people think this sort of result is fine. It's all about winning local elections, they'll say, each MP represents their constituency.
1:07.0	And while the imbalance in this example is extreme, it's the same problem in the real election, and the same argument is given, but there are two more problems with it in reality land.
1:17.6	First, few citizens have any idea who their MP is. They just know what party they voted for, what party they want to represent their views on the national level and pretending like it's a
1:28.4	competition on the local level is a bit disingenuous. In practice, it's an election for how the
1:33.7	nation will run, not really for who's going to represent a tiny part of it. And even if it were,
1:39.1	the individual constituencies are worse at representing their citizens than parliament.
1:43.6	Indulge this spreadsheet-loving nerd for a moment, will you?
1:46.0	The difference between what a party earned at the polls and what they got in Parliament is the amount of misrepresentation error.
1:52.0	If we calculate all the errors for all the parties and add them up, we can say that Parliament as a whole has a 47 percentage point of misrepresentation error. That sounds bad, but looks like a utopian rainbow of diversity compared to any local election,
	...

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