The Mathematics Of Voting Reform


One of the reasons the UK needs some kind of electoral reform is this: a person’s vote is more or less powerful depending on which political party the person votes for.

That’s not democratic.

The graph above shows the disparity between votes (inner circle) and seats in parliament (outer circle). All parties suffer from some kind of distortion between votes and seats, but look at the Liberals (yellow) and the “others” (grey): they have to get many more votes compared to, say, Labour in order to get the same number of seats. If you vote Liberal, your vote counts maybe half as much as it would if you vote Labour.

Voting reform would give more power to smaller parties, but only because it would create parliaments that more accurately reflect those parties’ votes. The system we have in the UK right now is massively biased in favour of Labour and the Conservatives.